In April 1929, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) met in Lausanne, Switzerland, to grant the hosting rights for the 1932 Winter Olympic Games. The United States was the frontrunner, and seven U.S. candidate sites showed up to bid: Bear Mountain and Lake Placid, New York; Denver, Colorado; Duluth, Minnesota; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Lake Tahoe and Yosemite Valley, California. For many small mountain towns, this would be their shot to generate the investment dollars needed to build new winter sport infrastructure and secure a strong tourism industry in a very economically fragile time—the start of the Great Depression.
Godfrey Dewey, vice president of the exclusive Lake Placid Club (and son of the inventor of the Dewey Decimal Classification System for library books) was the lead administrator of the town’s bid. Dewey made a series of lofty promises—chief among them, a new Olympic sliding track for bobsled. Then-New York Gov. (and later U.S. president) Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote letters in support of the project, turning the small New York town into a frontrunner.
It all seemed promising, until Lake Placid secured hosting rights and things got messy.
Dewey’s planned bobsled run was to be on the Lake Placid Club’s site, within the protected Adirondack Forest Preserve. The Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks led a legal complaint in New York State courts, claiming that the project went against the “forever wild” clause of the state’s constitution, which maintains that state lands “constituting the forest preserve…shall be forever kept as wild forest lands.”
A two-year legal battle ensued. Environmental activists routinely protested and made noise in the press. Eventually, the New York State Court of Appeals held that a statute authorizing the construction of a bobsled run, requiring the destruction of 5,122 trees, was unconstitutional. Dewey and the organizing committee were forced to find a location elsewhere. They settled on a site just outside the Forest Preserve boundary.
That kind of pressure from environmental groups has never gone away. In nearly every Olympic host city since, there has been what sport sociologist Jules Boykoff calls the “NOlympic movement”—organized groups of people who do not want these large, damaging events to come to town. Over time, these movements gained momentum and media attention, eventually reaching Olympic decision-makers and creating public pressure to effect positive green change. But this process would take decades.
Fast forward to 1970. Denver was awarded the hosting rights for the 1976 Winter Olympics. It was billed as an ideal opportunity to celebrate the United States’ bicentennial and Colorado’s centennial anniversaries. But it took less than a year for the Games to be met with major dissent from local politicians. Months after the hosting rights were awarded to the city, State Rep. Bob Jackson told the Associated Press, “We ought to say to the nation and the world, ‘We’re sorry, we are concerned about the environment. We made a mistake. Take the Games elsewhere.’”
Dick Lamm, another state representative, told Ski Magazine, “Every time I ask a question about ecology, the Olympic people tell me, ‘Don’t worry, we are going to take care of that.’ But a state which has never taken down as much as a single billboard to improve the environment is not going to run an Olympics which the ecologists would like.” By 1972, the city withdrew from hosting and the Games were moved to Innsbruck, Austria, which had held the event in 1964 and had most facilities ready to go.
Germany also saw environmental groups put pressure on—and ultimately shut down—the Olympics over environmental concerns. In 1983, the mayor and local tourism director of Berchtesgaden announced a bid for the 1992 Winter Olympics. Almost immediately, a local citizens’ initiative was organized against it, and successfully campaigned to shut down the bid. That edition of the Winter Games was hosted by Albertville, France.
Amanda Shuman, a historian at the University of Freiburg, has been studying how the Berchtesgaden citizens’ initiative was contextually different from those that preceded it in other countries. She and I work together through the Sport Ecology Group, so I called her to get the background story.
“The early 1980s were a unique time for the environmental movement in Germany. Acid rain was at the top of everyone’s mind because Der Spiegel, the country’s biggest magazine, decided to run a series of exposés on forest death with pretty aggressive headlines like ‘The Forest is Dying,’” Shuman said. “At the same time, the newly formed Green Party rode that wave of public concern into their first seats in Parliament. Environmental groups watched this happen and were emboldened to act on different issues because there was more visibility and political support for their work.”
Shuman argues that historically, anti-sport development efforts went against the political grain, as politicians routinely used sporting mega-events as a platform-building opportunity. But in 1970s Colorado, and again in 1980s Germany, there was some degree of political support behind anti-Olympics campaigns.
Despite repeated involvement and pressure by environmental groups to slow, move, or shut down sport development and big events through the 20th century, it wasn’t until the 1990s that sports organizations took up the mantle of environmental action themselves.
