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Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

Yup. While I'm very pro-climate-measures, hosting guests for the event where they must be at absolute peak performance at events for which they have trained for typically over a decade is NOT the time to skimp on environmental controls.

Room temp of 23°-26°C (73°-79°F) may be fine for ordinary couch-potato activities, but not for athletes needing to optimize for performance in the heat. The design is simply not fit for the actual use case, and should have provided the ability to set cooler temps. Optimizing the environment around the competitions, including everything up to bringing their own pillows on tour for sleeping is not uncommon at this level of performance and has been shown to make a difference. The building officials failed to understand the priorities of the assignment. Too bad.

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I can't sleep if the temperature is a few degrees warmer than normal. Imagine training for 4+ years and then not sleeping before the biggest event of your life, because of poor planning. Consistency is key for these atheletes.

If emissions were a big enough issue for the hosts, then they shouldn't be flying tens of thousands of tourists & atheletes to come watch some sports. AC units are a drop in the bucket.

Yup. And ironically, the buildings are designed for one set of guests — the Olympic athletes — and if they had done their planning keeping the athlete's requirements as the primary criteria, they would have ended up with a far more climate-effective solution.

Instead, they have a cooling system that starts out as known-insufficient, and will definitely be unable to meet requirements in case of even normal heat waves, nevermind the what-used-to-be-outlier events that are now far more common. And, because of that planned inadequacy, hundreds or thousands of new temporary AC units will be built, transported, installed, and run at vast otherwise-unnecessary expense and emissions.

Building the initial system to meet requirements under any conditions found in the last two decades, and using modern AC technology that allows motors to run at variable speeds (vs compressor ON/OFF only) would be vastly more energy-efficient, and actually more climate-friendly.

Sheesh

> Optimizing the environment around the competitions, including everything up to bringing their own pillows on tour for sleeping is not uncommon at this level of performance and has been shown to make a difference.

The cycling team from UK have done more or less that in their campaign for the London/12 olympic games[1].

[1] - https://hbr.org/2015/10/how-1-performance-improvements-led-t...

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