For four decades I have been travelling the world reporting on sports from cricket to Formula 1. In the early days I took it all for granted, oblivious to the impact on the environment of either the sports or the travel. Carbon offsets were unheard of.
A demonstrator seeking climate finance at the COP29 United Nations Climate Summit, in Baku, Azerbaijan. | Photo Credit: AP
Like everybody else I complained when rain washed out play, when matches had to be postponed because a city didn’t have water or when it was so hot the concrete media box seemed to close in on me. I once had to brush my teeth in beer because the taps in the city had run dry. No one connected the dots. Climate change was becoming a climate crisis, heading towards a climate emergency.
Clouds hover over the stadium as rain interrupted play, during the test match between India and Australia at the Gabba in Brisbane, Australia, in December last year. | Photo Credit: AP
Today ignorance cannot be an excuse. Sport reflects society, and is a useful medium for the necessary conversation about the subject. Some sportsmen, like Australia’s cricket captain Pat Cummins, are ahead of the curve. Others in the fraternity need to be educated. Warming Up looks at the crisis through the lens of sport, with interviews and case studies, making it an important text book.
Ball kids are pictured wiping the tennis court as rain delays play at Australian Open – Melbourne Park, Melbourne, in 2023. | Photo Credit: Reuters
Deep impact
Sport revels in the practice-play-travel-perform cycle which then repeats itself. How do these events impact us? How does a tennis surface or maintenance of a golf course or the construction of yet another unnecessary cricket stadium in India affect the quality of our lives and those of generations to come? What of sports equipment reliant on carbon fibre or other petro-based non-recyclable products? Sailing, rowing, canoeing, cycling, skiing, tennis, bobsleigh, luge, golf, ice hockey all contribute to the waste generated by sports.
Golf links are disappearing. Beijing hosted the Winter Olympics in 2022 with one hundred per cent artificial snow. Only one of the 21 previous hosts can host ski and snowboard events at the Winter Olympics by the end of the century. The message is being hammered into us.
Athletes of Italy speed-skating on artificial snow at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games, in Beijing, China. | Photo Credit: Reuters
How to fight back
By 2085, only 33 cities in the northern hemisphere — of 645 which were studied — can host low-risk Olympics, according to research by the University of California published in Lancet. The question, says Madeleine Orr, a climate ecologist and a Toronto University Professor, is not whether climate change will impact sports. It is already doing so.
Writing in Scientific American, Jules Bykoff, author of books on the Olympics, says if the organisers want them to be sustainable, the Games must reduce their size, limit the number of tourists, greenify their supply chains and open up their eco-books for bona fide accountability. “Until then,” he says, “the Olympics are a greenwash, mere lip service when facts demand systematic transformation.”
Greenwashing is today as much part of sport’s lingo as sportswashing is.
The former is defined as a marketing tactic to make the public believe that a company’s products, goals, or policies are environmentally friendly. The latter is the use of sports to distract from an entity’s unethical activities.
Mixed signals
The twain meet in West Asia. Saudi Arabia will host the 2029 Asian Winter Games after building 36 km of artificial ski slopes in Neom, a futuristic city yet to be completed. But before Saudi Arabia and Aramco and the threat of oil to sports from football to golf, there were U.S. oil companies, as Orr reminds us, who used the same strategy, with investments in the NFL and other American sports. “The Super Bowl and the NFL as we know it wouldn’t exist today if it weren’t for the voracious greed of a few oil tycoons,” she writes. It is convenient to believe that sport got into bed with fossil fuel companies only since oil was discovered in West Asia. As COP29 showed in Baku recently, smaller and vulnerable societies will continue to pay for the climate misdeeds of the rich and powerful.
“Climate action is a team sport,” writes Orr, reminding us that U.S. President Donald Trump has called climate crisis a “hoax” and “pseudoscience”, thus giving us a glimpse into the difficulty of doing the right thing. Warming Up is not all doom and gloom, though, even if some of the suggestions, like playing golf “between cooling towers, on the grounds of decommissioned fossil-fuel refineries and abandoned sports stadia,” sound impractical.
“One player [is] gonna die,” complained Daniil Medvedev in the middle of a match on the hottest day of the US Open tennis in 2023. Warming Up throbs with urgency.
Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sport; Madeleine Orr, Bloomsbury India, ₹1,999.
The reviewer’s latest book is Why Don’t You Write Something I Might Read?.
Published – January 31, 2025 09:00 am IST
