Postcards From the Future: Polluted Sport in a Changing Climate

Abstract

How is climate change affecting young athletes? Taking inspiration from the concepts of “polluted leisure” and “climatic affective atmospheres”, this article reveals how participating in sports (i.e., surfing, surf lifesaving, waka ama, kayaking, rowing) undertaken in/on rivers, oceans, and beaches damaged and destroyed by a changing climate are surfacing new affective and embodied relations with “polluted sport.” The analysis of focus groups and photographic montages with 45 young athletes (54% Māori and 50% female) reveals the agentic capacities of polluted sporting environments—logs, sewage, debris—and how new health risks, fear, anger, frustration and eco-grief were surfaced through young athletes’ immersion in climatic affective atmospheres. For some, such embodied experiences prompted new modes of environmental care and action. Ultimately, this paper highlights the importance of listening to, and learning from, young people immersed in sporting environments already being impacted by climate change. Our research also reveals the importance of Indigenous ways of knowing polluted sporting environments as highly relational, agentic and intimately connected to health, well-being, healing and performance.

Introduction

Sport scholars are increasingly examining the complex relationship between sport and climate change, and some are considering how participation in polluted environments is changing human-relations with sport. Yet, to date no research has considered how climate change is affecting the experiences of young people in sport. Recognizing this critical gap, this project centered the voices and embodied experiences of young athletes living in Te Tairāwhiti, a region of the North Island of New Zealand, that has been significantly and repeatedly impacted by extreme weather events, including Cyclone Gabrielle in February 2023. This article draws upon focus groups and photographic cocreation methods with 45 young athletes (aged 13–25 years) from a range of sports, including rowing, swimming, surf lifesaving, surfing, skateboarding, kayaking, rugby, and waka ama. Herein we focus particularly, but not exclusively, on the experiences of those in nature-based sports (where participation is intimately connected to the natural environment, see Booth, 2023, 2024; Melo et. al., 2023) because of the extent of the damage to rivers, beaches and the ocean.

Figure 1.

Photo montage evoking young athletes’ environmental attunement to the impacts of climate change on the environments they love, particularly the awa and moana.

Figure 2.

Photographic montage evoking young athletes affective and embodied entanglements with polluted sport.

Figure 3.

Some young athletes were moved through their affective and embodied sporting experiences to learn more about the environment and impacts of climate change.

This article engages with and contributes to multidisciplinary literature (e.g., sport sociology, cultural studies, critical human geography, environmental sociology, Indigenous studies, climate change and youth studies) to center the voices of young athletes impacted by climate change-related extreme weather events. Taking inspiration from the concepts of “polluted leisure” (Evers, 2019) and “climatic affective atmospheres” (Verlie, 2019), this article reveals how participating in environments repeatedly damaged and destroyed by a changing climate (and past and present problematic land and water management) are surfacing new affective, embodied and entangled relations with sport. The more-than-human analysis (consisting of both quotes and photographic montage) reveals the agentic capacities of “polluted sport.” Moving bodies train and compete with logs, silt, sewage and debris, surfacing climatic affective atmospheres of fear, health risks and vulnerabilities, anger, frustration and eco-grief. For some young athletes, such embodied experiences prompted new modes of environmental care (as affective, embodied and practiced). We conclude by arguing that, in a changing climate, polluted sport will become (and already is becoming) more common, and thus it is critical that we consider the effects on young athletes’ health, well-being and relationships with the people and places they care about.

Literature: Climate Change, Sport and Community

Sport scholars are increasingly examining the relationship between sport and climate change (Bernard et al., 2021; Orr, 2024). To date, much of the research has focused on the extreme environmental impacts of mega events such as the Olympic Games and World Cups, and the roles and responsibilities of sports organizations to advance sustainability efforts in sport (Kellison & Casper, 2017; Ross & Orr, 2023). The “greenwashing” of sports organizations—the divergence between what they say and do—has been a key focus (Miller, 2017; Murfree & Brison, 2025). Recognizing that many sports organizations are slow to respond, some scholars are exploring the critical role of athletes as environmental ambassadors (Barquero, 2023; Knowles et al., 2026; Orr, 2025; Orr & Sailofsky, 2025) and fans as advocates for change (Amann & Doidge, 2023).

Researchers have also considered various forms of eco-activism and environmentalism within sporting communities (McCullough et al., 2023; Wheaton, 2007), as well as growing efforts (and inconsistencies and contradictions) by individuals, groups and local facilities to engage in more sustainable sporting practices (Salome et al., 2013; Sharma-Brymer et al., 2017). Issues of environmental justice are increasingly garnering academic consideration, with a focus on the inequitable impacts of climate change and environmental degradation on communities that face heightened exposure and vulnerability due to the past and ongoing impacts of colonization (e.g., land dispossession, health inequities, job stability), racism, sexism and capitalism (Ali-Joseph et al., 2022; Chen & Kellison, 2023; Kellison, 2022; Wilson & Millington, 2020).

