Olympics face new blowback from skiers, activists over oil sponsorship

From Nat: As I explained in my last post, I'm in Italy covering the Winter Olympics for the next couple of weeks, and I'll be sending out stories that I think might be of interest to Alaska audiences. This one gets at a long-running debate around oil company sponsorship of winter sports events and features Alaska athlete Gus Schumacher.

I also published a fun piece earlier about the intense precautions American and Alaskan athletes are taking to avoid illness during the Games — featuring Fairbanks-raised skier Kendall Kramer and a painful example of what not to do courtesy of the Finnish women's hockey team, which posted a video of members singing Backstreet Boys karaoke in Milan and then promptly got taken out by a norovirus outbreak.

Want the inside scoop from the Olympics? I'm running a WhatsApp group for insiders; details at the bottom of my last post. As always, thanks for reading.

PREDAZZO, ITALY — Two months before the Winter Olympics were set to kick off in Italy, the torch relay, carried by runners from Greece to the Olympic venue, made an unusual stop: the headquarters of Italian oil giant Eni, where an executive from one of the company’s lower-carbon subsidiaries acted as a torch bearer.

The event tied in with what’s become, in recent days, a controversial endorsement deal — one that made Eni a “premium partner” of the Olympics at a time when athletes and fans are increasingly calling on winter sports organizers to renounce fossil fuel sponsorship.

The company is also hosting the "Eni Winter Village" in Milan during the Olympics. Visitors can test out a snowboard simulator, have a virtual snowball fight and try an urban cross-country ski trail made with "innovative polymers" produced by Eni's chemical company that "makes skiing possible in the city."

Nikolai Schirmer, a Norwegian extreme skier and YouTuber who’s helping lead a campaign called Ski Fossil Free, said it makes no sense for athletes and events dependent on snow to be advertising for the businesses whose products, through the greenhouse gases emitted by their combustion, pose an existential threat to winter sports and future Olympics, said 

“Winter sports, right now, are like a string quartet on the Titanic, playing as the ship is sinking,” Schirmer said. “Not only that, they’re advertising for icebergs while they’re doing it.”

Schirmer, 35, spoke in an interview Wednesday outside the main media center in Milan, just after he’d delivered a stack of more than 20,000 petition signatures to Olympics officials. 

His campaign — endorsed by Olympians like Alaskan cross-country skier Gus Schumacher and Greenlandic biathlete Ukaleq Slettemark — is making what Schirmer describes as a very modest ask: that the Olympics and the umbrella organization that coordinates global ski competitions, the International Ski Federation, examine the ethics of winter sports taking money from fossil fuel companies and draft a report.

A separate letter calling for the Games to reject future fossil fuel sponsorships, with current and former Olympian signatories, is set to be released in the coming week, said the Swedish cross-country skier who coordinated it, Björn Sandström. And Greenpeace, the international environmental advocacy group, has debuted its own protest video showing animated Olympic skiers, skaters and bobsledders being washed away by a flood of crude oil.

In past years, climate campaigners have disrupted top-level cross-country ski races in Europe. And in 2025, they threatened a demonstration at the World Championships in Norway over sponsorship by state oil company Equinor — though they ultimately stood down after a group of top athletes agreed to press ski race organizers for more stringent sponsorship guidelines.

International Olympic Committee officials, asked at a Wednesday news conference about Schirmer’s initiative, praised athletes for speaking up, with President Kirsty Coventry saying they “have a platform to speak up, and to say, ‘Hey, these are the things that we want to see you do better.’”

“We’re always going to try to be better, and ask our stakeholders to be better,” said Coventry, a former Olympic swimmer. “But that also takes time.”

Committee officials also pointed to sustainability efforts for this winter’s Games: renewable electricity at venues, a fleet of cars that includes 21% electric vehicles, and more than 20,000 pieces of recycled furniture from the last Summer Olympics. 

But Christophe Dubi, the Olympics executive director, did not respond directly to the petition’s request.

“We have to recognize one thing: Climate is a challenge for all of us,” Dubi said. “As sport, as well, we’re not immune to those climate challenges, and we have to hear voices.”

Officials from state-controlled Eni did not respond to requests for comment. The company told Reuters in a statement that it shares “the importance of addressing climate change” and will continue investing in renewables to hit its net‑zero emissions target by 2050.

At the Games in Italy, numerous athletes have arrived with stories about witnessing the loss of winter and snow.

U.S. downhill star Lindsey Vonn, at a separate news conference this week, said she’s seen, firsthand, “what global warming has done.”

“I’ve been skiing on glaciers since I was nine years old,” said Vonn, 41. “And most of the glaciers that I used to ski on are pretty much gone.”

Another U.S. athlete who has engaged in climate advocacy for several years, 25-year-old Gus Schumacher, lived through some mostly snowless winters growing up in Alaska; he’s also endorsed Schirmer’s campaign.

“We want to be able to ski, and want to be able to ski on natural snow, because that’s the best way to do it,” Schumacher said in an interview. “And I don’t want to support companies that are adding fuel to that not being a possibility.”

Fossil fuel companies like Eni are using their association with events like the Olympics to help burnish their image and diminish public pressure to more quickly transition away from fossil fuels, argued Schirmer.

Eni is using its Olympics sponsorship to advertise sustainability and renewable energy focused business lines. But its oil production has grown in recent years — and is set to keep growing through 2030.

The company's biofuels and renewables companies still bring in less than one-tenth of the earnings as its oil and gas holdings — though its chief executive last year told the Financial Times that profits from the green energy businesses should be equal to those from hydrocarbons by 2035, and exceed them by 2040.

"The Olympics are willingly greenwashing Eni — an energy still heavily invested in fossil fuels," Schirmer said. "And it doesn't look like that's going to change any time soon. So, in my mind, it looks like the Olympics, and organized skiing and snowboarding, are promoting their own demise."