I love travel as much as I love sport. Combining the two has accounted for some of the greatest moments in my life. Highlights have included a fortnight in Rio de Janeiro covering Olympic sports I’d never watched before—a lot of late-night Googling of terms like “sprint kayak”—and the fashioning of a long holiday to Australia around the England cricket team’s Ashes tour. We’re often reminded—by athletes and administrators alike—that sport creates community and offers a common language: it’s “the great leveller,” they say. It’s certainly a good way to connect with a new destination and the people who live there, establishing an instant bond that helps forge friendships and deepen your understanding of a place.
I ought to be the last person, then, to stand in the way of travelling fans. But I can’t help feeling that the sports industry—including those of us who are its most eager consumers—are wilfully ignoring the biggest issue on our planet today. Because while virtually every sporting organisation can talk a good game about sustainability—witness the reusable cups at the bar! Behold the trees we planted in the car park!—they won’t confront the fact that professional sport is predicated on air travel.
Virtually every sporting organisation can talk a good game about sustainability
Everyone flies: the athletes, the support staff, the fans. They have to because international sport is, after all, international. Tennis players and golfers maintain a continual, exhausting globetrot. Formula 1 teams shift not only their personnel but also their vast engineering infrastructure from one grand prix to the next. The more popular a sport becomes, the more valuable the time of its human protagonists—hence Premier League footballers are frequently jetted around the UK on flights of half an hour or less.
We’re all complicit, even if we’re sitting on the sofa at home watching. The demand that we create feeds the market and inspires all these tournaments. As with so many aspects of our climate crisis, it’s the overall system, not just the behaviour of individuals, that makes change so hard. In January, a teenage British endurance runner called Innes FitzGerald took the bold move of withdrawing from selection for the World Cross Country Championships in Australia. The 16-year-old wrote an open letter to British Athletics, pointing out that “aviation is the most energy intensive activity we can do” and expressing her solidarity with “those suffering on the frontline of climate breakdown”. The response from the governing body was muted—it declined to make a statement to the media.
One sport is showing the way: sailing. The first weekend in May is the grand finale of SailGP, whose season-long calendar of races has seen the league dubbed the F1 of sailing. As in F1, its drivers are the best of the best—Ben Ainslie skippers the British team—and its engineers are working at the bleeding edge of racing technology. The catamarans, which fly across the water on blades known as hydrofoils, battle around a course close to the shore, racing, colliding and sometimes even capsizing at great speed. It’s the most dramatic spectator event sailing has ever invented. You’d be tempted to call it high-octane, but there’s no hydrocarbon involved.
SailGP was recently conceived; its debut season was 2019. Unlike a sporting tournament with a long and involved history, it could choose its priorities. Sailors tend to be an eco-conscious bunch, and they wanted their flagship contest to be one that did no harm. So they developed sport’s first-ever climate-positive competition, one committed to offsetting more carbon emissions than it creates.
The teams don’t just compete on the water; there are two league tables, one for performance and the other for environmental impact. The latter Impact League measures their carbon footprint and their contribution to sustainability. The measurement is holistic rather than token—the score takes into account everything from how much meat each team is eating to the systemic improvements they fund and lobby for at home and abroad. It’s a model of how sport can and should harness its extraordinary power for the benefit of humanity, not just the profit of corporate behemoths.
The sailors themselves are aware of the seemingly intractable issues around travel. Their races do take place all over the world and, yes, the athletes do fly between them. Still, the spectators are largely locally drawn, and every part of the event infrastructure is designed to deliver them to and from the venue by public transport. Much of the broadcasting is done remotely to prevent travel-miles to and from the races.
If sport wants to be truly sustainable, it is going to have to stop doing things the way it has always done them. Maybe the rest of us will, too. I was invited out to cover the SailGP final in San Francisco, a tempting proposition that I’d have leapt at in the past. The return flight from London would have generated 2.7 tonnes of emissions. You can offset that for just over £50—although offsetting is a short-term fix that can’t be guaranteed to meet its promises. Better, I decided, not to take the invitation at all.
