It has been a bad week for those with the view that sport and politics should not mix.

On Tuesday The Age and the Herald revealed that Test captain Pat Cummins had discussed his ethical objections to Alinta with Cricket Australia’s chief executive Nick Hockley. Why? Because Alinta’s parent company, Pioneer Sail Holdings, has been listed as one of Australia’s highest carbon emitters. The energy company and CA will conclude their deal next year after a fifth and final season.

Throughout the day Netball Australia was dealing with its own player insurrection. Indigenous goal shooter Donnell Wallam raised concerns about wearing the logo of mining giant Hancock Prospecting. In the 1980s its founder, Lang Hancock, had advocated for sterilising Indigenous people by poisoning their water.

Also on Tuesday, gas giant Santos confirmed it would end its three-decade-long sponsorship of the Darwin Festival. Santos’ gas-fired cash, it turned out, had been supplanted with a donation from a coalition of artists, environmental groups and traditional owners called Fossil Free Arts NT.

On Wednesday it was reported that a group of high-profile Dockers fans, as well as Fremantle legend Dale Kickett and the club’s inaugural football manager Gerard McNeill, had called on the club to dump oil and gas giant Woodside as its major sponsor.

In an open letter to the Dockers board and president Dale Alcock, the signatories said it was no longer appropriate for a fossil fuel company to sponsor the club as the globe grappled with climate change.

“We should not allow our club’s good name to be used by a corporation to enhance its reputation when its core activities are so clearly threatening our planet,” they said.

Several of the Dockers’ leadership group, including captain Nat Fyfe, Alex Pearce and retiring legend David Mundy have publicly signed up to The Cool Down, a group of Australian sportspeople calling for more urgent action on climate change.

While many lament the intrusion of politics into sport, the two have long been entangled.

Ali’s heavyweight stance

“I got no quarrel with them Vietcong,” Muhammad Ali said in 1967 of his stance against the Vietnam War. The same year Ali refused to answer to the draft, was stripped of his world title, suspended from boxing and sentenced to five years in prison.

His commitment to his politics saw him sidelined between the ages of 25 and 28.

In 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medallists in the 200-metre sprint at the Olympic Games, raised their fists from the dais in protest against racism. They were expelled from the games after a complaint from the IOC, which deemed their action “a deliberate and violent breach of the fundamental principles of the Olympic spirit”. Peter Norman, the white Australian silver medallist, wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge in support of his competitors. He returned to Australia a pariah.

Over that same turbulent decade, objections to apartheid grew within Australian rugby to the point at which the so-called Wallaby Seven went on to boycott the 1971 Springboks tour of Australia.

In the 1980s, the campaign to ban tobacco sponsorship in sport began in earnest, with Professor Simon Chapman at its helm. Today he sees direct parallels between the campaign against fossil fuel advertising and tobacco ads, though he concedes the former has a social and economic utility never shared by the latter.

“We have data that shows that, this century, smoking could kill 1 billion people, but that could be eclipsed by climate change,” says Chapman, who has become an advocate for the movement against fossil fuel advertising in sport.

As a result, he says, fossil fuels are losing their social licence to operate and advertise like other products.

Chapman also recalls great pressure being placed on players, such as South Sydney Rabbitohs’ Nathan Gibbs – at the time a medical student – who spoke out against tobacco advertising.

The current wave of political action in Australian sport can be traced back to 2014, when former Wallabies captain (and current independent senator) David Pocock was arrested while chained to a digger in protest against a coal mine being opened in a forest in northern NSW.

“I believe it’s time for direct action on climate change, standing together as ordinary Australians to take control of our shared future,” said Pocock, then 26.

Since then, as a politically progressive and active generation has risen through the ranks in Australian sport, athletes are increasingly using their platforms to voice their views.

Josh Lalor, an Indigenous cricketer who represented NSW and also played in the Big Bash League for a decade up to last season, found his own voice through working on the anti-racism campaign Reflect Forward. He says social consciousness among cricketers has been rising for the past decade.

“I wouldn’t say it was poles apart from the start to where it is now, but it’s just more of a part of what every age group of cricketer that comes through ... with each generation this social consciousness has been a bigger part of their life, generally,” he says. “As new generations come through, it’s just more a part of society today, and we’re seeing the beginning of a wave of athletes [who] try to get involved in that space and use their platforms.

