The sport industry, and particularly its mega-events such as the Olympic Games, have undeniable contributions to the current climate crisis and subsequent sustainable practices that are implemented to mitigate some environmentally destructive actions such as large scale constructions, international air travel, and high energy consumption. In this regard, the International Olympic Committee (hereafter IOC), as an important non-state actor who can define standards, requirements and guidelines to the different host cities for its Summer, Winter, and Youth Olympic Games, have the power to define agendas and define what should be consider important risks to world society.
In an open access article published in Annals of Leisure Research entitled ‘Staging Olympic sustainability? A critical analysis of the IOC’s framing of sustainable practices on YouTube‘, Jan Andre Lee Ludvigsen and I have analysed how the IOC stages environmental sustainability in one of the most important new media for sport: YouTube. To analyse how the IOC uses YouTube to publicly frame sustainability, we have automatically collected all 13,131 videos that were part of the IOC’s library on its both channels (IOC Media and Olympics), and then proceeded with cleaning the data and selecting only the videos with ‘sustain’, ‘sustainability’, ‘climate’, ‘environment’ in either video title or video description. Even that environmental sustainability is at the forefront of the Olympics through its Agenda 2020 and Agenda 2020+5, to our surprise there were only 56 videos out of the 13,131 that actually referred to any of our search terms.
When conducting a frame analysis on those 56 videos, what we have encountered was that the IOC commonly focus on the positive educational role sport has in society. As we have argued in the paper:
“Within the gain frames that the IOC uses to stage climate and environmental sustainability, it commonly seeks to show how the Olympic Games, athletes and ‘Olympism’ – the philosophy behind the Games – could be catalysts for positive change in societies across the world” (Petersen-Wagner and Lee Ludvigsen, 2023, p. 14)
This non-critical reflection of its potential environmental destructive role was apparent in the frame analysis, as only a few of the videos actually contained a negative frame – which was always accompanied by a positive frame.
Therefore, our argument in the paper is that the when the IOC stages and presents itself in relation to ecological sustainability it does so by bringing attention to its positive and enabling factors in providing solutions to the current climate crisis. Moreover, it does so by spinning its role in creating environmental bads into promoting socio-cultural and economical goods.
In short, to answer the title question, for us it seemed that the IOC downplayed Olympics sustainability on YouTube by firstly not giving enough attention (only 56 videos out of 13,131) and secondly by omitting any self-criticism in terms of of its role in causing the current climate crisis and spinning its message to boost its capacity in providing solutions.
Give a read on the full paper and let us know what do you think.
Media and Digital Transformation in Sport 
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