Some scholars are turning their attention to focus on climate impacts on outdoor sports, including heat exposure, air quality, and changes to weather and seasonal patterns (Brocherie et al., 2015; Schneider et al., 2025). For example, Hutchins et al. (2023) offer powerfully emotional insights from cricket players in Australia amid climate crisis, and particularly drought. Other researchers are examining issues of environmental sustainability in outdoor sporting lifestyles (Hognestad et al., 2022; Larneby, 2025), with a growing focus on outdoor sporting industries, tourism and economies (e.g., skiing; Knowles et al., 2026). Among the latter, considerable investments in adaptation efforts are underway, with significant (economic, social, environmental) impacts already being felt by ski resorts and mountain town communities around the world (Orr, 2024; Stoddart, 2011; Thorpe, 2025).

It is beyond the scope of this article to review all of the rapidly growing, multidisciplinary literature on sport and climate change. Despite the burgeoning literature, to date, only a few researchers have studied the impacts of climate change on community club-based sports. For example, in their qualitative study of community-level sports clubs of grass-turf sports in Canada and Australia, Dingle and Mallen (2021) highlight the damage that extreme climate events cause to playing fields, as well as an array of indirect impacts (i.e., higher injury risks, interrupted and/or canceled competitions, insurance risks, higher operating and capital costs). Management scholars have also studied the impact of flooding (and floodwater, see Volz et al., 2024) on sports fields, communities and clubs (Filo et al., 2015; Sparks, 2011; Wicker et al., 2013) in Queensland, Australia. However, there has been little (if any) qualitative research focused on the impacts of climate change-related extreme weather events on local sporting participants, or specifically on young athletes in affected communities. To date, only a few studies have focused on climate vulnerability in youth sport (Grundstein et al., 2021; Hylton-Pelaia et al., 2025), with a focus on the work of organizations (i.e., schools) to mitigate risk (e.g., heat hazards). The sporting experiences of youth in climate-affected communities have yet to be centered in such research.

Conceptual Framework: Polluted Sport and Climatic Affective Atmospheres

Some have argued that management approaches largely dominate research on sport and climate change (McMillan, 2025). However, sport sociologists have made significant contributions to examining the political, performative and justice aspects of sport and climate change (Miller, 2017; Wilson & Millington, 2020). Sport sociologists are also increasingly engaging innovatively with social theory and creatively with methods to shed new light on the topic. A growing number are working in the more-than-human paradigm (approaches that consider both human and nonhuman matter as agentic) to explore the varied embodied, affective and entangled experiences of participating in sport in polluted environments and amidst climate crisis (Black et. al., 2025; Cherrington & Black, 2022; McDonald & Sterling, 2020; Olive, 2023). In so doing, scholars are engaging an array of theoretical approaches under the broad umbrella of the more-than-human paradigm (i.e., new materialisms, posthumanism, Deleuzian affect theory; Thorpe et al., 2020). For example, McDonald and Sterling (2020) drew upon feminist new materialisms to examine the polluted waters of the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic and Paralympic Games. Drawing upon Donna Haraway's “making kin with the Chthulucene,” Jeffrey and Thorpe (2026) engage creative writing practices to illuminate the “tensions that arise while moving in environments that are human and nonhuman, joyful and suffering” in the climate emergency (p. 365). In so doing, scholars are prompting important new questions about the longstanding relationships between water-based sports, health and well-being, and revealing the complex ways in which moving human bodies are entangled with increasingly polluted environments. In many ways, this work takes inspiration from scholarship beyond sport, including eco-feminist, geographical and cultural studies research into the complex human relations—cultural, embodied, affective, spiritual—with polluted waterways (e.g., Bates & Moles, 2023).

In this article, we take inspiration from the groundbreaking work of Clifton Evers (2019) and his more-than-human concept of “polluted leisure.” As a surfer, Evers (2019) initially developed the concept from his immersive research in the polluted waters at a postindustrial site in England, and then further extended the concept in the waters of Japan postearthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster (Evers, 2022). Broadly, the concept of polluted leisure describes “the embodied, sensorial, emotional, intellectual, spatial, and technological emergence of pollution—material and social, harmful and nonharmful, actual and perceived—assembling with leisure” (Evers, 2019, p. 424). In his later work, Evers (2021, 2024b, 2024c, 2025) proceeds to engage an array of concepts, such as “toxic natures” (Lora-Wainwright, 2017) and “toxic geographies” (Davies, 2022), to deepen understanding of the “affecting biological, sociological health and well-being” impacts of polluted leisure in the Anthropocene (Evers, 2021, p. 185). In so doing, he raises critical questions about the tensions and contradictions of living with pollution and encountering “hazards in [our] day-to-day lives, in mundane and incremental ways” (Davies, 2022, p. 409).

Aligned with his more-than-human approach (with a focus on human and the nonhuman), Evers (2019) developed the immersive, embodied, entangled method of “wet ethnography” in which the research encounter includes his own surfing body as it interacts with other ocean users, water, sand, pollution. More recently, Evers (2024a, 2025) has continued to develop an array of creative, sensory and more-than-human methods and modes of dissemination (i.e., exhibition, film, museum) to reveal how participating in polluted leisure impacts men's experiences of place attachment and wellbeing in an industrial coastal setting in the United Kingdom.