“It’s not like someone wakes up every day and says, ‘This is how much I’m going to commit to this cause today.’ The whole thing is a journey and individual athletes will end up where they end up. As people go along it will be either more or less of what they value, and that makes its way into their actions and behaviour. Some might speak up now, some might speak up in five years, depending on whether they’re comfortable, whether they feel educated and what that means for them.”

In Reflect Forward, Lalor found that the experience of bringing other players together to talk about racism had helped him, and reckoned that more raised voices on other fronts might do something similar regarding climate and sustainability.

“It sort of sprung out of an idea I had at the time – why can’t we get players’ associations and NSOs [national sports organisations] to agree on anything, when racism would seem to be a really important thing to agree on,” he says. “There was a fair bit of turmoil around the place with a fair few pay negotiations going on.

“It was also a culmination point in the road for myself in terms of my Indigenous heritage. So with Reflect Forward it was a case of me moving through the next stage of that journey for myself and I was interested to see who had felt a similar thing and could contribute to the story about this and share their thoughts.

“It was amazing to see as people watched the conversations [between cricketers like Pat Cummins, Harry Conway and Andre Adams] and experiences people had, and how aligned people are on that topic. That then gave me a bit more confidence that the thoughts I’d had about certain things not being right were replicated by other people you trust and respect. It gives you the legitimacy and confidence to continue that conversation.”

As for the relationships between athletes and the commercial decisions of their governing bodies, Lalor points out that in most cases where tensions have risen, it tends to involve a lack of consultation on one side or the other.

“Sponsorships are often held on the NSO side, the players’ views are often held on the players’ association side, and now we’re starting to get into this murky water through [memorandums of understanding] where the two start to meet,” he says.

Emma Pocock, a former Greens staffer who is now married to David and runs a climate consultancy working with athletes called FrontRunners, said interest in speaking about climate change leapt among athletes after the Black Summer fires of 2019-20.

“For the most part athletes are younger, and younger people have been much more concerned about climate change and much more involved in wanting to take action on it,” she says.

Further, she notes that climate change is already having a direct impact on how sport is played in Australia. “We’ve already seen cancellations. We saw the Brumbies and the Raiders had to move their entire pre-season because Canberra had the worst air quality in the world for a couple of months during the Black Summer fires.

“A bunch of teams in Melbourne moved most of their training to indoor facilities. We’ve seen games cancelled, and you know, we’re going to see a lot more of that if this summer’s La Nina is as bad as we are told.”

Loading

Beyond the immediate impacts of climate change, citing the case of Wallam and Hancock Prospecting, Pocock notes that athletes are required to wear the logos of organisations they may have a deep moral objection to on their bodies, which makes the debate particularly personal for some.

Obviously, political action by athletes is not universally welcomed.

“When we played, we just played the game. These days players seem to have so much more power,” Mark Waugh told RSN Radio this week. “They can seem to move a coach on if they want to, and now they can change sponsors. I don’t know where it’s all going to end, to be honest. I know individuals have got their own lives to live and their own ways they live their life, but how much does that cross into their profession? I find it a tough one.”

One elder statesman of Australian sport, former Wallabies captain Nick Farr-Jones, says he once believed sport and politics should never mix, but after touring South Africa and later meeting both former presidents F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela and seeing how sporting boycotts amplified the campaign to end apartheid, he changed his view.

Athletes, he told the Herald and The Age this week, can and sometimes should use their platforms to positive political ends.

That doesn’t mean he agrees with the Pococks, though.

Farr-Jones, who invests in mining, argues that decarbonising the world will necessitate more mining of the minerals needed for electrification, and that Australian thermal coal burns more cleanly than alternatives mined elsewhere.

“I think that a lot of very wealthy Australian sportspeople should be thinking about the mums and dads in Europe this winter who will not be able to afford to turn the heater on,” he says.

One of the fault lines in the conversation raised by Cummins is that, unlike many a musician, actor or celebrity to have waded through similar territory, the following for the Australian men’s cricket team is older and more conservative – a pillar of the sort of Australia John Howard once championed.

The baggy green symbolises continuity for many, and it can be jarring for them to hear its prime custodian advocating for change.

Chapman believes that change is inevitable either way. One day, he says, the fossil fuels will be gone and they will not be missed. Sport will continue to flourish, just as it did when it lost its tobacco sponsorship.

“You know it used to be the Marlboro Australian Open? Can you imagine that?”

Get to the heart of what’s happening with climate change and the environment. Our fortnightly Environment newsletter brings you the news, the issues and the solutions. Sign up here.