This would be a fantastic way to get lots of people to tune out
Every Olympic athlete in Pyeongchang should be vocal about climate change
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It’s not much of a leap from those two underweight snowmen to the Winter Olympics. Yes, the Games are big business. But every Winter Olympian’s love of their sport began with a childlike vision of fun. That’s the real reason climate change poses such a menacing danger to winter sports: Rising temperatures are threatening not just what we do, but who we are.
There’s even a word for it: solastalgia. A climate scientist friend, Elizabeth Burakowski, told me the term describes “the existential distress caused by environmental change, the homesickness felt when one is still at home. It is the unease one feels during those warm, snowless winters.” Today, many lifelong winter athletes are familiar with solastalgia — and a lot of everyday Vermonters and Utahans and Californaisn are too.
These are people who manufacture their own mental issues over a minuscule 1.5 degree F increase in temperatures since 1850.
Olympic athletes are uniquely positioned to sound alarms about climate change. Many of them already do: Ski racing legends Ted Ligety and Steve Nyman; cross-country skiers Kikkan Randall, Andy Newell and Simi Hamilton; and snowboarders Jamie Anderson, Kelly Clark and Danny Davis. They represent a new breed of competitor, focused almost as much on the need to save their craft as they are on the craft itself. Increasingly, their sponsors align. Burton, the company that made the U.S. snowboard team’s Olympic uniforms, is one of the most outspoken businesses about the perils of global warming.
But we need more than leadership from a few. The Olympics are an international stage from which athletes can demand action from the countries they represent and mobilize their sponsors and fans. This year, all the Olympians competing in Pyeongchang should be vocal in some way — every last one.
The Olympics are about achievement and execution, about pushing the limits of human physical ability. Pyeongchang, more than any other winter games in the past, will also be about other limits: how much humans will allow global temperatures to rise and the willingness of elite athletes to use their power, money and global platform to save their livelihoods, and ours.
So, people who just took long fossil fueled trips from all over the world to compete in the Olympics, and typically use lots of fossil fuels to get to the training areas and to compete in other competitions are best positioned to preach the dogma of the Cult of Climastrology? Really? It’s bitterly cold in South Korea. Think they’re keeping warm with solar panels and wind turbines? Nope.
As one person in the comments at the LA Times writes “How about the athletes be very, very vocal about North Korea’s slave pit of a Country?” That would be a lot better than all the fawning media coverage of North Korea.
