Like Greta Thunberg with oars: Why Olympians become activists

Taking a stand isn’t an afterthought for a new generation of Olympic athletes this year – it’s an essential part of their identity

When Raven Saunders stepped into the shot-put circle in Tokyo’s Olympic stadium in the summer of 2021, she paired an Incredible Hulk face mask with the standard Team USA vest. For Saunders, who was given the comic-book nickname at school, the persona was a show of strength after years of depression, injuries and a will to assert her identity as a gay black woman. Yet making the podium in Tokyo would be about much more than individual triumph; Saunders planned to use the most hallowed stage in sport to make a statement.
First came the throw. Pirouetting across the circle in the final on the fifth attempt, Saunders hurled a four-kilo ball just shy of 20 metres. It was enough to win a silver medal. ‘That was the first objective,’ the athlete, who’s 28, tells me by phone from Charleston, South Carolina, where she lives, days before the US trials for the Paris Olympics. ‘But as soon as I was done with the media and the drugs test, I wanted to get back to the athletes’ village so I could be ready for the medal ceremony the next morning.’
Saunders remembers her heart racing as she stepped on to the podium. Once the Chinese national anthem had played for the winner, Gong Lijiao, the three athletes removed their mandatory Covid masks to hold up their medals and bouquets for a phalanx of photographers. Saunders glanced nervously at Gong. Then, staring blankly ahead, she raised her arms, fists clenched, to create an ‘X’ symbol above her head.
‘The cameras really started clicking as soon as my arms went up,’ says Saunders, who later explained that the ‘X’ represented ‘the intersection of where all people who are oppressed meet’. ‘It was crazy how fast they were going, and I was like, “Oh, shoot, this is really happening now…” I was so nervous because I wasn’t sure what the outcome would be.’
Saunders had followed in the grandest traditions of Olympic activism, deliberately echoing the Black Power salutes that the US sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos held up on the podium at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. The men were expelled from those Games and became heroes of the civil rights movement six months after the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Protests at the Games are nothing new. But the current generation of Olympians and Paralympians is increasingly engaging with some of the most pressing issues of the day as part of a wider movement. These fresh-faced athletes no longer want just to be faster, higher or stronger – but louder, too.
‘The shift has been really quite dramatic since I retired,’ says Dame Katherine Grainger, chair of UK Sport, the government agency responsible for funding Olympic and Paralympic sport. The Scottish rower won five medals at five separate Games, from 2000 to 2016, including gold in London in 2012. ‘It wasn’t that I felt anyone stopped me from talking about issues,’ she says, ‘it’s just that it wasn’t encouraged. Now athletes are confident in sharing their opinions.’
Saunders wasn’t the only activist in Tokyo. Race Imboden, an American fencer, had drawn the same ‘X’ on the back of one hand before collecting his bronze medal. Another Team USA member, the hammer thrower Gwen Berry, raised a fist after being introduced in the stadium. Meanwhile, Great Britain’s women’s football team were among several to take the knee before matches in a stand against racism.
Beyond the Olympics too, footballers are increasingly using their plaform for change. Marcus Rashford has received plaudits for his campaign against child food poverty. The day before his team’s opening game at the recent European Championship, French forward Kylian Mbappé spoke out against ‘the extremes’ in his country, after the success of far-Right parties in European elections. ‘People say don’t mix football and politics but here we are talking about a situation that’s really important, more important than the game,’ he said at a press conference.
But Grainger wonders if the Olympic spirit of amateurism, and the way athletes burst from nowhere into the public consciousness every four years, often from relatively modest backgrounds, makes them more relatable. ‘There’s a normality there, they often feel very approachable, and I think that often is a good way to carry over messages,’ she says.
In 2020, UK Sport polled elite athletes and found that almost nine in 10 wanted to use their voices while still competing. Rather than resist or tolerate such a will, the agency decided to facilitate it. In 2022, it announced a partnership with The True Athlete Project, a charity founded in 2015 to help athletes use their platforms. They created Powered by Purpose, a coaching and mentoring programme to support British sportspeople in their activism.
More than 60 athletes have so far signed up, including sailors, boxers, runners and cyclists. ‘It was amazing to find out that so many athletes are really motivated about stuff that isn’t just sport,’ says Imogen Grant, 28, a world champion rower and one of Team GB’s best medal hopes in Paris.
A six-month course of workshops and seminars included sessions on public speaking, problem-solving, and ‘theory of change’, an approach to mapping out strategies that is vogueish among charities and their funders. Grant, who studied medicine at Cambridge University, had grown up as a vegetarian and is now a vegan. She has always been passionate about environmental causes, including the impact of the meat industry. ‘Powered by Purpose really gave me permission to explore that passion, and the confidence and support to do something about it,’ she tells me in a pause between training sessions.
Rowing had also exposed Grant to the scourge of water pollution and heat extremes. Thanks to her place in the programme, she’s now a busy ambassador for The Rivers Trust, lending her voice and time at events and meetings. While she may not yet be a household name – and isn’t preparing to make bold statements on any podium – as a double world champion, with her double sculls partner Emily Craig, she’s a star in the rowing world. ‘She’s a fantastic link into a whole community that is really engaged,’ says Emma Brisdion, who runs marketing campaigns at The Rivers Trust and has worked with Grant to promote a citizen water-testing programme for rowing clubs.
