With the exception of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, which began in September to allow for the southern hemisphere’s “reversed” order of seasons–winter in Australia is summer in North America–the summer Olympic Games generally are held in just that: the good old summertime. Add to the usual July-August time frame the fact that most cities that host summer Games are in warm locales to begin with, and you have a potential recipe for heat-related health problems if you’re not lucky enough to be involved with a sport that’s held in the water or in an air-conditioned arena.

Because of the demands of cross-country day, eventing tends to be the most scrutinized of the three Olympic equestrian disciplines in terms of the horses’ health and welfare. When a horse falls on cross-country or finishes the course in an apparent state of exhaustion, the incident makes the news. In Barcelona in 1992, the eventing competition made the news a lot, to the consternation of Leo Jeffcott MA, BVetMed, PhD, FRCVS, DVSc, VetMedDr, and many others in the horse world.

“We had some very bad press as a result of the fact that the weather was pretty hot and a couple of horses did get overtired,” Jeffcott, recalled. “It was a great shame, really, because it wasn’t the media’s fault; the information from the veterinary was just not presented. After the speed and endurance, a colleague and I sat for an hour at the press office waiting to be interviewed, to tell them in fact what a great day we’d had: Despite the heat, the horses had all got ’round; we’d had two tired horses but they’d been treated; we’d covered everything and it was all pretty good.” Unfortunately, it seemed to Jeffcott as if “the press didn’t wish to know that. They reported in the Scandinavian press that two horses were dead; they showed in the Daily Telegraph the Russian horse upside down, being anesthetized, looking as if it was dead…Everyone was saying that Barcelona was a disaster.”

Jeffcott and other veterinary experts resolved not to allow the 1996 Games–to be held in notoriously hot, sticky Atlanta, Georgia–to become a repeat of the events in Barcelona. So, even before naming of the veterinary officials and committees for Atlanta, Jeffcott, Allen, DVM, and Catherine W. Kohn VMD, Dipl. ACVIM, formed an ad hoc task force to study the effects of heat and humidity on the exercising horse–and, they hoped, to come up with practical recommendations for keeping Atlanta’s equine athletes safe and healthy