Sport in a Time of Climate Crisis

The world is undergoing a spot of global warming at the moment. In January 2023, more than 50% of French ski resorts were closed due to lack of snow, and many have since thrown in the towel entirely. This brings global, carbon-intensive activities such as the Olympic Games into sharp relief. Should we endorse all this travel and expense just for sport?

Some say no - retired cross-country skier and Paralympic coach Stéphane Passeron argues that “major sporting and cultural events are no longer compatible with the current climate crisis”. Campaign groups have called for France’s bid for the 2030 Winter Olympics to be scrapped, along with the Football World Cup and even the Tour de France, whilst making sport more local.

It’s hard to disagree, given the status quo. But I also believe in the value of cultural exchange and I do not believe any good would come of nations turning into hermit kingdoms. I believe there is a sustainable way forward. It’s worth stressing that Passeron calls for sport to be local, and whilst that could mean local to your town, in the context of cancelling the Olympics it could also mean a focus on regional or continental events, omitting inter-continental (mostly air) travel.

Several angles must be considered here - from venues, to travel and also to the wider ecosystem - the carbon footprint of the Olympic Games is almost negligible compared with the circuits of Olympic qualifying tournaments such as World Championships and Continental and Regional Games. It’s also fair to say some events are worse than others. Formula One has a huge annual carbon footprint - ferrying teams and cars around largely by air. The footprint of each F1 season is probably larger than that of the Olympic Games happening once every 4 years. How many flights do Toto Wolff or Max Verstappen take in a year compared with an Olympic athlete? And other events throw out surprises. Research by Cardiff University showed that the Tour de France had an unexpectedly enormous carbon footprint, largely down to spectator travel modes and the festivities surrounding Le Grand Depart.

Venues & Accommodations

Past Olympics have seen huge spending on grand venues - many of which stand empty and rotting. I have no argument - this has to stop - the expenditure of $100Bn on seven state-of-the-art stadia in Qatar was criminal. A huge human cost from the slave-labour workforce, a price tag that would have prepped eight London Olympics and vast carbon emissions for air-conditioned stadiums which now stand empty in a country with minimal domestic sporting interest. The Sochi Winter Olympics are in the same category. This is sportswashing.

The London Olympics set a new direction, with extensive use of temporary venues and the demountable upper tier of the main stadium, which eliminated 20,000 seats for a sustainable post-Games capacity. Construction has a financial and environmental cost, but London’s comes across as entirely reasonable - it catalysed the government to clean up 300years of industrial waste the private sector wouldn’t touch. The Olympic Games provides a deadline that pushes governments (reticent to invest) to deliver oft-overdue improvements to public transport, affordable housing and develop new sports and leisure facilities. Arguably, this is not really a “cost” - certainly not to be counted against the sport. It all needs doing and the Olympics provides a hard deadline to stop wishy-washy politicians losing interest (see: HS2, rail electrification, the rollout of domestic solar and green energy).

Some disagree - a NYTimes editorial recently questioned what a Host City gets back, arguing that New York “won” the 2012 bidding contest by losing and did much of the proposed development anyway - without “diverting billions of dollars to a short-lived sports event”. However, their key criticism was the huge wastage of Athens and Rio - which informed the approaches for London, Paris and LA. It also discounts cultural outcomes - the Manchester Commonwealth Games in 2002 spawned enduring legacy events like the Great Manchester Run. Certainly, a promoter could organise a 10k anywhere. But would this have actually happened without a catalyst like the Games? I have personal experience seeing a surge of interest and new participants joining clubs I was a member of following the 2012 Games. A city could of course spawn its own sports festival - but at their own expense. Whilst cities and nations spend money preparing for a Games, it is often overlooked that the circus itself is funded by sponsorship, ticket sales and broadcast rights.

Other considerations include whether the “big bang” approach helps with sustainable construction and integration - the QE Olympic Park is heated via a district heating scheme - more energy efficient than a patchwork of independent development schemes (local authorities should be more robust generally in setting out grander plans for such schemes and requiring developers to plumb into that infrastructure).

For future games, Paris and LA have followed suit with “no build” strategies to leverage existing venues, bulking up transit corridors as required. We should not write off the Olympic Games or similar events as incompatible with climate change on the basis of the venues. This can be done in a sustainable and holistic fashion.

Travel

This is the heart of it. Most developed nations have significantly decarbonised their energy and industrial sectors - but transport is the outlier. A Cardiff University study found that travel for the Tour de France Grand Depart was a huge contributor. The average spectator travelled 734km to spectate, many by air.

This seems to me a relatively trivial issue for any event up to Continental levels - Mandate rail travel. Ban domestic and short-haul aviation outside of tricky highlands-and-islands type edge cases - not just for sports. For everything. Competitors arrive by rail, and organisers provide shuttles to and from venues and accommodation.

A high speed rail line can move people 700km in just a couple of hours. This is entirely comparable with getting to an airport, enduring security and then flying. Moreover, high speed rail doesn’t merely get people across countries quickly. Building out inter-city lines frees up local rail paths - so travellers can get a local train from the main station out to the event (or failing that, organisers can lay on shuttle buses). I have travelled with larger groups for sport and believe me - by the time you marshal athletes to an airport and arse around with paperwork and oversize/excess baggage - worrying about your train taking an hour longer than a plane disappears into the general mix. You’re losing a full day to travel, whichever way you look at it.

