The Olympic Spirit: Friendly Competition or Unsustainable Growth?

by Mark Cramer

Every four years, the Summer Olympics present a rare opportunity for friendly competition and collaboration among nations. The public has an opportunity to witness a myriad of sports that otherwise never make the headlines. Talented athletes get a rare chance to display their skills before an international audience.

The Olympics offer a venue for peaceful, international solidarity. Yet they also present a seemingly insurmountable ecological challenge. To begin with, there are the grossly excessive air mileage for athletes, entourages and tourists. One estimate put the number of athletes and staff that were carried by plane in the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro at 28,500. With another estimate placing the number of people traveling internationally to view the Paris Olympics at about 1.5 million people, it’s safe to say the air emissions generated by spectators are even higher.

Hosting the Olympics also drives a multitude of other ecological challenges. These include exorbitant energy consumption; unmanageable levels of waste; and unsustainable pressures on local food supplies. During the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, seafood suppliers lobbied organizers to water down their sourcing standards.

The Paris Olympics Greening Efforts

With criticism of the ecological toll of the Olympics mounting in recent decades, hosting countries have begun to make public pledges to green the Games. Paris, not wanting to be outdone, promised the “most sustainable” Games ever. Efforts have included the highly publicized clean-up of the Seine River. The city also took steps to make Olympic venues easily accessible by public transportation and city bike infrastructure.

Organizers stressed frugality and utility, with 95% of the structures either existing or temporary venues. The only significant exception to this rule was an aquatic center in a poorer northern suburb. With public transportation access to all venues and cars excluded from the outer perimeter of each site, transport emissions were significantly reduced.

Paris 2024 also pledged to offset more emissions than it produced, by supporting environmental projects in other parts of France. Organizers have banked on innovation. For example, they installed an underground water-cooling system beneath the Athlete’s Village, rather than resorting to air conditioning. Plant-based and local food options are favored, with plastic-free packaging for performers and spectators alike.

However, as Kara Anderson from Greenly cautions,“despite all best efforts, a big international event cannot be completely sustainable. Certain emissions and waste is unavoidable, and carbon offsetting projects are imperfect.” Air travel, also, is inherently unsustainable. “[U]ntil the air industry is able to advance technologically to solve this issue, there will always be resulting carbon emissions.” The only way of making the Olympics sustainable, according to the author, would be to scale down the Games or to rotate them among cities that already have the infrastructure in place.

A Scoreboard in Reverse: The Ecological Footprint

What Anderson and other commentators fail to address, however, is that the Paris organizers’ attempt to green the Games succumbs to the “green growth” fallacy. Thomas Bach, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President, may have foregrounded athletic prowess and peaceful coexistence to spectators at the closing ceremony. But appeals to growth still very much remains a central piece of IOC’s strategy for marketing itself to host countries. Take for example how it highlights its potential to “stimulate[] the regional and national economy.”

If we compare the ecological footprint per capita of the countries that participated in the Paris Olympics, we find that the growth compulsion also very much drives the distribution of winning performances. Only six countries dominated the medal scoreboard of the Paris 2024 Olympics. All six have a disproportionately high ecological footprint per capita. Take the United States, the undisputed winner of the games, with 126 medals taken home. It happens to be also the country with the largest ecological footprint of any competing country, with 8 gha per person living in the United States. We would need the equivalent of five Earths to sustain human life if everyone consumed like Americans.

China, for its part, needed 3.5 earths to produce 91 medals, while equaling the USA in gold, with 40 medals. Japan (4.5), Australia (7.0), France (5.0) and Great Britain (5.0) round off the per capital ecological footprints of the top six Olympic nations. In contrast, the ecological footprint of the 23 African nations where an athlete never reached the podium is only 1.08.

Olympic organizers and host nations may stress the lofty goal of athletic excellence and friendly competition between nations. But this obscures that the Olympic medal scoreboard actually tells us very little about the raw talent of individual athletes. Rather, it is a reflection of the ecological resources wealthy countries are able to lavish on them.

Of course, the per capita ecological footprint of the winning countries is only a very crude shorthand for this reality. That said, it is a telling one. This is because, in all likelihood, the measure is an underestimation of the gaps in investment by the handful of countries dominating the Olympics and the rest of the pack. Take the July 31^st basketball match between the United States and South Sudan. The Red, White and Blue ended up winning 103 to 86. But Sudan never really stood a chance against the United States’ $4.7 billion investment in combined NBA player contracts. This exceeds the entire GDP of the nation of South Sudan, whose ecological footprint hovers around 1.0.