Laurence Halsted, a retired British fencer, joined The True Athlete Project in 2016 after competing at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. He runs Powered by Purpose. He says the increasing professionalisation of sport had reinforced the image of elite athletes as ripped robots. ‘Everything was about marginal gains and results, and it had become increasingly meaningless,’ he says.
He also believes that advocacy helps improve performance on the field, rather than distracting from it. ‘You haven’t got your whole sense of identity riding on every competition, and that’s allowing athletes to perform with more confidence,’ he says.
Grant adds: ‘It adds a dimension to my career that isn’t solely focused on me and gives me a peace of mind that means that I can race with a clearer head.’
Grant says activism suits Olympians (what are they if not dedicated and goal-driven?). She tells me that speaking out has become even more of a reflex for the junior rowers she meets. ‘They might not yet have the platform that I have, but it’s already on their minds, and they’re more educated about sustainability than I was,’ she says. ‘I definitely think that the opinion that athletes should shut their mouths and play sport is gone from their consciousness.’
Halsted is stunned by how quickly attitudes are changing. ‘I think it’s wild that a funding body would actively train their athletes to become activists and advocates when you look at the landscape just a few years ago,’ he says, when athletes were expected – by coaches, teams and perhaps fans – to stick to the sport.
But was that such a bad thing? Do we need our athletes to become Greta Thunbergs with oars? And is there a whiff of hypocrisy about athletes who talk about sustainability while looking for new branding partnerships and jetting off to a sporting jamboree with an enormous carbon footprint?
‘This is not for everyone, and no athlete should feel obliged to do it,’ Grainger says. ‘But I think those who want to do it, and balance it alongside very intensive training programmes, do it because they’re passionate.
Otherwise, it’s much easier just not to. And I think anyone with a different agenda – to raise a profile or to get sponsorship – gets found out very quickly.’
Martin Perry, a Scottish Paralympic table-tennis player from Paisley, who is also due to travel to Paris, says the lifestyle of top-flight sport opens athletes’ eyes to causes. He had only left the UK once, on a school trip, before the London Olympics inspired him to take up the sport. ‘Now I’ve been almost everywhere in the world, and I’ve seen the beaches covered in plastic,’ he says.
Perry, who’s 30 and was born with one leg and both hands missing (he plays with a bat fixed to his right arm), is now an ambassador for Prevented Ocean Plastic, a global project that supplies recycled plastic products made of material that has been collected from coastal areas to brands as diverse as Patagonia and Lidl. He regularly speaks to businesses, and became the first athlete to join the books of The Athlete Media Group, a sports marketing agency that pairs campaigning stars with brands.
Marketing veteran Mark Middlemas launched the agency in 2019, and it now represents more than 70 athletes, including the runner Eilish McColgan, who has campaigned on gender equality. He has paired Isaac Chamberlain, a boxer from Brixton, with a telecoms company. Hannah Mills, a British sailor who has been championing environmental causes for years, worked with an outdoor advertising business on a single-use plastics campaign. ‘Companies are a lot more aware of their responsibilities,’ Middlemas says. ‘Those doors are always open now.’
Etienne Stott’s environmental awakening came while competing as a Team GB canoeist. He began to feel increasingly uncomfortable about the impact of the Games themselves. After winning a gold medal in London, his ambivalence peaked in Rio in 2016, where he was struck by the poverty he could see in the favela next to the sparkling new artificial canoe course.
Stott, 45, retired after Rio and co-founded Champions for Earth, one of a growing roster of athlete-led environmental campaign groups. In 2018, he joined Extinction Rebellion in its early days. He and a group of activists, who also included former Team GB sailor Laura Baldwin, climbed on a Shell oil tanker during a mass action in central London in 2022. ‘A gold medal has power,’ he tells me. ‘It can help bridge divides and overcome prejudices about what an activist looks like.’ Stott has been arrested during protests 10 times.
For athletes still competing, there’s a big difference between politely highlighting, say, plastics pollution and making a bolder stand at the Games themselves. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has long sought to protect the sanctity of the event, somehow imagining that a gathering of highly competitive nations watched by an audience of billions could exist above politics.
But just before Tokyo, the IOC amended its charter in response to the rising tide of athlete activism. Article 50 had long outlawed any ‘demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda’ during the Games. Now athletes would be able to make statements, just not during competition itself or on the podium during medal ceremonies.
Raven Saunders remembers a buzz of intention in the US Olympic team, and among its black athletes in particular. For Saunders the stakes were high – and personal. The first school she attended shared a name with the Stono Rebellion of 1739, when African slaves rose up against British rule in the Southern Colonies. Saunders was 19 when, in 2015, a young white supremacist shot dead nine people at the church where she had been christened. The shooting followed a string of deaths of young black people, some during interactions with police, that had fuelled the Black Lives Matter movement.
