A women walks carrying a tray of drinks after rain stopped play on day one of the Wimbledon tennis championships in London, on July 3.Alberto Pezzali/The Associated Press
The to-go drinks served anywhere at Wimbledon come in the same plastic cup.
The cup has a note written on it – “I live at Wimbledon. Please take me to a return point so I can be used again and again.”
So, the garbage.
The cups are part of Wimbledon’s pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2030. All England Club CEO Sally Bolton loves talking about it. Alongside making gobs of money, it’s her favourite business thing.
“We believe that [Wimbledon] has a meaningful role to play in helping to protect the environment, today and for the future,” she has said (dozens of times in various ways).
What does that look like exactly? It looks like plastic cups. It looks like the players being chauffeured around in electric Jaguars. And something about future construction projects which I presume will be mud huts instead of anything involving steel beams. It gets fuzzy after that.
When you open the landing page for Wimbledon’s sustainability pledge, you are greeted with an image of a gardener watering a 12-foot-tall topiary in the shape of a tennis ball.
Where exactly can I find this water-guzzling super shrub? Climate cloud cuckoo land? Because if you want to be ‘sustainable,’ building a yard to rival Versailles is not the way to do it.
You have to get into the fine print before you get the actual story.
Since all the recycled cups in Christendom will not even out all the many thousands of people who travel here to drink from them, remaining shortfalls “will be balanced through equivalent investment in carbon compensation.”
Ah, the old carbon offset. As has been pointed out elsewhere, this is process whereby you lose weight by paying someone else to eat less.
Wimbledon somehow even gets the benefit of the Just Stop Oil movement. On Wednesday, activists invaded the same outer court during two separate matches. Both were minor interruptions. Their only real effect is making news that plants in people’s minds the idea that Wimbledon is a place where climate protest happens.
No wonder everyone else in tennis wants to jump in on this ‘save the environment’ con.
The Association of Tennis Professionals recently introduced an app that allows players to track their emissions, so that “they may have … a better awareness of the choices they make,” according to the ATP’s CEO, Massimo Calvelli.
By the ATP’s own admission, 90 per cent of carbon produced by its players is the result of air travel. Hopefully, the players will become so aware of their choices that they learn how to flap their arms and fly themselves to tournaments. Or is that not how this is supposed to work?
The issue here is not whether tennis (or any other professional sport) can become guardians of the environment. They cannot.
Sports is not the good guy in the climate-change story. It is one of many bad guys. No amount of shouting at the rest of us to take our cups to the return point will change that ethical equation.
It’s not the amount of resources sports eats up. It’s that those used-up resources produce a good of no tangible value. Entertainment cannot be eaten or lived in. It does not even have art’s excuse - that it is edifying. Pro sports is just a way to turn boredom into money.
But we live in a time when everyone wants to speak truth to power, especially power. As long as it’s repeating the truth often enough, power thinks it’s possible no one will notice. So far, it’s working.
There is one way professional sport can make a meaningful change to protect the environment – by ceasing operations. Obviously, that’s not happening, and nor should it. Society needs major-league sport. It keeps your dad off the corners at night.
But it does not then follow that sports gets to pretend it is a force for good. It’s not like people don’t know the world is getting hotter. They are outside. They can feel it. So there is no more use in education.
If sports wants to start a provocative conversation about the environment, their only useful role is as the antagonist.
Were sports to be forthcoming about how much carbon it emits (a lot), how much it cares about that (a little) and how willing it is to fundamentally change (not at all), we might then have the basis for a discussion of substance.
What we have instead is a grand circular back rub. Everyone leans in to the person in front of them and whispers, ‘You’re one of the good ones. I know you care. I saw you separating your recyclables. Sure, you took eight overseas trips last year/drive a truck the size of a school bus, but you have to put on your own oxygen mask first, right. You deserve some self-care.”
The only way in which sports leads is in producing soporific, self-deluding eco-agitprop. Let us all gather together and say the magic words, but never say what we’re actually thinking – that some scientific genius somewhere better figure this out or else we may actually be hooped. All of us want to be the good guy, while also sacrificing nothing.
Someone has to be the bad guy, and it’s not the oil industry. No one knows it. Therefore, no one cares what it says.
The useful villain in the piece must be someone famous. A face on which everyone else can focus their rage, and consider their habits in opposition to. That might get some results. Probably not, but it’s worth a shot.
If Wimbledon really cares, that’s a burden it can take on.
‘Listen guys, we have done all we can. Once, we even travelled Economy Plus. It was horrific. In future, all cups will be made out of dolphin beaks and the drinks will cost £400. Proceeds will go to building a new, private airport, so that we never have to rub up against the rest of you again.’
Prompting righteous eco-fury – that is the one and only way sports could conceivably lead on the environment.
At the very least, it could stop what it’s doing now – prompting insufferable eco-boredom.
Cathal Kelly