What’s more - high speed rail really opens up long-distance sleepers. This is a singularly overlooked aspect of transport policy. Paris to Istanbul is about 1600miles, following the LGV out to Strasbourg, through Stuttgart to Munich, across to Vienna and around to Budapest. A sleeper averaging 160-180mph over a 200-220mph capable track could make the distance in about 10 hours - board at 8pm and arrive at 6am, rested and ready for breakfast. This is almost certainly a more comfortable and practical way to travel than spending hours in an airport, and then sitting on a plane - and you don’t lose a “travel day” doing it!

The question therefore has to be: why are any European athletes arriving at the Paris Olympics by air? Literally everyone west of the Bosphorus should be within 10hours of Paris by train. Such an arrangement would nullify environmental travel concerns. Of course in the case of the Olympics, you have inevitable intercontinental travel. But for European championships, or the Tour de France? There are no excuses.

The reason of course is political disinterest. Journalist Jon Worth has extensively covered the difficulties with cross-border rail. Whilst some decent high-speed networks exist (e.g. France & Spain), central countries such as Germany have failed to build out their networks. Despite the enviable S-Bahn in most German cities, the inter-city network is tired and north-south oriented, with surprisingly little east-west connectivity established since reunification. There has been talk of London-to-Copenhagen Eurostar services - but the high speed rail peters out after Brussels, with the stretch past Hamburg driving up journey times. The Danes are notionally willing to build HS line on their side of the border, but there is little point if it can only connect to 80mph lines in Germany. Likewise, the Spanish have an enviable network (albeit the French need to hook up that last bit from Perpignan to Avignon). The Italians also have a good spine of high speed, but it runs out at Turin and hasn’t yet been connected to the French network (in fairness, this probably requires an ambitious base tunnel under the mountains to Nice).

Surprisingly, the EU - in its attempts to federalise members - has not imposed more stringent requirements for unified ticketing, or joining up the disparate bits of high speed rail.

Looking to North America, there hardly seems an issue there either. A high speed rail network could provide coast-to-coast journey times of 16hours (NYC to LA), which is a sleeper plus some day travel. The bulk of use cases however would be easy travel around population clusters in the US such as the Dallas-Austin-Houston triangle, around the mid-west, from Houston across to Florida, and along the coasts, including into the Toronto-Montreal-Quebec City corridor.

Meanwhile in Asia, China’s Belt & Road Initiative has built thousands of miles of railway (albeit for freight, not high speed) from China to Europe. Such mega projects are perfectly feasible with political will. Beijing to Instanbul via Almaty and Tbilisi is a clear 5500miles - 25hours if you can get 200mph run. Albeit the route inevitably takes you through either Russia or Iran - both politically difficult. But as a pure engineering prospect, is a day on a sleeper train really much worse than an 11 hour flight bracketed by two nights of disrupted sleep? A full night’s sleep in a proper bed, space to move around, and eating in a dining car rather than a fold-down tray sounds far more appealing. For regional events, India to China or Vietnam is a fraction of that. There is no getting away though from aviation for Indonesia, Japan or the Philippines.

Running events

Mr Passeron is correct to say we can’t go on as we are. The environmental costs of sport are enormous. But they need not be. To take shooting as an example, the World Cup series - originally a way of distributing Olympic quotas - now exists as a standalone annual competition. The development of events such as Asian and European Games mean quotas are now distributed at regional events. We could scrap the World Cup series (four matches plus a final), reserving inter-continental travel for the World Championships and Olympic Games. With the right political support, there should be no issue with Europeans or Americans (those from the Americas, not specifically the USA) travelling to the European Championships or Pan American Games by rail. There is no need to engage in transatlantic aviation.

Asia is rather harder - the Asian Games can be held anywhere from Dubai to Singapore. Perhaps the concept of the Asian continent needs further subdivision into South East Asia and recognising that India and China have almost half the world’s population between them. But rail is still feasible for much of Asia, and this would be a key step to reducing the carbon footprint of sports as a whole

But it’s also fair to admit that we can’t do this at home yet. Cardiff for instance is a victim of its own success. A thriving schedule of sports and concerts see crowds flock to the Millennium Stadium. Most arrive by car, parking at the edge-of-town Blues stadium where a park-and-ride operates. But the Millennium Stadium is next to Cardiff Station. The vast majority of attendees should arrive by rail, either mainline from further afield, or on the South Wales Metro. A £2 tax could be levied on each ticket which then entitles the bearer to free local travel on the day (players should also arrive by train). But for some reason they don’t, despite roads being hugely congested with hard bottlenecks such as the Brynglas Tunnels.

More fancifully, I have long wondered about the viability of modern ocean liners. Cruise liners are horribly environmentally damaging, but I remain curious about a transport-oriented ocean liner. Low drag, modern engines and use of modern “sails”, along with minimal on-board amenities - could we get the CO2/pax-km below that of aviation? Probably not, and biofuels will come to dominate remaining long-haul aviation. But it’s probably worth having some naval architects think about it for a bit.

The sad part is, this won’t happen. Our weak, unambitious politicians cannot bring themselves to commit to a rolling programme of international high speed rail delivery or decarbonise our transport networks. They do not have the vision for a low-carbon, egalitarian society where travel is not predicated on private car ownership and aviation. Despite the fact that such a scheme would - in a stroke - cut unemployment, drive our flagging growth figures and (eventually) cut the cost of living. To quote the great John Maynard Keynes - “anything we can actually do, we can afford.”

It is unfortunate that so many of our leaders are still in thrall to Reagonomics, and the weird notion of managing sovereign economies similarly to household bills, or the running of a greengrocer’s shop. And yet the same nationalists who decry the rise of the Chinese and Indian economies and the stagnation of our own, staunchly prefer austerity to investing in our own countries. Bizarre.