Warming Up
How Climate Change is Changing Sport – A GUARDIAN SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR
-
- € 16,99
Beschrijving uitgever
Longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2024
"Couldn't be a bolder, more forthright SOS for sport" The Observer
The world of sport has a new opponent: climate change.
In recent years, a world championship marathon was held at midnight to avoid the blistering sun. Professional athletes needed oxygen tanks to play during wildfire season in California. Players collapsed and play was suspended amid the heat and bushfire smoke at the Australian Tennis open. Ski resorts in the Alps have turned into ghost towns. Golf courses are sinking into the sea. And then there's the Qatar World Cup, among the greatest follies in sporting history, one that saw hundreds (perhaps thousands) of heat-induced deaths before a ball was even kicked.
The threat climate change poses to sport is clear, but with billions of participants and fans around the world who rely on the sector for entertainment, jobs, fitness and health, this is one industry we can't afford to lose. In this book, Madeleine Orr shows it doesn't have to be this way. There are ways to mitigate, and perhaps counter, even the worst elements of climate change.
A world-leading sport ecologist, Madeleine interviews athletes, coaches, politicians and thought-leaders to learn more about the inevitable consequences for this trillion-dollar industry. From the frontlines of climate change, Warming Up takes readers through a play-by-play of how global warming is already impacting sport, and how the sports world can fight back.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This humdrum debut from Orr, a sport ecology professor at the University of Toronto, studies how global warming is playing out on fields, courts, and golf greens across the world. Her visit to the French Alps serves as the occasion to explore the plight of ski resort towns, which are struggling to stay afloat amid declining snowfall. Athletes in hotter climes face increased risk of heatstroke, Orr warns, recounting how a football player at the University of Maryland died after overheating during practice in 2018. Elsewhere, Orr describes how droughts have made it almost impossible to maintain cricket pitches in India and how family relocations after the 2018 Camp Fire in northern California left Paradise High School's once formidable football team in shambles. Unfortunately, Orr's recommendations on how sports might adapt come up short. For instance, her suggestion that government subsidies for sports stadiums should be contingent on the public's ability to shelter in the structures during emergencies is undercut by her own account of the terrible conditions at New Orleans' Superdome after Hurricane Katrina. Other proposals are Pollyannaish, as when she suggests golf might embrace a more extreme mode of play by forsaking water-intensive greens for expanses of "rubble and bits of concrete." The reporting highlights some less discussed, if also less consequential, effects of climate change, but the vision for a better sporting future fails to persuade. It's a mixed bag.
