Global travel and international competition are inevitable for the modern-day athletes. Travel has become an essential component of sport, yet it poses well-documented challenges to athlete health and performance. Overall, 8% of the athletes incurred at least one injury, and 5% of them suffered an illness during the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Long-haul, rapid transit across multiple time zones poses athletes with two distinct challenges: jet lag and travel fatigue. Jet lag is a syndrome of symptoms manifested by physiological adaptations that occur when the body is shifted into a new time zone. Whereas travel fatigue is a more complex summation of physiological, psychological, and environmental factors that accrue during an individual trip, accumulating over the course of a season and reducing the athlete’s capacity to recover and perform. Moreover the immune system is also compromised in the new and changing environment due to (travel) fatigue, making them prone to infections especially when possible countermeasures are limited.

Due to circadian rhythm disruption, the traveling athlete may in the short term be exposed to sleep disturbances, change in mood and fatigue levels and a possible higher burden of illness and injury. However, additional research is needed to support this. The duration and severity of symptoms experienced by the individual athlete, depend on the number of time zones crossed, and the direction of travel. This may potentially have a negative impact on physical performance. Intrinsic risk factors, such as health status, sleep pattern, nutrition, training etc and the extrinsic risk factors like surface contamination with bacteria, crowds or teammates with potential spread of infectious particles, infected food or water etc have been found to be closely correlated with travel fatigue.

The Travel Management Program is a comprehensive approach to the management of jet lag and travel fatigue that encompasses the preflight, in-flight, and post flight periods. Performing a brief sleep history during the medical screening and collecting a month’s data of sleep logs will help to determine who is more susceptible to this issue. The practical management of jet lag and travel fatigue requires a host of pharmacologic and circadian interventions and supplementary clinical therapies. The prevention of illness in athletes during travel involve implementation of behavioral, lifestyle and medical strategies in order to limit the  transmission of infections. Nutritional strategies to maintain immunity in athletes, strategies to measure, monitor and manage training and competition load, and methods to detect early signs and symptoms of illness, over-reaching and overtraining are also important. Jet lag is potentially modifiable with strategic exposure to or avoidance of light, administration of melatonin and correct timing of exercise and meals.