An Uphill Battle

But next to an array of athletes and businesses determined to fight climate change is an array of obstacles, including the International Olympic Committee and the International Ski Federation (FIS).

“FIS leadership is incompetent,” Olympian Noah Hoffman said. “President Gian-Franco Casper needs to leave. FIS is responsible for the health and well-being of all the skiing sports globally, and they are underperforming.”

Casper, who has now entered a third decade of leading the organization, got widespread criticism in February when he referred to “so-called” climate change.

“He’s just an old school Swiss guy who chain-smokes cigarettes and has no idea what’s going on outside of his little bubble,” Andy Newell said.

The International Ski Federation did not respond to multiple interview requests.

Newell also said the International Olympic Committee has made concerning decisions, notably in their choices of Olympic venues.

“The fact that the Olympics were held in Sochi seemed like a bonehead idea to me,” he said. “The IOC was so concerned with making big dollars and forming deals with Putin and the Russian government and satisfying all these different international sponsors that they agreed to hold an Olympic venue in a new area where they had to literally clear cut national forests to put in alpine ski areas, and they had to divert waterways to put in Olympic villages. So much environmental destruction, just for the sake of making a few dollars for their sponsors.” 

Ski activists also face another, less direct obstacle: Skiing isn’t always green. For high school and college skiers, races often mean long drives, especially when teams must make the trek to resorts that can make their own snow. Plane rides to World Cup races and water-based snowmaking make for a sport that isn’t always environmentally friendly.

“Cutting carbon footprint is something people try to pay attention to, but it’s also something that I haven’t seen that active of an effort for in the ski community,” former Bowdoin skier Sam Shaheen said. “We’re a sport whose fate is tied to climate change, but we’re also dependent upon carbon.”

Greylock senior captain Miriam Bakija noted that skiers may have a hand in climate change while bearing much less of its consequences than others. 

“It’s a bummer that we can’t ski,” Bakija said. “But it’s going to be a bigger bummer as more and more people in developing countries die because of the climate crisis.”

 Shaheen brought up another element of skiers’ role in the environment, frequently discussed quietly–the long, carbon-backboned molecules stretched out by as many as eight Fluorine atoms. Or, in less, chemical terms, the fluoros.