Scholars are taking up the concept of “polluted leisure” in an array of lifestyle and recreational sport and leisure contexts. For example, Evers and Phoenix (2022), Moles and Olive (2025), and Hoerst (2025) have engaged “polluted leisure” in a range of water-sporting and recreational contexts (i.e., swimming, sailing), and in so doing, have offered important contributions to research on blue health and well-being. Others are applying the concept of “polluted leisure” to examine skateboarding (Glenney, 2024; O’Connor et al., 2022) and BMX (Ding et al., 2025) in “gray spaces” (concrete and city infrastructure) as distinct from “blue spaces” (oceans, rivers, lakes, waterways).

Evers (2019, 2021, 2024, 2024a, 2024b, 2025) has continued to develop the concept and applied it to a range of postindustrial and postdisaster water wastelands, and scholars are engaging with polluted leisure in an array of recreational sport and leisure contexts. However, polluted leisure has not yet been applied directly to organized, competitive sport, or in environments polluted through climate changed-related weather events. In this article, we build upon and extend the concept of “polluted leisure” to consider “polluted sport” in the context of climate crisis. Rather than focusing on the recreational and leisure practices of everyday adult participants, we explore the experiences of young athletes training for competitive sport. This extension of “polluted leisure” to “polluted sport” recognizes that the experiences and infrastructures of organized sport—timeframes, training, coaches, competition—are impacted by climate change-related events both similarly and differently to more recreational activities. In particular, we focus on how immersion in polluted sporting spaces significantly impacts the emotional and affective connections young people forge with competitive sport, particularly as climate change disrupts their sporting goals, hopes and aspirations.

Climatic Affective Atmospheres

In this article, we bring the concept of “polluted sport” into dialogue with affective atmospheres to further explore how embodied immersive experiences in polluted environments—particularly rivers and oceans—surfaces new emotional and affective relationships with bodies, places, objects and human and nonhuman others. While affect is interpreted in many different ways, herein we understand affect as “how emotions, sensations, atmospheres and feelings arise out of relational encounters between objects, space and people” (Spinney, 2015, p. 235). Importantly, affect does not equate to emotions, but rather “that which is felt before it is thought; it has a visceral impact on the body before it is given subjective or emotive meaning” (Hickey-Moody & Malins, 2007, p. 8). Furthermore, it is through the generative forces and affective intensities surfaced through relations between bodies, emotions, sensations, objects, technologies, place, and people, that capacities to move us to feel, act and do (differently) emerge (Pavlidis and Fullagar, 2015; Ringrose et al. 2020).

In this article, we draw specifically upon the concept of “affective atmospheres,” which broadly refers to the ways that spaces, places and bodies interact to produce feelings, ways of sensing and knowing. As Anderson (2009, p. 81) writes, affective atmospheres are “perceived and sensed through the body.” Others have extended upon such thinking, recognizing the ways affective atmospheres are also created by bodies, bodily relations, and specifically, bodies in motion (Bille & Simonsen, 2019; Clark & Lupton, 2021; McCormack, 2014). Some scholars are exploring the affective atmospheres of climate change, weather and “elemental geographies” (Adams-Hutcheson, 2019; Verlie, 2019). While there is a growing body of research on climate change-related emotions, including eco-grief, eco-anger, eco-anxiety and solastalgia (Albrecht, 2019; Neckel & Hasenfratz, 2021), “climatic-affective atmospheres” offers a different perspective, recognizing “the climatic and affective to be entangled processes that co-produce each other” (Verlie, 2019, p. 1). Working constructively with the “conceptual affordances of affective atmospheres,” the concept of “climatic-affective atmospheres” goes beyond linear human-oriented emotions—i.e., climate change makes us “feel” scared, angry, worried—instead drawing attention to “how climate change reconfigures, disrupts, shapes and directs humans, and how everyday human affective practices contribute to changing or stabilising climate” (Verlie, 2019, p.1).

Working with both “climatic affective atmospheres” (Verlie, 2019) and “polluted leisure” (Evers, 2019), we reveal how participation in competitive sport training (i.e., swimming, waka ama, kayaking, rowing, surf lifesaving, surfing) in natural environments (rivers, ocean, beaches) during the weeks, months and years following climate change-related extreme weather events surfaces new affective responses and practices in relation to and with the changing environment, which for some translate into deepening environmental care (as affective, embodied, ethical, relational, and/or applied).

Context: From the Frontlines of a Changing Climate

Our research is focused on the experiences of rangatahi (youth) living in Te Tairāwhiti, a remote and sparsely populated region (pop. approx. 51,000) on the east coast of the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand with the highest proportion (55%) of residents of Māori (Indigenous) descent. On February 13 and 14 of 2023, Te Tairāwhiti was severely impacted by Cyclone Gabrielle. Lives were lost and thousands of people were displaced and isolated. Many homes were damaged or destroyed. Productive lands were ruined, over 74 bridges in the region were lost or damaged and 80% of the roading network was temporarily lost. Telecommunications, water, and power were interrupted for days, weeks and even months in some parts of the region, and there were widespread food and fuel shortages. The cyclone revealed interconnected risks across sectors, such as housing, water, transport, and care systems, highlighting significant infrastructural inequities. The region's largest economies—horticulture, farming, forestry and tourism—have all been significantly impacted, with continuing job losses and business closures.

The impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle were compounded by additional severe weather events in the years prior and following. In 2023 alone, the region experienced nine extreme rainfall events, with five States of Emergency declared. Researchers have attributed the severity of these repeated rain events to climate change (Harrington et al., 2023), with one study reporting that global warming increased the total amount of rainfall during Cyclone Gabrielle by 10% with human-influenced conditions significantly increasing the impacts of the event (Stone et al., 2024). Cyclone Gabrielle was New Zealand's most costly natural event, with economic losses estimated at $14.5 billion. According to climate change scientists, it resembled “some of the worst-case scenarios” predicted for the region (Stone, 2024). Modeling indicates more frequent and intense weather events in the region and country, with up to 35% more extreme rainfall from future cyclones (Gibson et al., 2025). Qualitative researchers have also explored the impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle and repeated weather events, with a focus on community health and well-being (Thorpe et al., 2024, 2025), revealing the trauma, chronic stress and “rain anxiety” caused by repeated weather events, and increased vulnerability and complex economic, social, environmental and cultural challenges that are exacerbated in a changing climate. Indigenous-led research has focused specifically on the impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle on Māori health and well-being across the region, and the culturally specific forms of grief, trauma and responses to the Cyclone (McClutchie et al., 2026).

It is impossible to fully comprehend the affective, embodied and health and well-being impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle without contextualizing the event within histories of colonization and capitalism. Over the past century, the impacts of extreme weather such as Cyclone Bola in 1988 and Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023 have been significantly worsened by problematic land-use practices rooted in colonial and economic imperatives (Smale, 2024). Te Tairāwhiti, a region once cloaked in dense Indigenous forests, has been cleared for pasture, monoculture forestry and carbon farming. With European colonization came a push for “productive” land that led to widespread clear-cutting of forests, which destabilized the soil and increased erosion (Thomas et al., 2025). After the devastation of Cyclone Bola in 1988, industrial-scale pine plantations (many owned by transnational companies) replaced Indigenous forests, creating further problems as clear-fell harvesting left landscapes vulnerable to landslides, flooding and debris flows. As McClutchie and colleagues have discussed elsewhere, Cyclone Gabrielle exposed the consequences of this mismanagement, as rivers choked with forestry waste, bridges collapsed and communities were devastated:

Destruction of forests, rivers and whenua has had profound ecological, psychological and health impacts, with local [Māori] communities experiencing grief not just for lost homes, but for damaged urupā [burial sites], polluted awa [rivers] and severed ancestral connections. The weather's impacts have been exacerbated by extractive land use models that prioritise short-term gain over sustainability, yet another manifestation of the impacts of colonisation. (McClutchie et al., 2026, p. 9)

As this article proceeds to illustrate, the everyday sporting experiences of rangatahi (youth) are entangled with histories of capitalism and colonization, and ongoing practices of unsustainable and unethical land and water mismanagement.

Methods

This study was conducted with approval from the University of Waikato Human Research Ethics Committee (Health; HREC2023#55). Utilizing strategic and snowball sampling, our participants included 45 young athletes (aged 13–25 years old) from a range of sports, including rowing, swimming, surf lifesaving, surfing, skateboarding, kayaking, rugby, and waka ama. Many of these young athletes are competing at national and international levels. Reflecting the cultural demographics of the region, 54% of the young athletes identify as Māori and 46% identify as Pākehā (non-Māori, also often interpreted as New Zealand European), with even representation (50:50) of those identifying as female (wahine) and male (tane). With the aim of understanding rangatahi affective, embodied and relational experiences of sport in a changing climate, we engaged two methods: focus groups and photographic cocreation.

Focus Groups

Focus groups are a common qualitative method with young people, particularly because, when well facilitated, the group-based method can facilitate greater comfort, and a participatory and conversational approach among youth (Gibson, 2007; Raby, 2010; Warr, 2005). We conducted a total of nine focus groups with the young athletes from the same or similar sports. The focus groups took place at their sports clubs as these are spaces where the youth felt most comfortable. For convenience, we organized focus groups around training times wherever possible. Club managers and coaches led initial communication with potential participants and played a key role in co-ordinating between the researchers and the young athletes. In recognition of their time and contribution to the project, youth participants received koha [offering] (a $50 voucher of their choosing), and clubs were also gifted koha ($500 petrol vouchers) for their administrative support. While we followed a semistructured guide, we also allowed the conversations to flow freely with participants adding to, clarifying and/or extending the dialog. As the focus groups were conducted with youth who were teammates, and/or those who regularly trained and competed together, and in places of familiarity (i.e., their sport clubrooms), they seemed to quickly settle into the conversation and had a lot to contribute.

