As smoke plumes from raging Canadian wildfires drifted south and turned the New Jersey sun into a hazy, muted orb, the Spanish men’s World Cup squad held an outdoor training session on Thursday ahead of Sunday’s championship match, despite official warnings that local air conditions had reached hazardous levels.
The intensity of the hour-long practice, which kicked off at 11 a.m. EDT in East Hanover, remains unclear: members of the press were only permitted to observe the opening 15 minutes of the scheduled session. Across the country in the southeastern U.S., Argentina’s national team continued their preparation undisturbed by the wildfire fallout, holding training in the Atlanta area less than a day after pulling off a dramatic comeback semifinal win over England that booked their spot in a second consecutive World Cup final. Marietta, Georgia, where the team is based, sits far enough south to escape the smoke, which has been carried southeast by winds from northern Ontario, triggering air quality warnings stretching from the U.S. Midwest all the way to the Northeast.
Public health officials have urged residents across affected regions to limit outdoor time and wear protective masks when outside, as air quality indexes have fallen into the unhealthy to hazardous range—ranks that pose risks to all people, regardless of pre-existing health conditions. Multiple public health and climate experts have raised urgent red flags over the decision to hold high-intensity outdoor training for elite athletes in these conditions.
“These are high-level athletes who are moving a lot of air through their lungs during every practice and every game, and really they shouldn’t be practicing outside if the air quality levels are at hazardous sort of ranges for wildfire-related air pollution,” explained Dr. Courtney Howard, an emergency room physician and leading official with the Global Climate and Health Alliance. “That’s the time to schedule a practice inside. You could put an N95 mask on them, but trying to make sure that everybody’s mask is well-fitted, I suspect that’s not the best choice. I would go find an air-conditioned indoor facility that’s a clean-air shelter.”
Requests for comment sent to both FIFA and the Spanish Football Association, asking whether an indoor alternative had been considered or was logistically possible, went unanswered as of Thursday. Officials do project that the wildfire smoke will clear out of the East Rutherford, New Jersey region long before Sunday’s 3 p.m. EDT championship kickoff, easing concerns that the final itself will be disrupted.
Data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Now monitoring network shows that while East Hanover’s air quality started Thursday in the “unhealthy” category, conditions gradually improved through the day, falling to only “unhealthy for sensitive groups” by mid-afternoon. Even so, particle pollution levels across New Jersey on Thursday registered more than seven times higher than the maximum safe threshold set by the World Health Organization. Forecasters expect air quality to improve to the “moderate” range by match day Sunday.
Wildfires are growing in size and frequency across North America as global average temperatures rise, and decades of medical research confirm that wildfire smoke causes systemic damage to nearly every organ system in the human body, contributing to tens of thousands of premature deaths annually. Smoke irritates the respiratory tract almost immediately, triggering sharp spikes in asthma attacks and emergency ambulance dispatches within hours of pollution levels rising. It also sparks widespread inflammation throughout the body, targeting a person’s most vulnerable pre-existing health conditions and triggering unregulated immune system responses to the toxic irritants, medical researchers explain.
“It’s not healthy for anyone to be in the smoke, especially if you’re exercising,” said Mary Johnson, an environmental health research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “You’re exchanging more air, so you’re being exposed to even more pollutants, and even healthy individuals at some point will have some type of health effect from the exposure to the smoke. So, even though these are healthy, young individuals, it’s not a good idea to be exercising in this type of environment.”
Scientists have identified at least 1,000 distinct toxic compounds in wildfire smoke, according to Luke Montrose, an environmental toxicologist at Colorado State University. “If I gave you a list you would recognize some of these as being very bad often times associated with the burning of diesel fuel or cigarette smoke things like formaldehyde or volatile organic compounds,” Montrose said. “Just the smoke itself can be bad.”
Climate video producer Teresa de Miguel in Washington, D.C., and SNTV videographers Lissette Romero in East Hanover, New Jersey, and Max Feliu in Marietta, Georgia, contributed reporting to this article.