This from the Dallas Morning News cycling Blog:

Before 10 a.m., riders filled only a few cots in the emergency medical tent at the finish line. By the afternoon, riders crowded the more than 40-cot tent, said Dr. Keith Williamson, the ride's medical director. At 11 a.m., riders staggered in with that "1,000-mile stare," he said. By 1 p.m. they were being carried in.


"It was simply the hottest Hotter 'N Hell. The hottest ever," Dr. Williamson said.

Sixteen people went to the emergency room; nine for trauma and seven for heat-related or other ailments. Nobody went to the intensive care unit and only two or three were admitted to the hospital. It's usually 10 to 15. Dr. Williamson gives credit to his medical staff for doing its best to stabilize people at the finish line.

Several folks received IV treatments of hypertonic saline. That's a method employed by only a few other athletic events worldwide, such as the Boston Marathon.
Even though they kept folks out of the ER, that doesn't mean they had an easy job. Dr. Williamson said he saw some of the worst cases ever. One man went into seizures, and the doctor said he recorded a few riders with a core temperature of 106 degrees. (That's the point where tissue starts to break down and leads to heat stroke.)
"I have never seen that before at the Hotter 'N Hell," he said.
Dr. Williamson also shed more light on how he measured the heat's danger. He used a combination of the following:
- Dry bulb temperature. This is what most people commonly refer to as the air temperature.
- Wet bulb temperature, or humidity.
- Globe temperature. This is a black metal ball that measures radiant heat to figure out how much heat is being generated by the sun's rays and absorbed.
Those combined figures read 84 at 10 a.m. Dr. Williamson said the American College of Sports Medicine advises against letting anyone compete outside after that figure reaches 85. When he advised crews to close Hell's Gate at 11 a.m., that figure was 89.
Dr. Williamson, who has ridden the HHH himself 10 times, said he understood why people were upset, especially those who believed they would have fared well.
"Some people absolutely would have been OK, but the vast majority of people would not have been. We could have had significant casualties," he said.
Those final 20 miles are hotter and harder, mostly because of that south headwind, and that performance decline always shows up in the time splits, he said.
And if you need just one more reason to believe it was really, really hot, consider the Texas Christian University medical researchers who were studying conditions of people suffering heat-related problems. It was so hot that their instruments stopped working and had to be 'revived' in an ice chest.