How Olympic athletes teamed with climate advocates to save a World Championships race from disruption

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TRONDHEIM, NORWAY — At 9 p.m. on the evening before she would vie for a relay medal at the cross-country skiing World Championships here, American Julia Kern was not sleeping.

Instead, she was sending phone messages — announcing that competitors had reached an agreement with climate campaigners to avert a race-disrupting protest.

The deal capped days of negotiations between the two sides over an issue that’s central to the snow-dependent sport of cross-country skiing.

The athletes had stepped in at the last minute, after the campaigners said they would persist with a protest due to event organizers’ rejection of their demands: removing the logo of Norwegian state-owned oil company Equinor, an event sponsor, from visible advertising, and playing a video about a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty.

The final agreement between the athletes and advocates was immediately endorsed by some of the sport’s biggest stars, including Trondheim medal-winners Jessie Diggins of the U.S., Federico Pellegrino of Italy and Frida Karlsson of Sweden. 

The pact calls for them to work with climate advocates on two proposals in advance of an International Ski Federation meeting in June — one to create new guidelines prioritizing event sponsors with a “genuine commitment to climate leadership,” and another calling on the ski federation to endorse the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative.

Negotiating the deal required multiple digital meetings and intense communication during the most important event of the athletes’ racing season — with Kern, at one point, having to break away to collect a medal from her silver-winning performance in the team sprint event with Diggins.

Nonetheless, Kern, who is one of two cross-country representatives on the ski federation’s athlete commission, said the distractions were worth it.

“I absolutely love ski racing. But to use that platform to make meaningful change, that is purpose,” Kern said in an interview after Friday’s women’s relay, where the U.S. placed sixth. She added: “My purpose in skiing isn’t the results. It’s a lot more than that. And I think it is really helpful to be reminded: We’re doing this for more than just ourselves.”

Gus Schumacher, another U.S. athlete who helped draft the agreement and has previously worked in climate advocacy, said he thinks the outcome could put “a little bit of oomph behind the suit.” The American team in Trondheim has been wearing new racing uniforms at the championships with imagery representing melting glaciers — though the squad’s announcement of the design was not accompanied by any specific climate policy proposal.

“I’m feeling pretty proud of being able to give the activists the table they deserve — that they felt like they deserve,” Schumacher said. “I feel good about them not obstructing the race, which I think is a huge achievement for us and for them. And having some concrete stuff moving forward is really cool.”

Instead of demonstrating in the middle of the race course and risking violent intervention by competitors or spectators, members of Folk Mot Fossilmakta, or People Against Fossil Power, spent Saturday on the side of the trail. Reading from lists of names and numbers of athletes that signed the agreement, they cheered Schumacher and their others during the men’s 50-kilometer event.

Spokesman Callum Macintyre said he’s encouraged by what felt like a sincere commitment from the athletes to join in their advocacy.

“It was quite obvious, from the beginning, that they were authentic,” he said. “This wasn’t just them wanting to make some little statement about climate and then look like the heroes.”

The athletes and advocates both acknowledged that their agreement is a first step — and that it’s likely to take much more work for the national ski associations that make up the International Ski Federation, or FIS, to be convinced to forsake sponsorship by oil and gas companies.

The athlete pledge has support from competitors from Sweden, Italy, Australia, America and France. But it has not yet been endorsed by any skiers from Finland or Norway.

Norway’s national ski associations has a long-term sponsorship deal with Equinor, though it ends after this season; Finland’s athletes are sponsored by ST1, which sells fuel at more than 1,000 gas stations across Scandinavia.

Kern’s own counterpart on the athlete commission, Jimmy Clugnet of Great Britain, races with a club team sponsored by Aker Solutions, which works in oilfield services. Clugnet, in spite of helping to negotiate the athlete pledge, didn’t sign on to it himself, saying he didn’t have time to clear it with his team. 

While Norway’s athletes have been largely absent from the conversations so far, Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, a Norwegian who won gold in all six men’s events in Trondheim, said Saturday that he would “love to be part of the conversation.”

At a news conference after winning Saturday’s 50-kilometer race, he told reporters that he had not yet seen a copy of the agreement between the other athletes and the climate campaigners.

“We’ll see how things can change,” he said. “I think that’s a theme we can dig into more deeply during the spring.”

The discussions between Folk Mot Fossilmakta and the athletes began through a pre-existing relationship between Clugnet and Macintyre.

The climate group wanted Clugnet to circulate a letter among elite skiers that endorsed their requests of the World Championships organizers. 

Clugnet, according to Macintyre, said the athletes didn’t want to be associated with the planned disruptive protest but made, effectively, a counterproposal: The skiers would issue a statement on climate change, the demonstration would be canceled and the two sides would work together on a proposal to FIS.

“So, then we came together,” Macintyre said.

Last weekend, in the middle of the championships, the campaigners held an initial meeting on Zoom with Schumacher, Kern, Clugnet and Björn Sandström, a high-level Swedish skier and climate advocate who wasn’t competing in Trondheim but had previously been in conversations with Folk Mot Fossilmakta.

Kern said she was “quite nervous,” and was unsure about how the discussion would unfold. But it quickly became clear that the participants were aligned, she said.

“We realized we have a lot of shared, common values. And we just were disagreeing on the ways to go about it,” she said. “We started talking about: How can we make this change collectively and agree on the methods and ways of doing it?”

After the first meeting, Folk Mot Fossilmakta proposed specific language for an athlete statement. At a second discussion, the athletes brought in the leaders of another snow sports-focused climate advocacy group, Protect Our Winters, which Schumacher and Diggins both work with.

That meeting, with Diggins also on Zoom, was more intense, Macintyre said.

“They were talking quite a bit about how it’s hard for a lot of athletes to really speak out when there’s so much fossil fuels in the sport. They maybe have trouble with coaches and sponsorship deals, and things like that,” Macintyre said. “I told them that I have friends in prison in the U.K., right now, who have been in prison since July for doing climate protests. And that sacrifice, that’s a part of this.”

After the second meeting, participants hammered out the details of the athletes’ statement. The final version says that climate change is threatening “both the future of our sports and and the livelihoods of millions of people around the world,” and it specifically acknowledges activists’ concerns that “having fossil fuel sponsorship at one of the biggest events in our sport is contradictory.”

The statement was sent out to athletes late Thursday — less than 24 hours before it was released — and Kern said it’s not clear that it reached every competitor. The two channels she and Clugnet use to communicate with top-level skiers — a group with team captains and a group that athletes can join voluntarily — aren’t comprehensive.

“We just hope that people build trust in this coalition, and that as we gain momentum, more people will join in,” she said. “World Championships is a really hard time. There’s a lot of media. So, I understand if athletes don’t feel ready in a matter of 24 hours.”

Kern said she sees the unfolding advocacy effort as likely to be a “multi-year process.” But Macintyre, the campaign spokesman, said he expects the athletes to stick it out.

“We would have never done it if we weren’t 100% confident that they were going to be authentic in what they’re saying,” Macintyre said. He added: “I have a good feeling that it will continue, this kind of coalition.”