Sporting Tales

Sporting tales for troubled times...
Sporting Tales is about finding more imaginative ways to engage with the unprecedented challenges our times, and brings together a huge range of insight and imagination from elite athletes, academic experts, poets, artists and activists.

The current moment seems more precarious than ever, standing on the edge of potentially irreversible ecological decline and in the grip of toxic social divisions. Athletes engaged in outdoor physical exertion find themselves especially exposed, with their health and lives under threat from the climate extremes of a heating planet, as well as the air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. But sport has an extraordinary ability and opportunity to mobilise its mass audience and appeal for change.

Sporting Tales is part of a bigger project, and the fifth volume of essays and stories curated by the New Weather Institute following: There was a Knock at the Door, Knock Twice, Knock Three Times, and Contagious Tales. It includes contributions from several members of the Cool Down - sport for climate action network ISee the whole series).

""Sport is losing to climate breakdown and climate criminals, but has always been a coliseum of social and political change. Can sport rise to the occasion? These tales of hope make me think so."
Jasmin Paris, champion ultrarunner and the first woman to complete the infamous Barkley Marathons

"Sport has many stories to tell; good and bad. Sporting Tales is a stadium full of better stories about surviving and thriving in a troubled world."
Melissa Wilson, Team GB rower and co-founder of Athletes for the World

"An uplifting and important collection of tales that epitomise the "think global, act local" approach to tackling systemic societal and environmental challenges through the lens of sport. A must read."
Claire Poole, founder, the Sport Positive Summit

"Story is about the very patterns of life. We recognise the narrative arcs of daring tales, the reticence to change habits at first, the heroic journey when prompted, the hope that follows action, the evil antagonist, the path back home But sport is a bit different, the losses are inevitable, even for the good. And they happen a lot. Sport is central to modern culture, and these Sporting Tales are a fine, wise and fabulous insight into how sport can change the world, and how it too mirrors those very economic and social structures in their best and worst ways."
Jules Pretty, Professor of Environment and Society at the University of Essex and author of The Low-Carbon Good Life

"We all know that sport is sometimes thought of as a battlefield. Orwell once likened it to 'mimic warfare'. But increasingly the struggle is for the soul and purpose of sport: torn between regenerating communities, building health and social relationships as opposed to providing a propaganda vehicle for undemocratic regimes and major polluters. This beautifully written collection shows that new stories and narratives of how the spirit of sport is being reclaimed can yet save everything we love about sport from those whose values threaten our very existence."
Professor Peter Newell, Sussex University.