Game over: Review of Madeleine Orr’s Warming Up — How Climate Change is Changing Sport

Review of Madeleine Orr’s Warming Up — How Climate Change is Changing Sport

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”