In 1992, the same year that the word “sustainability” entered the global lexicon at the United Nations Earth Summit in Brazil, the IOC was facing challenges with the perceptions of the Olympics following the Albertville Winter Games, which were dubbed an “environmental catastrophe” in the local news given the extraordinary distance between the different venues. The event was so spread out geographically that athletes and spectators drove through the mountains from one town to the next, clogging up the roadways and polluting an otherwise quiet area of France.
After Albertville, the IOC knew it had to act to strengthen its reputation on environmental issues and align more closely with growing global concerns about the climate. It’s still not clear whether the IOC has succeeded at improving its record or reputation on environmental work.
The 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, are viewed as the first attempt to create a “green” Olympic Games. It was a tall order. After the environmental wreckage at Albertville, local activists in Lillehammer forced the organizing committee to adapt their hosting plans based on environmental concerns. The changes included a redesigned speed-skating rink that minimized impacts on a nearby bird sanctuary, a plan to prioritize the use of renewable building materials, energy-efficiency upgrades for facilities, and a recycling program at all venues.
The 1990s were a supercharged decade for sustainability across all sports, not just the Olympic Games. In 1993, the National Football League in the United States launched their NFL Green campaign, which has seen every subsequent Super Bowl implement waste management and nature restoration projects. In 1994, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) created its Sports and Environment Program to promote environmental awareness through sports and sustainable design principles in sports facilities and equipment manufacturing. Also that year, the Centennial Olympic Congress of Paris named the environment a “third pillar” of the Olympic charter, alongside sport and culture.
Later in the 1990s, the UNEP worked with the IOC to develop an “Agenda 21” for the Olympic Movement based on sustainability guidelines created by delegates at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. (The document’s publication was sponsored by Shell.) The IOC committed itself to promoting sustainability among its 206 member nations and 30 governing bodies for winter and summer sports, and to require sustainability plans from the hosts of its marquee events. This is only a commitment to “encourage” sustainability, though, not to mandate it. The IOC does not control operations among its members. Despite these ambitions, the process of implementation has been a roller-coaster, with several sharp turns off-course.
For the first 20 years of the green sports movement, from about 1992 to 2012, the focus was on operational improvements: reducing waste, switching to energy-efficient lighting, using less water, and measuring carbon footprints. These efforts were impactful. Consider how much toilet paper is used in a stadium with hundreds of toilets—it’s a lot. Finding a toilet paper provider that uses recycled paper instead of fresh forests is a meaningful improvement.
Or think about the water savings that can be achieved by implementing an irrigation system that cuts water use from 60,000 liters per night to 50,000. In one year, the facility will reduce its water consumption by more than 4.1 million liters. That’s enough water to fill three Olympic-size swimming pools. But these efforts can be hard to communicate to fans and do little to leverage sports’ sizeable platform to inspire fans to act on climate change and build popular support for action.
A 2021 study published by Martin Müller and colleagues at the University of Lausanne developed a model to evaluate the environmental sustainability of Olympic Games hosted between 1992 and 2020. It found that Salt Lake City in 2002 was the most sustainable, while more recent iterations in Sochi, Russia, in 2014 and Rio de Janeiro in 2016 were the least sustainable. Part of the challenge for the IOC is that each host country is operating within its own sets of definitions, limitations, and government priorities, so sustainability often takes a back seat to tourism development and growth plans.
Some of the most exciting work on sustainability is coming out of the Paris 2024 Olympic Committee, which promises a carbon-positive Games. The French capital has banned non-essential through traffic from its city center effective in 2024, making 5.4 square miles of the city straddling both sides of the Seine much greener and cleaner. They are also adding bike lanes and bus routes, and 95 percent of the venues will be existing facilities or temporary builds, so only two new builds are needed. We haven’t seen anything better than this. Still, there will be loads of tourists (it’s Paris, there are always tourists), so the organizers have committed to offsetting all remaining emissions.
I have been outspoken in recent years about how I don’t think it’s possible to have a carbon-positive Olympic Games—and that this language is misleading and potentially detrimental to the broader movement. It’s great to see the ambition to be very low-impact, but “carbon-positive” is just not realistic in the context of an international sporting event with hundreds of thousands of tourists and participants.
Overall, though, the green sports movement is decidedly on the right track. Reflecting on the progress to date in the United States, environmental scientist Allen Hershkowitz—once dubbed the “Godfather of Green Sports”—said in a podcast interview in 2021, “I think, actually, over the last 10 years, the sport and sustainability movement has been one of the most effective sectors in the environmental advocacy world, especially in North America, where our government has been outright hostile to environmental progress.”
From where I’m standing, it’s clear a lot more has been happening in green sports in recent years. The sector is moving forward, and moving together. Now we have to pick up the pace.
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