In January 2021, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) unfurled a fresh set of sustainability goals, vowing to become ‘climate positive’ by 2024 when the Paris Summer Games are slated to transpire. To achieve the aspirational standard of emitting less carbon into the atmosphere than it removes, the IOC promised to curtail greenhouse gas emissions by 45% (by 2030) and to ramp up its carbon offsetting programme. The supranational organization already claims carbon-neutral status when it comes to its internal activities, having worked with Dow, a Worldwide Olympic Partner, in a ‘carbon partnership’ from 2017 through 2020 that is grounded in carbon offsetting practices. The IOC’s press release stated, “All upcoming Olympic Games, including Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022, have committed to carbon neutrality”1.

But when it comes to the Olympic brand of sustainability, some healthy scepticism is in order. As Martin Müller has noted, “The gap between rhetoric and reality is a persistent one when looking at the sustainability commitments of Olympic Games hosts”2. To claim carbon neutrality at the postponed Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics or the Beijing 2022 Winter Games, one must advance a circumscribed definition of both sustainability and the sweeping activities related to the world’s biggest, most complicated sports mega-event. The IOC’s tendency to issue expansive proclamations about its environmental sustainability has galvanized critiques of greenwashing: the duplicitous practice of parading concern for the environment and claiming credit for providing sustainable solutions while in reality doing the bare minimum, if anything, to achieve long-term, material improvements in the ecological sphere.

Previous academic analysis of Olympic sustainability practices typically zeroes in on a particular Olympic Games. Writing in Nature Sustainability, Müller et al.3 offer a much-needed, systematic, longitudinal assessment of Olympic sustainability at 16 installations of the Summer and Winter Olympic Games, spanning 1992 through 2020. In doing so, they broaden the discussion of sustainability so that it includes three axes: not only ecological sustainability, but also its social and economic variants. Overall, they find that the Olympic Games achieve ‘medium’ sustainability marks, earning 48 out of 100 points on the nine-indicator scale that the authors construct. More specifically, the ecological dimension averages 44 points while the means for social and economic sustainability are 51 and 47, respectively. The researchers found that the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games were the most sustainable during the time period under study. On the other hand, the least sustainable Olympics were quite recent — the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro — pointing up the inconvenient fact that the Olympics have not consistently improved their sustainability follow-through over time.

The authors’ decision to commence their comparative analysis in 1992 is a propitious one. After the ground-breaking 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the United Nations (UN) issued its plan for environmentally sustainable development: Agenda 21. The IOC, which around that time was establishing a working relationship with the UN, soon followed their lead. By 1994, the IOC was asserting that the environment was “an essential component of Olympism”. In 1995, the IOC amended the Olympic Charter, insisting that “the Olympic Games are held in conditions which demonstrate a responsible concern for environmental issues”. The IOC also launched a Sport and Environment Commission to convene each year. By 1999, the IOC inaugurated its own Agenda 21 that promised to enmesh sustainable development ideals into their activities. Eventually, the IOC christened sustainability as “the third pillar of Olympism”, joining sport and culture. IOC-style sustainability made its splashy debut at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney4.

Under the emergent IOC sustainability regime, aspiring Olympic cities increasingly conjure strategic ‘geovisualizations’ assuring that Games-driven planning will be marked by deep concern for environmental sustainability5. Despite the inherently speculative nature of these geovisualizations, they play a pivotal role servicing green narratives that make the Games more alluring to the general public during the bid phase when popular buy-in is essential. Critics who raise the spectre of greenwashing note that such visualizations, which are highly unlikely to be implemented with the same vigour as their articulation in the glossy pages of Olympic bid books, serve short-term instrumental purposes like selection by the IOC to host the Olympic Games, or, more crassly, career advancement for elected officials, Olympic bid consultants, and sustainability specialists. However, John Lauermann generously suggests, “such ideological practices can also be understood as pragmatic or even altruistic: visualising an urban future is a meaningful step towards implementing it”5.

Analysis of sustainability practices at recent Olympics supports Müller’s observation that “The grand claim to organise ‘the greenest Games ever’” has become “almost de rigueur for mega-event hosts”, even though so often it “rings hollow”2. Müller found that the 2014 Sochi Games actually led to irreversible environmental destruction and, due to substandard governance, failed to meet the sustainability goals delineated in the original bid. The Rio 2016 Olympics met a similar fate. While Rio’s bid books promised to clean up the notoriously polluted Guanabara Bay, which would host the Olympic sailing and windsurfing competitions, by treating more than 80% of the sewage that flowed into the bay, nothing of the sort transpired. Ahead of the Games, an Associated Press investigation revealed that every single Olympic water venue was unsafe; waterways were riddled with human waste that delivered perilously high levels of viruses and bacteria4. To make way for a ski run at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, an ancient forest was chopped down. Jung Woo Lee found that the Games actually achieved “economic and ecological unsustainability”, and that “the economic and ecological problems caused by the Olympic development are still on-going”6. While Tokyo 2020 bidders rhetorically prioritized ecological recovery in Fukushima Prefecture — which was slammed with a tsunami, earthquake and nuclear meltdown in 2011 — follow-through has lagged. Today, Fukushima resembles a capitalist sacrifice zone for the climate-change era7.

In Greenwashing Sport8, Toby Miller distils the dynamics at the core of the sports mega-event industrial complex: “Sports are complicit in two ways with both climate change itself and our failures to deal with it. On the one hand, they are directly responsible for significant carbon footprints and ecological crimes, via stadium construction and energy use, player and spectator travel, animal mistreatment, and media coverage. They endeavor to legitimize the harm they cause by promoting themselves as good environmental citizens. On the other hand, they accept sponsorship from the supremely craven gas and petroleum industries, thereby imbuing those extractive corporations with a positive image by embedding them within the everyday pleasures of sport. Taken together, such activities amount to serious greenwashing”.

The analysis by Müller et al. operationalizes potential greenwashing while bestowing weighty implications for Olympic organizers who have allowed a chasm to develop between sustainability word and deed. The study also supplies political grist for anti-Olympics activists who have long argued that negative externalities emerging from the Olympics — such as gentrification, displacement and the militarization of public space — affect both social and economic sustainability. Today, anti-Games activists with NON aux JO 2024 à Paris are fighting the construction of a media village in an ecologically sensitive zone. The 2028 Olympics, scheduled for Los Angeles, have been energetically challenged by the group NOlympics LA, which has made gentrification and eviction centrepieces of its fightback. The sustainability battles promise to grind on.