Some of the world’s top winter athletes have called on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to stop accepting funding from the fossil fuel industry, including Italian oil company ENI, a “premium partner” and official sponsor of the 2026 Winter Olympics.
“It is time to question the seemingly normal connection between our sports and the products that fossil companies sell,” said a petition delivered to IOC officials in Milan on Wednesday.
The burning of oil, gas and coal is driving climate change. This leads to rising winter temperatures and a reduction in the snowpack needed for skiing, snowboarding and other winter sports. Winters are warming rapidly across much of the Northern Hemisphere, endangering not only the Olympics and professional sports competitions, but also people and communities that rely economically and culturally on commercial skiing and other winter recreational activities.
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To date, the petition to the IOC found more than 20,000 signatoriesincluding Alex Hall of the United States, who won the Olympic gold medal in freestyle skiing at the 2022 Winter Games; Helvig Wessel from Norway, the 2024 freeride world champion, and Nikolai Schirmer, also from Norway, whose non-profit organization “Ski Fossil Free” organized the petition and personally delivered it to IOC representatives on February 4th.
Conditions for the Winter Olympics are getting worse and worse
As of press time, neither the IOC nor ENI have commented on the petition. However, the IOC has purchased 2.4 million cubic meters of artificial snow to ensure reliable conditions for the downhill races in the Italian Alpine town of Cortina d’Ampezzo.
ENI, which had previously declared, by 2050 Wanting to be climate neutralannounced in December that “90 percent of the fuel ENI will supply for the Games will be derived from renewable resources.”
According to a new one Study According to the scientific non-profit organization Climate Central, temperatures in February have risen by 3.6 degrees Celsius in the 70 years since the first Winter Olympics were held in Cortina in 1956. Cortina now has 41 fewer frost days per year than in 1956.
Globally, only half of the locations considered suitable for future Winter Olympics will have reliably low temperatures by 2050, Climate Central has found. “If we don’t do anything about human-caused climate change and the burning of fossil fuels, the possibility of hosting a Winter Olympics will literally disappear,” said Kaitlyn Trudeau, one of the study authors.
2034 Winter Games in Salt Lake City? Unlikely
“People in my community don’t debate whether climate change is real or not,” said Graham Zimmerman, a professional alpinist and spokesman for the nonprofit Protect Our Winters, which supported the signature drive. “When we look at the mountains, it’s very obvious.”
Zimmerman and his team were at 7,000 meters on Pakistan’s K2, the second highest mountain in the world, when melting snow and ice forced them to take shelter on a narrow ledge for 14 hours.
“At this altitude you usually put on thick clothing to keep warm,” he said. “Instead, we had to protect ourselves from avalanches and falling rocks at 5 degrees because the mountain was literally falling apart.”
It may seem counterintuitive that winters are rapidly warming despite bitter cold across much of the United States and Europe, but weather is not the same as climate. “In a warming world, cold snaps will continue to happen, just they will occur less often,” Trudeau said. “We will continue to have cold days, just probably less often.”
Salt Lake City is scheduled to host the 2034 Winter Olympics in 2034. But Rocky Anderson has his doubts. Anderson was the city’s mayor when it hosted the 2002 Games. Now he points to the majestic peaks east of downtown and says, “There’s almost no snow in these mountains. I don’t think we’ll see a Winter Olympics in Utah in 2034.”
This article was created as part of the cooperation between the project “Covering Climate Nowand the taz. Mark Hertsgaard is managing director of “Covering Climate Now” and environmental correspondent for “The Nation” magazine.