It’s been six years since the IPCC released its 2018 report warning that mean global temperatures would rise past 1.5 Celsius unless drastic action was taken by 2030. While climate change is already impacting all aspects of our lives, there is one area where relatively rapid and meaningful steps could be taken, but have yet to materialize: sports. Rising temperatures, seas, and emissions all call into question the sustainability of current sports practices. Can athletes continue to compete outdoors under current game conditions in scorching climates? What happens to athletes from island nations threatened by rising sea levels? How can mega-events like the Olympics and the carbon footprints left behind by associated construction and tourism continue to be justified? Professor Madeleine Orr joins Edge of Sports to discuss these questions and other topics addressed in her book, Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sports.
Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Taylor Hebden
Audio Post-Production: David Hebden
Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Dave Zirin:
Meet me on the edge. Welcome to Edge of Sports, the TV show only on the Real News Network. I’m Dave Zirin. Right now we’re going to do, ask a sports scholar where we’re going to speak to a professor at the University of Toronto, Professor Madeleine Orr, who has a book coming out called Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sports. Let’s bring her on right now. Professor Orr, thank you so much for joining us.
Madeleine Orr:
Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Dave Zirin:
Yes. Look, I know your goal from an email you sent me is not just to write a climate book, but one that appeals to sports fans. How are you endeavoring to pull that off?
Madeleine Orr:
Yeah, I think sports fans are; it’s such a huge tent, so it’s hard to catch them all, but I think they want to hear sports stories; they want to hear human stories, and often with climate, we get science stories, and it just doesn’t resonate in the same way. So what I tried to do here is to tell those human stories, to bring up athletes and coaches and how this is impacting them in different ways around the world. And so, I hope that comes across in the book. I’ll let readers decide for themselves.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah. I want to ask you what story is really resonating with you as you look back on the writing, but first, can you give our audience a sense how is climate change changing sports?
Madeleine Orr:
Yeah, so the big one is it’s getting warmer, which global warming, it’s in the name, but that means winter sports are starting to get squished on the schedule. So we’ve basically lost November and April skiing on both sides of the Atlantic in the last 30 years. We’ve also seen in the summer side, it’s getting too hot to play. So at the moment, in North America, heat stroke and heat illness is the leading cause of death among youth athletes. We don’t often hear about it because it often gets chalked up as basically anything else because they don’t want to talk about heat, but heat is the big, big one.
The second issues tend to be related to water, so either not enough water or too much water. Both are not good if you’re playing on drought-based fields; it’s hard. It injures you more when you fall, and if you’re playing on a wet field, well, we’re looking at slip and falls, and we’re looking at all kinds of issues with flooding. So really, kind of across the gamut, it’s either too much water, not enough water, or heat that’s really changing the landscape around the world.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah. As you said, you are trying to tell the story of climate change in sports by telling the stories of athletes, of events, of the problematic nature of this current moment. Can you tell us one of those stories that really sticks with you as you’re coming out there with the book?
Madeleine Orr:
Yeah, so I spent some time in California with communities impacted by fire, and Paradise, California, got razed to the ground in 2018 with the campfire. The story that I tell in Paradise is the high school football team, and from the lens of the coaches, who essentially had to stop all football and evacuate the city with their athletes, and then over the course of a year build a program back up from the ground with very traumatized athletes, a bit of a problematic space in terms of where they were playing and what resources were available to them.
There were athletes who were homeless following the fires. There were athletes who had experienced months and months of insomnia and associated mental health issues. There were coaches that were landing in the hospital from related injuries to the fire, and because of the let’s get after it, macho football culture, a lot of that went unheard, right? The idea was let’s get everyone on the field as fast as possible, get “back to normal,” and all of these mental and physical health issues got pushed to the side, which ended some athletes’ careers, it ended some of the coaches’ careers. And so four years on, I was talking to some of those athletes and coaches and trying to figure out what happened there and how do we keep athletes safe when big events like this come to town.
Dave Zirin:
Are we looking at the end of youth sports in the foreseeable future in big swaths of the world, or is there time to wind this back?
Madeleine Orr:
I don’t think we’re looking at the end of sport. I think we’re looking at a huge shift in sport. I don’t think that we can continue to play on the seasons that we currently have. So your American football in the fall, soccer in the spring, that’s going to have to shift. I also know from working with organizations in Oceania, for example, to Southeast Asia, the Caribbean that they’re looking at completely untenable playing surfaces and fields as early as the 2030s. So by Brisbane in 2032 and sport events kind of further into the 2030s, we could see entire nations dropping off the map in terms of playing ability.