Photographic Cocreation

In designing this project, we took into consideration that young people may not always feel comfortable articulating their feelings and embodied experiences in a formal interview setting. Thus, we also engaged in the arts-based method of photographic cocreation with the young athletes. Various scholars are engaging in arts-based and creative methods to evoke affective, embodied and more-than-human experiences of water-based sports and leisure activities, including an array of visual methods such as with a GoPro (Evers, 2015; lisahunter & Stoodley, 2021) and photo-talk with young people (Cosgriff, 2023). Others are using arts-based methods to deepen understanding of climate change-related topics, and to surface more affective and embodied relations with participants and communities (Bentz, 2020), including with young people (Doyle, 2020). Some have shown that participatory arts-based methods can prompt “more climate compatible behavior change” (Burke et al. 2018) and can even help transition ecological grief towards more “creative forms of resilience” (Borovica et al., 2026).

At the end of the focus groups, we asked participants to indicate whether they would be interested in being part of a photographic session (either individually or as a group) in their sporting environment. The second author, a local Māori wahine professional photographer, then met the participants at their sport clubs, or at a time and place chosen by the young athlete (e.g., a beach) and proceeded to work with the participants to co-create a series of photographs of them immersed in the environment and/or doing their sport. In many cases, standing in the environments with the youth surfaced new conversations and embodied knowledge and insight into young athletes’ affective emplaced experiences. Whereas the focus groups often focused on negative aspects of polluted sport, the photographic sessions also created space for feelings of joy, pride, and connection with the places in which the young athletes were immersed.

These photographs, framed and printed in black-and-white, were then curated (by Thorpe and McClutchie) into an exhibition with quotes from the data that traveled across the region, hosted in sport clubs, marae and schools (see www.sportandclimatechange.com/exhibition). At each of the four exhibition showings, the participants stood proudly alongside their photographs, leading conversations about the research, the connections between sport and climate change, and the wider impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle on young people's lives in the region. The exhibition was not simply a “research output” or a form of “knowledge translation,” rather through sharing the research with the community in this way, our understandings of the topic and key issues (from the perspective of youth, their whānau, and the wider community) continued to deepen. As the photographs were shared with community, and gifted back to the athletes, we watched attendees stand with, lean in, and be moved by the images and text. Many informal conversations surfaced about personal experiences, memories and the reflections evoked (from the athletes, parents, community members) through the exhibition. All the printed photographs were gifted back to the youth and now hang proudly in their homes and sports clubs. The exhibition is not the focus of this article and will be discussed in more depth elsewhere. However, in this article we include montages from the photographic cocreation method not to “represent” findings from the data, but to emplace the entangled bodies—human (individual and team), natural and built environments (mud, dirt, grass, sand, ocean, river, concrete), and equipment (boats, surfboards)—and evoke the range of affective responses (joy, disgust, fear, anger, grief) that emerged through the focus group dialog, and that we observed and felt during the photographic cocreation sessions and in community exhibitions.

Researcher Positionality

The first three authors grew up in Te Tairāwhiti, and the first two authors are currently living in the region, each with personal and professional connections across a range of sporting contexts and communities. Three of the authors are Māori, one of whom is also Pacific, and two authors (including the lead author) are Pākehā, each with varying connections to and relationships in Te Tairāwhiti. In a community that has experienced repeated extreme weather events, the trust and relationships with the researchers was critical in gaining access. In some instances, our children were involved in the clubs (swimming, kayaking, surfing, skateboarding), but it was primarily our intergenerational connections (with large extended families in the community) and ongoing commitment to the region (as residents, researchers, family members) that were integral to the willingness to participate and depth of insights offered by participants. In so doing, we write from a position not dissimilar to Evers’ (2019) “wet ethnography,” that is, entangled with our toxic sporting community.

Where appropriate, all focus groups started with a karakia (cultural incantation) with participants offered kai (food). While this article is not solely focused on the experiences of Māori youth, to ensure their systemic underrepresentation in similar research elsewhere was not repeated herein, care was taken throughout the project—from recruitment to representation—to ensure their knowledge and voices are centered, valued and respected in ways that are specific to the region, with local relationships and connections (with each other and the natural environment) always at the fore.

Analysis

Our analysis of the focus group transcripts initially followed Braun and Clarke's (2022) thematic analysis, with two researchers (first and third authors) reviewing all transcripts following a process of familiarization and coding. The lead researcher then engaged in an iterative process of analysis—moving back and forward between transcripts—in dialog with relevant literature, and particularly the concepts of “polluted leisure” (Evers, 2019) and “climatic affective atmospheres” (Verlie, 2019). The photographic cocreation method (and the later community exhibitions) called for a more embodied, affective, material, more-than-human relational and entangled mode of analysis in which we were drawn to what “glows” in the photographs (MacLure, 2013a) and the connections (felt in and through the body) with the transcripts. Moving fluidly between the transcripts and photographs thus became a material-discursive mode of analysis. It was not a linear process. Rather the regular and repeated engagement with the photographs and the quotes from participants, helped deepen our own affective respondings to the topic, and surfaced new ways of knowing, and new ways of becoming with data (MacLure, 2013b). In this way, the ongoing process of cocreating, curating, and sharing the photographs with youth and the wider community, deepened our understanding of how bodies are entangled with polluted sport in climatic affective atmospheres. Montage of the photographs are included not as a way of “representing” data (MacLure, 2013c), but to evoke the entangled relations of young bodies in the climatic affective atmospheres of polluted sport. While all participant quotes are anonymized, participants involved in the photographic cocreation process consented to having their photos in both the exhibition and research outputs.

