From unseasonal heat and drought, to flooding, fallen trees and algal blooms, climate change is affecting sporting events across the UK like never before, and the influence of humans on the environment is impossible to ignore.
As the researcher and author Dr Madeleine Orr, who studies the effects of climate change on sport, says: “The best thing the average person can do about climate change is talk about it. People get scared because it’s always framed as what we have to give up and lose but we stand to gain so much from getting this right.”
I caught up with former downhill world cup racer Manon Carpenter, trail runner Martin Johnson, the fastest person to run the 184 miles of the Thames Path, and endurance swimmer and ocean advocate Lewis Pugh about how their love of sport inspired them to get involved with positive environmental action and how others can contribute too.
“It’s a shame to spoil the positives of such an exciting event by negatively impacting the places you’re riding through”
“We can see the changes happening,” says Manon Carpenter, a passionate cyclist and former downhill mountain bike racer from Wales. “We’ve had sporting events disrupted by extreme weather – bike races affected by both drought and flooding – and in 2022 Tour de France organisers were having to cool down the tarmac on the roads with water, a highly valuable resource.”
In 2021, Manon made the film Winds of Change about the impact of Storm Arwen, which devastated forests in the northeast of England and Scotland, damaging 16 million trees, and rendering many of the mountain bike and hiking trails unpassable. “The climate crisis will make it harder to do the sports we like, especially as weather events get more extreme in the future,” she says.
But instead of despairing about the situation, Manon has been channelling her energy into supporting organisations who are taking positive action against the climate crisis including Protect Our Winters, who focus less on individual behaviour and climate guilt and more about creating system change.
The reality, says Manon, is that we can only do so much ourselves as individuals, and that we need much wider societal changes to meet our environmental targets, including one of her bugbears – better provision for bikes on public transport. “I did a Carbon Literacy Training course through Protect Our Winters,” she says. “We had to measure our individual carbon footprints and see what we’d need to do to get it to zero, and it was impossible as the system is now. You’d barely be able to eat and heat your home!”
She stresses, it is important to still make those individual changes to show we want to live in a system that can meet those targets, and especially when it comes to litter and the use of single use plastics, and she works with Trash Free Trails to that end.
“They see littering as a symptom of a disconnection with the world we live in,” says Manon and she believes it’s important for racers to consider the impact that throwing a gel into a hedge will have on the environment and animals living there versus the marginal gains they might get in their performance from not putting the wrapper in their back pocket.
“It’s like saying you see yourself as more important than the world around you,” she says, but it affects the image of the sport you’re doing. “And it’s a shame to spoil the positives of such an exciting event by negatively impacting the places you’re riding through.”
“It’s about that collective responsibility to reduce our individual impacts”
In 2021, Londoner Martin Johnson became the fastest person to run the Thames Path, a journey he documented in Run to the Source. He says trail runners are typically seen as more connected to nature than road runners, but he believes city-based runners have just as much reason to care about environmental issues and not just because of the impacts of air quality, though that was his way in.
“I was running in and out of London in rush hour, directly meeting with air pollution and traffic,” he says. And it played on his mind, especially in an area where air quality was a hot button issue following the death of Ella Roberta Adoo Kiss Debrah in 2013, the first person in the world to have air pollution listed as her cause of death.
“I was really connected to her story and inspired by her mum Rosamund, who has become a real advocate for clean air setting up The Ella Roberta Foundation,” he says. It’s something he thinks all runners should care about citing the increasing evidence of the impact of air quality on performance, and Martin is working with The Ella Roberta Foundation to put on the London chapter of Running up for Air, a global event, which seeks to raise funds for clean air charities.
He is also a big fan of The Green Runners who emphasise that “you don’t need to be perfect” but just to keep improving “by putting the planet first when making decisions”. He references their four pillars, which ask runners to consider how they get to events, how they kit-up, what they eat, and whether they speak out to amplify these issues in a positive way.
Advice which chimes with the TCS London Marathon’s Training Hub tips for incorporating environmentally-friendly practices into your running. Martin says it’s common practice in trail running to wear a race vest and carry your own snacks and water bottles with you, which you then refill along the way, and he believes it wouldn’t take much to encourage road runners to do the same.
“It’s about trying to change that mindset – the fear of losing one second if you stop to do this – and presenting alternatives like race vests,” he says, and also suggests runners use innovative energy gels and bars made with edible packaging to avoid littering.
He thinks runners should be selective about the races they enter to challenge race organisers to do better. “Do we need finish line t-shirts and does the event work with Trees not Tees? [London Marathon Events has worked with Trees not Tees since 2023.] What are they doing to discourage people from flying to events? [The TCS London Marathon charges a carbon levy for international ballot participants.] It’s about that collective responsibility to reduce our individual impacts,” he says.
“We protect what we love”
The British-South African swimmer Lewis Pugh first made his name taking on some of the most challenging endurance swims in the world at record-breaking pace. But his motivation shifted in 2005 while swimming in Antarctica.
“I was swimming in Deception Island and saw thousands of whale bones littering the sea floor,” he says. “Deception Island had been the epicentre of the whaling industry in the Southern Ocean, and it was a major wake up call for me, bringing home the lasting impact we have on our environment.”
Since then, Lewis has sought to use his swimming feats to raise awareness of the importance of ocean and waterway protection, setting up the Lewis Pugh Foundation in 2015. “I love swimming,” he says, “but these days if I’m pioneering a swim it has to be ‘on purpose’ – there needs to be a reason and a message I’m conveying with my actions.”
He believes open water swimmers can play a key role in the environmental movement. “Oceans, lakes and rivers are often the first to feel the effects of pollution, of rising temperatures, and extreme weather events and everyone who uses them has a corresponding duty to protect them,” he says.
Lewis advises swimmers to start where they are. “Report what is happening in your local community, and the places where you swim. Organise with other swimmers to do beach or riverbank clean ups in your community. Put collective pressure on decision-makers to improve the condition of your waterways,” he says.
He also encourages swimmers to move beyond merely reporting dirty rivers, lakes, and beaches, to actively protecting them through engagement with the political process. “Surfers Against Sewage is a great example of how passionate activism can lead to real change – their awareness campaigns and beach clean-ups have made a significant difference to the waters around the UK,” he says.
But most of all, Lewis believes it all starts with fostering a love of nature in our communities, be that through swimming, running, cycling, walking or however we experience the outdoors. “We protect what we love, so the earlier your eyes are opened to the beauty around you, the better,” he says.