Low-Carbon Triumphs

Greening the Olympics is about far more than reusing Olympic swimming pools or cleaning up the Seine. It is fundamentally an issue of equity, and of the values that guide our investment in winning Olympic performances.

As our look at the participating countries’ ecological footprint scoreboard reveals, Olympic medals do not just reward athletes’ innate prowess (though any viewer will attest that Olympians’ athleticism is beyond question). They also reward post-colonial bullies willing to throw their economic might around to crowd out the competition. This begs the question: What would the Olympics look like if the ecological playing field were level, and if ecological principles were woven into the fabric of competitive sports?

The Paris 2024 Olympics have shown us that low-carbon medals are possible. On August 7th, Zambia won a bronze medal for the 400 meters with remarkable efficiency, with its ecological footprint at less than 1. Its representing athlete’s, Muzala Samukonga’s, time was just 0.3 seconds apart from the gold medalist, American Quincy Hall, and 0.26 seconds from British silver medalist Matthew Hudson Smith. The two athletes who defeated Samukonga come from ecologically unsustainable countries that rely on Earth-depleting practices to produce Olympic champions. This means Samukonga’s energy-efficient bronze may even athletically be the more impressive achievement.

Other countries with a less-than-one or a near-one ecological footprint winning Olympic medals were: Kenya (11 medals), Ethiopia (4), Tajikistan (3), Pakistan (1), Côte d’Ivoire (1). Honorable mentions for countries with a less than 2-earth-per capita carbon footprint included: Cuba (8 medals), Jamaica (6), Kyrgyzstan (6), North Korea (6), Colombia (3), Guatemala (2), and a few others with a single medal.

Notice how much more diverse the roster of countries with ecologically efficient medals is. For all those who fear that greening the Games would also ruin them, this is an important point to remember. Putting a cap on the investments that individual countries allot to their athletes would make them more diverse and competitive. And it would disrupt the old boys’ club of formerly (or in the case of China and the United States, not-so-formerly) colonial states with the resources to lavish small countries’ GDPs on their athletes’ performances. A price-capped Olympics would not just be a greener Olympics. It would be a fairer Olympics, one that could help us build on the values of friendly competition among nations.

Reclaiming the Spirit of the Olympic Games

As a global community, we need to come together to decide what the Olympics should represent. Should they continue to be a growth industry spurring unnecessary surplus megabuilding projects and Earth-destroying corporate endorsements? Or do we want them to evolve into an event that truly celebrates individual excellence, cultural exchange, and international diplomacy?

As long as we allow the grossly disproportionate investment in athletes’ performances to continue, the Olympics will continue to fall squarely into the first camp.  Yet, as a spectator of the Paris Games, I also witnessed seeds of other possibilities.

Take the protests of the French government’s plan to bus African migrant families to temporary shelters before the start of the Games. 12,500 migrants were evicted in an attempt to make Paris into a sort of “Disneyland.” Activists called the move a form of “social cleansing” that violated the Olympic spirit of international solidarity.  Pro-migrant associations sponsored a “Counter Opening Ceremony” under the banner of “The Games of Exclusion.”

Outside the Bercy Arena, before the basketball quarter finals, I jostled through a festive crowd largely unfazed by the massive police presence. Amidst impromptu partying, ticket scalpers, dressed like upscale sportsmen,  exemplified how growthism infiltrates every facet of the Games. But many spectator activities benefited from the spirit of France’s Fête de la Musique, where great musicians play for free. I entered the fan zone at Trocadero without a Euro in my pocket.

The Paris Olympics may even have sparked one true long-term ecological win for the planet. The mayor of the next Summer Olympic venue, Karen Bass, took note of the City of Paris’ spurning of the automobile in favor of public transportation. She was so impressed that she has already publicly vowed to make LA a car-free Olympics. If she can follow through on this commitment, there is at least one way in which the Olympics could become a vehicle (so to speak) for positive ecological change.

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Mark Cramer is the head of the Paris Chapter of CASSE and the author of If Thoreau had a Bicycle: The Art of the Ride. He has lived in France since 2000.