Saunders admired Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers American football quarterback who, in 2016, became the first person to take the knee, before games. In 2019, Saunders met John Carlos and talked about his Black Power salute in 1968. ‘From a young age I told myself that I would do the same if I were provided the opportunity,’ she says. ‘So the “X” wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing, it was years in the making… I saw it as a responsibility to use my voice for something bigger than myself.’
Saunders slept fitfully the night before the medal ceremony. She had only told two or three teammates what she planned to do. She remembers being whisked away by a Team USA staffer once she had stepped off the podium. She managed to blurt out an explanation on the way out. The IOC launched an investigation, and said the US Olympic Committee would be required to penalise athletes who breached its rules. But American officials had said they wouldn’t punish free speech that didn’t include hatred.
Tragedy would end the stand-off when Saunders’ mother, Clarissa, died two days after the ceremony. While offering its condolences, the IOC announced that it had cancelled any probe. Saunders thinks waiting for the Chinese national anthem to finish helped her case. ‘But honestly, in that moment, I didn’t care what happened,’ she says. She recalled meeting with John Carlos. ‘He told me that when you’re doing something for the greater good, you have to be willing to risk it all.’
In 1968, Carlos and Smith, who were 23 and 24 respectively, suffered a huge backlash after being ordered to leave the Games. A Los Angeles Times columnist wrote that the men ‘do a disservice to their race – the human race’. Their careers would be completely overshadowed. Yet athletes speaking out today still take risks.
Kaepernick did not play again in the NFL after the season in which he rose to prominence as an activist. LeBron James, the NBA and Olympic basketball star, has also drawn ire for his support of causes, including racial justice and abortion rights. In 2018, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham said James should ‘shut up and dribble’, a phrase he then reclaimed as the title of a documentary series about athlete activism.
UK Sport’s Powered by Purpose training includes classes on potential blowback, something British athletes have also grappled with when taking on more charged issues than the sort that win you brand partnerships or MBEs. ‘It depends what’s being discussed, but I would say more often than not, speaking about something controversial doesn’t help you,’ says Nick Hartwell, a sports agent.
Hartwell represents Becky and Ellie Downie, British sisters who, in 2020, took their activism to the top of their sport when they blew the whistle on a culture of abuse in gymnastics. Ellie, who was then only 20, put her early retirement last year down to the stress of speaking out and a sense of feeling ‘punished’ as a result. ‘Ultimately it did really hinder us a lot, we both didn’t make the Tokyo Games,’ she told the BBC.
Would Stott be risking arrest with Extinction Rebellion if he were still competing? ‘That’s really hard,’ he says. ‘If you’re good at sport, it gives you a bit more freedom, but generally you rely on the goodwill of sporting systems, and if you’re a pain, it’s not going to make your life easy, especially if your performance wobbles.’
It can also be hard for athletes to keep control of their messages – and avoid activism becoming a distraction. Alice Dearing became a figurehead for diversity in sport when she qualified for the 10km open-water swim in Tokyo as the first black British woman to swim for Britain at an Olympics. She had already co-founded the Black Swimming Association to tackle stereotypes about race and swimming, and the higher incidence of drowning among black and Asian children. Just days after she qualified, Fina, at that time swimming’s governing body, rejected an application by Soul Cap, a company founded by black swimmers, to have its headwear accepted at the Tokyo Games. The hat, which was designed to accommodate thicker, curlier hair, didn’t fit ‘the natural form of the head’, Fina said. The response created a storm of criticism, and Dearing was soon gasping for air, having become the face of the story.
‘Within a week, my agent had had three or four interview requests a day,’ she recalls. ‘I got asked to be on Newsnight, and I absolutely love Newsnight, but I was like, “I’m four weeks away from the Olympics, I don’t have the emotional energy to do this.”’ In the end, she was disappointed with her performance in Tokyo (she finished 19th) and retired from swimming this year after failing to qualify for Paris. Her activism continues and, in 2022, Fina approved the Soul Cap.
Raven Saunders says she received predominantly praise and opportunities after Tokyo. Her social media exploded. ‘And then there were the messages from people telling me that I inspired them, or that they wished they had the mentality I had of just being comfortable being myself.’
Saunders is pleased that sports bodies, coaches and agents are realising that activism increasingly comes with the territory for young athletes, and is better off being embraced. Imogen Grant also tells me she has only had support from her coaches. ‘They see us as whole people now,’ she says.
It hasn’t all been easy for Saunders; life changed in an instant after Tokyo, adding new pressures to the grief of losing her mother and the impact of major hip surgery. In 2022, she failed to update doping authorities on her whereabouts, meaning she missed three tests, and received an 18-month ban (she accepted full responsibility and passed doping tests after each administrative error).
Paris has felt like a sequel for The Hulk. Saunders is looking forward to playing a new role as mentor – on and off the field. ‘There will definitely be a lot more people willing to use their voices,’ she says, laughing coyly when I ask what she might do on the podium this time. She sees no shortage of issues worth fighting for, from rising male suicide rates to challenges to LGBTQ and abortion rights. ‘Our work isn’t done,’ she says, ‘and I want to reassure other athletes that they shouldn’t be afraid to speak any more.’