Surviving the summer heat may be the most popular sport at next year’s Tokyo Olympics.
Ten months ahead of the 2020 opening ceremony, organizers are experimenting with increasingly extreme methods of cooling crowds.
More than 150 volunteers at a canoeing test event on Friday were blasted with fake snow, according to the Japan Times.
But unlike the fluffy flakes that occasionally shower the capital city, onlookers were pelted with what the newspaper called “fairly coarse shards of shaved ice.”
Artificial snow falls onto journalists seated in a stand during a test event ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games (via Toshifumi Kitamura/AFP)
“We are trying everything possible to ease heat risks,” 2020 Organizing Committee Senior Director Taka Okamura said in a statement.
During a five-minute experiment, staff fed blocks of ice into a truck-mounted snow machine, dropping some 660 pounds of precipitation over a horde of human guinea pigs.
“This is not meant to cool the entire atmosphere, but have spectators feel refreshed when the flakes of ice touch them,” Okamura said, admitting the system needs some tweaking.
After all, ice doesn’t last long in 77-degree heat: Volunteers were quickly soaked through and the aluminum stands became slick with water. (One journalist even took a tumble.)
An artificial snow is designed to ease the expected summer heat during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (via the Japan Times)
If recent summers are anything to go by, 2020 will be a massive headache for participants and fans.
In just one week at the end of July, more than 18,000 people across Japan were hospitalized with suspected heat stroke—about 60 of whom died as a result.
There is no word on how much the committee expects to spend on temperature-mitigating measures—including the proposed umbrella hat, which folks can attach to their heads to protect their faces from the sun.
Officials have previously acknowledged that such efforts will inflate the event’s budget.
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