Sporting Tales: new book rethinks sport
As summer heats up, major polluters continue to use the world’s favourite sports as giant billboards to promote themselves. From The Euros and the Tour de France, to international cricket and the Olympics, this sportswashing and greenwash are everywhere.
Yet sport is especially vulnerable to extreme weather, as are athletes, officials, and fans. In 2019, the Rugby World Cup was disrupted by unprecedented Pacific typhoons; in early 2020, the Australian Tennis Open was disrupted by the smoke blowing in from the country’s devastating bushfires; and polling from BASIS found that 60% of cricket players and spectators had experienced climate-related disruption (this threat rises in Global South countries where cricket is particularly popular, with Bangladesh and Pakistan ranked seventh and eighth respectively for vulnerability on the Climate Risk Index). Even before the pandemic changed the date, the Tokyo 2021 Olympics were “the hottest in history” with conditions described as “torturous”, with athletes warning that extreme heat at the Paris 2024 Olympics could pose a risk to athletes’ lives.
So how might we rethink sport due to global heating, and could sport even lead the way?
“Sport has many stories to tell; good and bad. Sporting Tales is a stadium full of better stories about surviving and thriving in a troubled world.”
- Melissa Wilson, Team GB rower and co-founder of Athletes for the World
The new book Sporting Tales is a playful and serious reimagining of sport in the face of the climate and nature emergency asking just that. From champion international athletes to leading global campaigners, writers and academic experts, the stories within its pages explore where the biggest challenge of our era tackles the world’s most popular pastime, sport. Many of the contrib
These tales may be about the games we all love to play, but they are also about matters of life and death, inviting us to see how we can all play a better game.
The current moment seems more precarious than ever, standing on the edge of potentially irreversible ecological decline and in the grip of toxic social divisions. Athletes engaged in outdoor physical exertion find themselves especially exposed, with their health and lives under threat from the climate extremes of a heating planet, as well as the air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels.
“Sport is losing to climate breakdown and climate criminals, but has always been a coliseum of social and political change. Can sport rise to the occasion? These tales of hope make me think so.”
- Jasmin Paris, champion ultrarunner and the first woman to complete the infamous Barkley Marathons
Sport has an extraordinary ability and opportunity to mobilise its mass audience and appeal for change. Sporting Tales invites us to imagine the power sport can wield to stop climate breakdown blowing the final whistle.
Sporting Tales is part of a bigger project, and the fifth volume of essays and stories curated by the New Weather Institute following: There was a Knock at the Door, Knock Twice, Knock Three Times, and Contagious Tales. It includes contributions from several members of the Cool Down – sport for climate action network.
“We all know that sport is sometimes thought of as a battlefield. Orwell once likened it to ‘mimic warfare’. But increasingly the struggle is for the soul and purpose of sport: torn between regenerating communities, building health and social relationships as opposed to providing a propaganda vehicle for undemocratic regimes and major polluters. This beautifully written collection shows that new stories and narratives of how the spirit of sport is being reclaimed can yet save everything we love about sport from those whose values threaten our very existence.”
- Professor Peter Newell, Sussex University.
