Sport – the story maker

by Andrew Simms

A taster extract from the introduction to the new book Sporting Tales

Sport is a story machine. As seasons, years and careers roll by, sport constantly resets. With every refresh a new story cycle begins. We devour rivalries, the twists of an athlete’s career, the troubled relationships between managers, coaches, players, teams, supporters and even the reporters who feed us the stories. 

Why? Sporting drama is not a niche of human experience, but a stage where, time-bound, all life is played out. It is a kind of ritualistic theatre where the script is rewritten as the play commences, and the ending is, generally speaking, unknown, but happens within reassuringly familiar boundaries. It creates an ultimately safe, addictive form of jeopardy. 

But there’s another form of jeopardy we can’t ignore.

Pitches flooded, heat-struck players fearing for their lives, races and games rearranged to avoid the new extremes of climate, and air full of the pollution from burning fossil fuels and forests turned to tinder: sport is on the frontline of global heating. 

With so many games and competitions played in the open air, both air pollution from burning fossil fuels, estimated to kill somewhere between five and over eight million people annually, and the extreme weather it worsens due to climate breakdown, now threaten athletes, fans and events alike. Reflections on this perilous condition and calls to action fill these pages on the challenges sport now grapples with. They embrace the dangers faced by athletes and sports, but also the opportunities and their responsibilities to halt the slow motion climate catastrophe. 

There’s something about people involved in sport that gives them a unique advantage over others when it comes to doing difficult or seemingly impossible things. Statistically, the odds in competitive sport are always stacked horribly against you – typically, there can only be one winner. But that doesn’t stop millions trying. Fans too are often used to living in hope, however forlorn, for their team or favourite athlete to win, sometimes for years or a lifetime, but it doesn’t stop them. 

And, indeed, some of the brightest glimmers of hope in recent years scarred by upheaval, war, pandemic, and division have come from sport. Taking the knee, wearing the rainbow and calling out child food poverty are all ways in which sport has driven awareness of prejudice and injustice, and pushed social progress.

But the opposite is also true. At the elite level especially, sport has allowed itself to be a billboard for corrosive commerce, promoting everything from junk food to gambling. Violent regimes with appalling human rights records are allowed, brazenly, to use teams and events that command some of the biggest media audiences in the world to ‘sportswash’ their reputations. Top level sport itself has become the favoured public relations cloak of those who have the most to hide. 

You can argue that this isn’t new. It’s true, tobacco companies were once one of sport’s most prominent sponsors. But the glaring contradiction of healthy sporting activity being sponsored by an addictive product that kills led to widespread bans. So, much like a team changing tactics to overcome an obstacle or an opposition, we know that sport can adapt when it needs to. Is it asking too much?

Change – rapid transition – has never been more needed than now, with the frighteningly real prospect of losing, irretrievably, the climate that sport and all of us depend on. 

Many things need to happen simultaneously. But one easy win would be for sport to stop being a billboard for the very climate polluters who are wrecking both the conditions it needs to survive, and the health of its athletes. 

Yet, it seems that in every direction, in almost every stadium, or on almost every team shirt there is a fossil fuel company, car maker or airline promoting highly polluting products and lifestyles – normalising behaviour that is pushing us over a climate cliff. The good news is that voices are beginning to be raised against the practice. Campaigners globally are calling on sport to drop dirty sponsors, from African civil society working for oil company Total to be dropped as sponsor of the Africa Cup of Nations, and internationally coordinated efforts to separate FIFA from the world’s biggest oil company Aramco, to fans of cycling, running and winter sports, a wave of activism is rising reminiscent of the uprising against big tobacco, but potentially even greater, given the supporter base of sport. Groups are coming together and organising through alliances like the Cool Down sport for climate action network.

Sport is also much more than just a story machine.

It’s a place where new communities are created and established communities come together. 

When Tahir Shams approached the historic athletics club Herne Hill Harriers in South London’s Tooting neighbourhood with the idea of creating a different kind of running club, open to those who may never have run at all, nobody foresaw that within a year hundreds of local people new to club running would weekly fill the athletics track and over a hundred each week join a social run around the nearby Common. And, it wasn’t just that a lot of people were getting active, Tooting Run Club, as it became known, quickly won national awards for its outreach and creation of a free, supportive, nurturing community for the local area.

The benefits of sport for mental and general health are now so well appreciated that doctors’ surgeries increasingly prescribe sport to treat a wide range of conditions. 

For many, sport is also one of the few ways that people might have any contact with nature. Going for a run, a ride, an outdoor swim, a kickabout, football match or a tennis game may be among the few times that especially urban dwellers are reminded of the changing seasons, or touch grass, hear birdsong and be surrounded by trees.

Taking part in sport, put simply, is another way of being in the world, living a full, embodied life. It can tick all the boxes of the ‘five ways to well-being: being active, connecting, keeping learning, taking notice and sharing. Sport does things to give you life-satisfaction that consumerism promises but fails to deliver. Local sport is exemplary in this regard, highlighting a tension with more global games.

There seems to be a great imbalance in which the big bets to promote public benefit from sport are placed on the demonstration effect of the elite and international level. Whereas it tends to be the less glamorous, poorly funded, local level which, against the odds, has the track record of success. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong in enjoying the performance of elite athletes, it’s just that if you want to widen and democratise the many benefits of sport, you need to look elsewhere, invest differently and create a more fertile soil at the grassroots. The pendulum has swung too far in favour of elite sport. Now, for the wide range of human benefits, and a more ecologically viable model for sport, it needs to swing back to the local. 

The urban green spaces set aside for local sport (think of all the school playing fields tragically sold off for speculative speculative developments), and sports’ physical infrastructure of community spaces to gather, play another potentially life saving role in an era of global heating. Towns and cities with more trees and green spaces are less vulnerable to extreme weather events, whether those might be heatwaves or heavy rainfall. Too many hard, paved surfaces in urban areas create a ‘heat island’ effect – hotspots that are lethal to more vulnerable people. They reduce the ability for rainfall to be safely absorbed, exacerbating run-off and the likelihood of flooding as drainage systems become overwhelmed by sudden inundations.

As networks of civil society, local sports clubs are also havens that not only deliver on their primary purpose of giving opportunities to participate in sport but are important community assets in times of need when public gathering spaces are needed. Where do people go when the flood comes or a wildfire levels their home? Usually it is the nearest school or sports hall. With society so widely unprepared for the worsening impacts of global heating this local infrastructure will be key to resilience – not just for shelter, but the networks and relationships they create and maintain within local areas.

Sport has vast potential to make lives better.

If a single, very personal, image can capture the essence of what sport can bring, for me it is caught in a photograph of my daughter, Scarlett, aged five, running across the long, dreary raised pedestrian walkway over the platforms of Clapham Junction railway station in London. 

A late winter sun casts dramatic, long shadows on the ground. She is running fast towards me, so fast that in the picture she is blurred and almost bursts out of the frame. Exploding with joy, behind her there is a shrinking perspective of shadows that stretch into the distance. I look at this picture and experience a rush of thoughts: that we are born to run, that sport is just another word for play and can happen anywhere, that it is a celebration of life and a beautiful way to be in the world, and that this is one of the best stories sport can tell.