And that means that, at the youth level, it’ll happen sooner. So I think there’s a lot of work to be done to preserve playing opportunities. The good news is almost all of these playing opportunities can be preserved, but we’ve got to divorce ourselves from the tradition Latin sports system where we’re married to schedules; we’re obsessed with keeping certain play traditions. The amount of time, for example, in a half or a quarter of a game that might have to shift, there might need to be more breaks to accommodate heat, to accommodate rain or whatever it is. And I think we’re just going to have to get more comfortable being flexible.
Dave Zirin:
What does it tell us about the sports media? And I’m talking about sports radio, ESPN, TSN. What does it say that, in my opinion, they’ve completely missed this story when it can so irrevocably alter or warp sports?
Madeleine Orr:
Yeah, they have totally missed it. So far, there’s a trickle of stories since 2020 coming into play. They tend to focus just on, there’s a hurricane in the South, but they play it off as a one-time event. They’re not kind of drawing the thread from hurricane, to hurricane, to fire, to heatwave, to hurricane, which is what you need to do with climate change is kind of tie these things together and see the bigger picture. What we do know is we’re starting to get pushback. The leagues are starting to push back on 10-year media contracts to try to get them tighter into three to five, which allows for a renegotiation and more flexibility in terms of how those commercial breaks happen and when they happen. And can we get more time? And what does it look like if we need to have a rain delay?
All of those questions are now on the table in these negotiations. It’s not coming out to the public though, and I think that’s a shame because sport has a huge opportunity to tell a story about climate change that’s not necessarily life and death but will hit people right in the feels. In terms of that’s their pastime on the weekend, it might be their passion, it might be what they’re listening to on the radio on the way to work. So if sports is such a big part of our lives and the media is how we receive that information, the media has got to be part of telling the story better.
Dave Zirin:
What are your thoughts about the mega events, the massive mega events like the Olympics or the World Cup that do leave a big carbon footprint, but they always say that they’re doing these events with green principles in mind?
Madeleine Orr:
Yeah, I think that claim that they’re green is, it’s cute; it’s not real, but it’s cute. I have worked with the IOC on projects, I know that it’s not about them not having a few good people in place; it’s that they need a hundred people in place and a totally new model of hosting. The tweaks that are happening at the moment are generally related to using existing facilities, increasing public and active transit in the city once people are there, and changing the way that the events move, meaning when they go from one place to another, that more information and knowledge sharing happens between host cities. That’s not enough, in my view. It’s not even close. In order to have more sustainable events, if they want to use that word, we need to be talking about a huge shift in the scale of the event, meaning much, much smaller.
It would not be a tourism spectacle. It would be mostly reserved for the folks who live in the region where it’s being hosted, but that will be necessarily a hit to the economics of the event, which already aren’t great. And you’ve had Jules Boykoff on; he has written extensively about NoLympics campaigns about folks in the community that get displaced around these events, around harm and violence that happen systematically because of the events related to police and security, et cetera. So there’s already a long list of reasons these events are not great for hosts. In Paris already, we’re seeing quite a few riots related to this summer’s games. I think we’re going to keep seeing it. Are they fun? Sure. Is it worth it? Not from an environmental standpoint, at least not yet.
Dave Zirin:
I was going to ask you if these events were incompatible with the planetary crisis.
Madeleine Orr:
Yes.
Dave Zirin:
It sounds like you’re saying yes.
Madeleine Orr:
Yes.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. You can’t have a healing planet and the World Cup, and the Olympics as they currently exist.
Madeleine Orr:
That’s right. Yep. And I think that they want to sell this idea that they’re green, I mean for their sponsor’s sake. The sponsors want to be telling that message, but also because it allows them to continue business as usual. The problem with that is, right now you can kind of slap a green label or the word sustainable on just about anything because there’s not clear rules on what that means. And so there’s a lot of work happening by organizations like Carbon Market Watch in the UK to break down what these organizations are doing, what’s real and not real. There’s quite a lot of creative accounting on the emissions side, but there is no version of a sustainable games as of yet.
Dave Zirin:
So, professor, or if I put you in the throne and made you the commander-in-chief of all things sports-
Madeleine Orr:
Okay.
Dave Zirin:
-How would you change the current setup? And I’m talking about from youth to the pros, so sports could, in theory, operate ethically with regards to the climate?
Madeleine Orr:
Well, so a couple of things, right? The first thing would be we need healthy people in order to have a healthy climate. If people are unhealthy and they’re on that kind of rat race wheel of stress and frustration around jobs and they don’t have time to do things like care about the planet, or they don’t have money to make choices that care about the planet, then they’ll get discouraged and drop out of that project. So the big thing is I would focus on participation, not medals, which is the model that certain countries have begun to adopt with considerable success. That would mean majority of the funding that goes to sport would be for youth and participation sport. It would also mean that all the big sporting events would be considerably smaller, and that would also link to a huge quota of tickets for any given event reserved for folks that live within kind of a 20, 30-mile radius of the event.