Analysis: Affective Atmospheres of Polluted Sport

In the remainder of this article, we share key findings related to how young athletes became attuned to polluted sporting environments, and their affective respondings to damaged, destroyed and toxic ecologies. In so doing, we focus particularly (but not exclusively) on the experiences of those involved in water-based sports of rowing, waka ama, kayaking, surfing and surf lifesaving. Most of the young athletes are highly dedicated, training multiple times per week in preparation for national and international events. The following more-than-human analysis reveals the agentic capacities of polluted sporting environments—logs, sewage, debris—and how new fears, risks and vulnerabilities were surfaced through the young athletes’ immersion in climatic affective atmospheres. For some, such experiences prompted new modes of care in, with and for the environment.

Polluted Sport and Environmental Attunement

Cyclone Gabrielle caused extensive damage to awa (rivers), beaches and the moana (ocean). Logs, debris and silt washed from the hills, through the rivers—damaging and destroying bridges, roads, homes, and sports clubs and fields (including rowing, kayaking, waka ama and surf lifesaving) along the way. Much of the debris was carried out into the ocean and washed back onto the beaches. The mountains of large woody debris clogged the beaches for many months, and the flood deposited silt dried to become a hazardous dust (“Growing Concerns,” 2023). The floodwater, mud and silt contained toxins, chemicals and fecal matter that can impact human health, and various gastrointestinal concerns and skin infections were experienced, particularly among those involved in clean-up efforts (Cressey & Russell, 2024; Martin, 2023). Untreated sewage continues to be released (by the Council) into the river with even moderate rainfall due to aging infrastructure, and various other forms of debris (from logs to supermarket trolleys and dead animals) wash up upon the banks of rivers and beaches with each rain event. As this article reveals, the destruction and damage to these natural environments significantly impacted the sporting participation of local youth.

As young athletes returned to their sport training in the weeks and months following Cyclone Gabrielle, and immersed their moving bodies in the now polluted environments, they became highly attuned to changes in the natural environments that they once found so much pleasure, pride and connection in (see Figure 1). As one rower recalled, “It felt different, because you’d walk down and then everything was covered in mud, everything was gray and brown.” Through their immersion in polluted sport, the youth experienced what Welch et al. (2021) refer to as “environmental attunement,” learning more about the environmental impacts of climate change, and revising their sporting practices to accommodate such changes:

We’d never seen anything like that before. Just seeing this volume of water cover all of Anzac Park and the bridges, and how high it got was really surreal! Going down to the rowing sheds for the first time and seeing all the silt just everywhere, up to pretty much the roof. Boats destroyed. Shovelling all the mud was not fun. We have to do that every time it rains, we have to re-shovel it all out. Even once it stops raining, you can't go in the river because of the sewage, and because the river has changed. There's trees fallen down … The silt is so built up that you can barely paddle at low tide. And because of the bank erosion displacing metres of soil into the river, the amount of silt that does flow into the river, often it's first of all very opaque. There are also logs which sometimes float at the top or sink to the bottom or are just hovering there just below the surface of the water, which can cause a lot of minor damages to the boat which we’ve just been having to repair throughout the season. (rowing)

Some of the young athletes’ environmental attunement included critique of the geo-physical and land-use history of the region:

I think a big part of it is the slash [large woody debris], because that was the main contributor to the flooding with the slash just clashing up against the banks. [We also have] very soft soil up in the North Island … so we’re much more prone to slips. (rowing)

As the comments above suggest, through their immersive experiences in polluted sport, young athletes have acquired in-depth knowledge about the impacts of climate change-related extreme weather events and have become increasingly attuned to ongoing changes in the environments in which they participate.

According to Verlie (2019), in “emphasizing the entanglement of the affective and climatic” we must not assume “generalized, universal or definitive patterns of climate/affect/subjectivity,” and we should remain attentive to the ways different bodies/subjects “interact differently with climatic-affective atmospheres” (p. 6). In the context of our study, it is important to contextualize rangatahi relations with polluted sport within Māori understandings of health and well-being (hauora) as relational, spiritual and holistic (Kenney & Phibbs, 2021; Rout et al., 2024), and Indigenous ways of knowing whenua (land), awa (rivers), moana (ocean), and connections to people and places of past, present and future (Salmond, 2018; Thomas, 2015). As Salmond et al. (2022, p. 430) write: “In Te Ao Māori, waterways are relational knots/nodes/strands in a meshwork of whakapapa [lines of ancestry] that arises from exchanges between earth and sky, land and sea.”

Some Indigenous scholars have revealed how Māori knowledge systems shape relationships to climate change (Taiapa et al., 2025), and the interconnectedness of human and environmental health in a changing climate (Johnson et al., 2021, 2024; King et al., 2008). Recent research suggests that Māori cultural identity is linked to greater regard for the natural environment, particularly attitudes and (less so) behaviors (Tassell-Matamua et al., 2021). Others, however, suggest that in Aotearoa New Zealand, it is environmental identity rather than Māori identity per se that has the greatest influence on environmental distress (Apiti et al., 2023). The purpose of our research is not to decipher whether climate change affects young Māori athletes more or less than Pākehā youth. However, it is important to acknowledge that cultural ways of knowing and interacting with the natural environment inevitably shape young athletes’ experiences of polluted sport. The work of Pihama et al. (2025) examining “Māori views, understanding and expressions of emotions” is instrumental, including how Indigenous ways of knowing the natural environment deeply shape Māori affective respondings to and with the world.

