How Climate Change is Impacting Sports: What Happens When it Becomes Too Hot to Play?

For many of us, sports are a refuge. Whether watching or playing, they give us a chance to escape for a little while, to get away from the real-world worries that are causing melatonin sales to spike. But what happens when one of the issues keeping a lot of people up these days has a direct impact on the games we love?

If you enjoyed watching the recent Winter Olympics – especially the skiing and snowboarding – you probably marveled at the athleticism of the athletes or just their sheer guts for wanting to speed down those acrophobia-inducing slopes. What you may not have realized, however, is that if it weren’t for people working diligently behind the scenes, many outdoor events might not have been possible. This is because, due to warming temperatures, there wasn’t enough natural snow. In fact, reports Sports Illustrated, almost all of the snow was man-made, and this isn’t a new phenomenon.

In 2010 in Vancouver, freestyle venues relied on snow that was trucked in from higher altitudes. In Sochi in 2014, 80% of the snow was artificial. Four years later in PyeongChang, that climbed to 98%, and in 2022, all of the snow at the Beijing Games was man-made. Says SI:

Simply put, the Winter Olympics don’t have enough winter anymore. It’s melting away, dripping from the forefront of the Olympic movement and threatening the future of winter sports. And unless something drastically changes, potential host cities will continue to diminish each year due to climate change.

It’s that last part that should concern everybody the most. A study from 2024 mentioned in the article found that by the 2050s, of 93 possible locations to host the Winter Olympics, only 52 could feasibly do it. In the worst-case scenario, the study says, only 27 spots in Europe, North America, and Asia would be able to host the Games 50 years from now.

And, of course, the irony of ironies is the fact that the hotter the planet gets, the more fuel will be needed to keep making snow, which will in turn make the planet hotter and increase the need for even more man-made snow, which will…you get the idea. Case in point: Beijing required 100 snow generators and 300 snow cannons to generate enough of the fluffy stuff.

While higher temperatures are having an impact on where certain games can be played in the winter, during other times of year, they can be downright dangerous. At tennis tournaments in China last fall, top players like Novak Djokovic and Emma Raducanu, suffered heat-related ailments, including nausea and dizziness. This prompted Denmark’s Holger Rune to call on the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), to implement a heat rule. “Do you want a player to die on court?” he asked.

Rune isn’t the only one concerned that high temperatures could result in fatalities. Said Professor Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures: “I’m getting increasingly worried that we are only one heatwave away from a sporting tragedy and I would like to see governing bodies lean into the climate and health science.”

Forster and other experts believe that the upcoming World Cup could be extremely dangerous for both players and fans, and that game times may have to be adjusted to avoid calamity.

“If you want to play football for 10 hours a day, they’ll have to be the hours of the early morning and late evening if you don’t want to have players and fans die from heatstroke or get severely ill with heat exhaustion,” said climatologist Friederike Otto.

Of course, because this would affect ticket sales and TV viewership – which would have a direct impact on advertising revenue – we probably shouldn’t expect FIFA to do much more than say they’d take this under advisement.

Climate change could also end up playing a large role in the sustainability of sports. According to research, children in the U.S. on average lose about a week of sports every year due to not only high temperatures, but things like fires and flooding. In California, it’s almost two weeks. Plus, many towns don’t have the resources to recover from disasters like hurricanes.

“They don’t have balls, nets, fields and other needs because weather continually impacts their community,” said Jessica Murfree, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina who studies sports and climate change. “There’s a huge gap between the capacities of elite youth sports and parks and rec community centers. In climate research, we call it organizational climate capacity – your capacity to return to play.”

This means that children may stop playing sports sooner – or maybe not start at all – which would result in fewer of them getting to higher levels, which could ultimately impact the pool of athletes for college and pro sports and the Olympics.

Unfortunately, there’s no quick or easy solution to deal with this crisis. Thanks to the folks who buried their heads in the sand (or still have them there), this is the reality we have to deal with. We all had to cope with the “new normal” of the pandemic, and the same is true with climate change in regards to sports.

Perhaps the saddest part of this? The worse it gets outside, the greater the chance that games will be moved inside. Not only will this exacerbate things – think about how much energy it takes to keep thousands of people air-conditioned – it robs fans of the joys of true open-air excitement. It may also lead to silly things like more indoor golf leagues. Want a truly bleak image? (Aside from millionaires playing glorified putt-putt?) Think of Wrigley Field covered by a dome. Just the thought would probably make Ernie Banks roll over in his grave – twice.