So that kind of scales it down considerably. The other thing I would start to think about is we got really creative during COVID with how the media delivers events to people at home, and we need to start using some of that technology, whether it’s AR and VR, whether it’s holographs of athletes, like if you had an Olympic Games in Paris where only the athletes and the media travel and everyone else in the stands is from Paris, and then everyone who wants to watch around the world, who ordinarily would travel, is going to go to their local venue and watch holograms of the athletes at their local venues. Not only does that bring sport to home and makes it more accessible financially for people to get engaged and involved, it also means that we’re reducing all that travel. So there’s, I think, a lot of ways that we can improve without cutting the opportunity for athletes at the elite levels to play. And without removing fandom completely, it’s just going to look a lot different.
Dave Zirin:
The book is called Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sports by Madeleine Orr. It sounds like an absolute must-read for anybody who cares about sports or the history of the planet. I can’t let you go though, Professor Orr, without talking about something not completely different but certainly on a bit of a parallel track. I understand that you are at the NCAA Women’s Basketball Final Four, which secured bonkers ratings, became a national phenomenon for about 55 different reasons, and I was hoping maybe you could share some of that experience of what it was like to be there live.
Madeleine Orr:
Yeah, so this wasn’t my first Final Four, but it was the biggest hype around a Final Four that I’ve ever seen. I follow the women’s game, not the men’s game, although there were a lot of fun men’s games this year. The vibe in Cleveland was awesome, frankly, in the city. It was the same weekend as the eclipse, so you had women’s basketball fans and science nerds, which is the best possible combo in my book. And it was electric. The venue was sold out, 18,300 people, a lot of kids, way more kids than you would ordinarily see at an event like this. Families were coming all together, and I think that’s something really unique about the women’s game. And then just the number of women in the stands. You go to an NBA game or a Men’s Final Four, and it’s a lot of young men that’s kind of dominating the space.
At Women’s Final Four, it’s hugely diverse, it’s really inclusive, it’s a lot of fun, way less beer sales, way more kind of soda and candy, and that kind of thing. But it was a lot of fun. You had to stand in line for about half an hour to get merch, which is a great sign. And they had merch at every corner, and you still were standing in line. The festival area outside was packed all weekend, and it was free. Even if you didn’t have a ticket to the game, you could go to the fan zones for free. On the Saturday between the Friday and Sunday games, they had an open practice for both the teams in the finals, so South Carolina and Iowa played open practices, and they filled the stadium for open practice. Just the support for these women was amazing, the media presence was awesome. It felt like the women’s game was finally given its flowers, and credit to Dawn Staley, credit to Caitlin Clark, and the two teams that were there for raising the women’s game, for drawing that much attention.
And all I can hope is that people are going to watch the draft this year. It’s in a few days, and the women’s game is wild because you have players competing in Final Four and then literally the following week in a draft, and then within about five to 10 days of the draft, they’re in camps because training camp has to be done for two weeks before the season starts a month later. And in some cases, athletes who get drafted are still writing final exams for college while they’re in training camp and at the draft, and then in the W. So it’s fun, it’s fast, it feels like this space is growing really quickly, and I can only hope that it doesn’t slow down.
Dave Zirin:
Higher ratings than the World Series, higher ratings than the NBA finals, higher ratings than the Men’s Final Four, higher ratings than a lot of NFL games this year. Peak ratings: 24 million people watching. I got to ask you the questions everybody’s asking me: do you see this as a one-time, women’s game, getting its flowers, Caitlin Clark phenomena? Or do you think we’ve hit a pivot point in the history of popularity in women’s sports, particularly women’s hoops?
Madeleine Orr:
I think we’ve hit a pivot point. We’ve got women in the pipeline that are just absolute rock stars that are going to be around for a while. The fun thing about the women’s game is there’s no one and done; they’re there for four years. So the younger players that are absolutely dominating right now, we’re going to see them for a while, and that’s what makes it so fun compared to the men’s game. So I’m hoping, and actually, I’m betting on this being a turning point and not just a flash in the pan.
Dave Zirin:
JuJu Watkins already a star. Can’t wait to see how that popularity explodes in the years ahead, because that’s where I’m putting my hard-earned money. No doubt about it. And I also agree that we’re at a pivot. Professor Madeleine Orr, thank you so much for joining us here on Edge of Sports.
Madeleine Orr:
Thanks for having me.
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