Some Māori scholars have examined how Indigenous knowledge systems and cultural practices inform Māori experiences of water-based sport and leisure, including surfing (Waiti & Awatere, 2019; Waiti & Wheaton, 2022) and waka ama (Severinsen & Reweti, 2021). The water-based activities of surfing (eke ngaru) and waka ama are much more than sporting forms, they are also important cultural practices with long histories in Pacific traditions (Nendel, 2017; Walker, 2011), connecting Māori through past, present and future relations between people, ancestors and places, as well as through place-based cultural customs (tikanga) and te reo/language revitalization. Indigenous-led research into these water-based sports reveal the complex, nuanced and important relations between cultural knowledge, sport and movement practices, community, connections to place, and holistic understandings of health and well-being (Hauora). Furthermore, through interviews with waka ama paddlers in Aotearoa New Zealand, Severinsen and Reweti (2021, p. 524) illustrate how “the well-being of the environment connects to the spiritual, cultural, and physical health of people,” with a particular focus on waiora, the “spiritual connection between hauora and the environment.” While Severinson and Reweti's (2021) study was not conducted in a context of climate change-related environmental damage or destruction, there are important connections between their findings and our own, particularly Indigenous sporting practices as entangled with relational knowledge and care for the natural environment that is always changing.

For many of the Māori participants in our study, their relationships to places of significance—including awa and moana—were significantly impacted by Cyclone Gabrielle and repeated extreme weather events (also see McClutchie et al., 2026). The following comments highlight how cultural customs and Indigenous connections to and relationships with rivers (including the water, logs, silt and dust) are distinctly entangled with their sporting, leisure and health practices:

The Waiapu River runs just over here [pointing], that's our ancestral river. With this climate change, and not just the cyclones, because of the floods and the sediment coming through the Waiapu River … we have huge dust storms, everything is covered thick in dust so that affects asthma. All of the slash comes down so our access to our moana, to Mōtū Awa, not only just for sports but our food, our traditional kai, so all of that stuff is affected. All of that stuff is a direct result of the climate change and forestry. (rugby)

In terms of like tikanga [values and principles] and kawa [cultural practices and protocol] and all of that kind of thing, yeah, that affects how we’re able to continue to practice that. Going down to the river mouth to recover [from sport training] or fish or whatever, so yeah, all of that stuff, and the traditions that come with say when you're down at the river mouth, what you can do, what you can’t do, all of those things. It affects the way that we can continue to practice our traditions. (rugby)

A young wahine Māori surfer spoke of the grief and pain experienced in seeing and feeling the damage to the ocean and the land, including her ancestral lands:

The sea is quite a cleansing space, but after all the cyclones it gets dirty and the logs are there. It almost switches it to something else … and it can be a bit scary. When the sea gets polluted, it's like your home's been wrecked. That's kind of what it was like when the cyclone hit. (surfing)

All my ancestors are from Tokomaru. I think it's really bad when our whenua gets trashed and our rivers get dirty, because I think that's a real sense of belonging for a lot of us and I think when it starts to look like that, it's almost like it's hurting them or hurting us when it starts getting like that. It's almost like if it affects the land and the sea, it affects us. (surfing)

Similarly, Māori waka ama paddlers and surf lifesavers observed the damage to the awa (river) and felt such destruction deeply, with concerns raised about the lack of action to better protect and care for the natural environment:

I think just as a majority Māori, I think … oh, it's probably the same with the rowers and the kayakers, that we all care for the river. We all use it, we all care for it, so all of these events and all the pollution and stuff, it's disheartening and it seems like nothing's being done about it. (waka ama)

There's so much time spent on that river, it's not clean, it's not healthy. That awa's mauri [life force] is missing. That's like a barrier and stuff. Yeah, it is. It's going to take time because, like I'm saying, for us, our activities, our sports, it's in our language, it's in our art, it's in our kōrero. (surf lifesaving)

As these comments reveal, participation in sport is much more than a physical activity, with movement practices (i.e., surfing, waka ama, surf lifesaving) intimately connected to cultural ways of knowing people and place (“it's in our language, it's our art, it's in our korero”), deeply impacted through climate change damaged environments. Herein our findings extend the work of Severinsen and Reweti (2021), revealing how climate change-related damage to awa and moana negatively impacts the spiritual, cultural, and physical health of Māori sporting communities, and the affective relationships with places of cultural significance. For some rangatahi Māori athletes, the environmental grief and sadness is intergenerational. As the subsequent sections reveal, Indigenous knowledge of and relationships with the environment shape affective relations and responding to polluted sport.

Polluted Sport as Agentic and Affective Entanglement

Drawing broadly from a more-than-human approach, polluted sport and the various actants of polluted sport—logs, silt, debris and sewage—are agentic, moving bodies and surfacing new affective relations with the environment. The large woody debris (commonly known as “slash,” a forestry term) that flows down the rivers from (most often) unethically managed forestry plantations is agentic, taking out roads, bridges, homes and sporting facilities, and then clustering in mountains on the beach or in the ocean, killing sea life below. Tragically, a 12-year-old boy was killed by the large woody debris in the ocean, and a submerged log crushed a 10-year-old girl's pelvis while playing in the waves (Dunseath et al., 2023). The silt that overflows the banks, submerging land, homes and buildings, setting “like cement” and then becoming a toxic dust, clinging to clothing, skin, vehicles and lungs, surfaces new feelings of fear, worry and anger. Dead animals, tonnes of rotting fruit, supermarket trolleys, barbed wire fences, and the many other more-than-human objects collected by the floodwaters were carried out into the ocean, ultimately returning to the beach and waterways. As our research shows, the more-than-human matter of climate change-related extreme weather events—logs, silt, debris and sewage—are agentic, surfacing an array of new affects among youth, from disgust to fear and grief.

Similar to Evers’ (2025) research on the “smell of polluted leisure,” the young athletes in our study spoke of the highly sensory experiences of participating in polluted sporting environments. Strong feelings of disgust emerged through their embodied interactions with logs, dead animals, and sewage:

We never used to paddle in brown water but it's brown, just brown all the time now. Smells like poo. I just try not to swallow any water or fall in. It's just how it is now, it's the norm. It just makes it so much more unmotivating, turning up and it looks like that, it's like, I don't want to paddle …. (kayak)

The awa, it's kind of like a part of us. But you just don't want to paddle in a river that's like that … just full of sewage … sticking out branches, ‘big as’ [very big] logs … dead animals. It's so gross. (waka ama)

The new smells (“like poo”) and sights (color of the water and new esthetics of logs, silt, debris) affected the young athletes, surfacing negative feelings about their sport, including loss of motivation and enjoyment:

Ages after the cyclone … I went out and there was lots of people out, but when I was out there, there's all these logs coming in and lots of fruit as well and lots of rubbish everywhere in the water and I just didn’t even want to go surfing. I probably lasted 30 min because it was that disgusting. (surfing)

We've been here so long so it's kind of like this is our river … it's kind of like a part of us. But sometimes you just don't want to paddle in a river that's just full of sewage. Can’t they put the sewage anywhere else? Nobody really wants to swim and paddle in poo and mimi [urine] water, in vomit water. The river also has dead animals in it, and it's full of sticking out branches, ‘big as’ logs that are still there. You're having to dodge the logs as you're paddling. It's breaking wakas too. Running over a log and it just scrapes the whole bottom of the waka. (waka ama)

As young athletes’ bodies entangled—submerged, navigated, inhaled, digested and spat out—polluted sport, they “experienced climate change in visceral, intense, embodied and emotional ways” (Verlie, 2019, p. 1). The highly sensory experiences of paddling or swimming in “poo” or “vomit” water, or breathing in the toxic dust, changed their emotional relations and reactions to sport (see Figure 2). As the participants explained, many “didn’t even want to go surfing” and “nobody wants to swim and paddle in vomit water.” While the young athletes in our study continued training despite such affective respondings to polluted sporting environments, they observed many of their peers dropping out of sport because of the “disgusting,” “gross,” and “yucky” waterways.

Such embodied and sensory experiences of polluted sport prompted new worries and concerns. The following quotes illustrate how logs in the river and the ocean prompted many young athletes to experience new forms of stress and fear:

I think the logs are the biggest hamper to rowing … It's just very stressful trying to go through the river not knowing what spears are coming up through – because if you haven't remembered what tree was where at low tide, you're like, was it there? Because it could just be lurking below. (rowing)

We would go down, check the typical surf spots to see how many logs or whether they were moving, and mum would be on the sand ‘log spotting’. … People probably think like it's the big ones but they're pretty obvious, but actually, the smaller, more thicker, dense logs, once they come over the falls and smack you in the head, they can be just as bad. There was also a lot of dead sheep and cows. Fences, especially in Toko [Tokomaru Bay], entire fence lines had been dragged into the ocean, so fence posts with nails and all that kind of thing. Even just getting from the carpark to the surf spot was just phenomenal, like having to clamber over logs and then you go to put your foot in and it kind of sinks down … So yeah, it was pretty scary. (surfing)

The young athletes, and their coaches, teammates and families, engaged in an array of new practices (i.e., memorizing the river-scape; “log spotting”) in efforts to minimize risk while continuing their training in polluted sport.

We did not identify any significant gendered differences between our athletes regarding their worries or fears of polluted sport, and their efforts to continue training amidst new risks. However, some young women noted the additional challenges in accessing polluted sporting environments. For example, a young surf lifesaving athlete explained that, because of the mountains of large woody debris on the beach, “we have to carry our skis and boards quite far down the beach. It's very tiring, especially for us girls, heavy.”

As Evers (2019) and Olive (2023) have highlighted, participating in polluted leisure environments—or what Evers (2019) has also referred to as “toxic natures” and “toxic geographies”—can pose an array of health risks and vulnerabilities. This was certainly the case for the young athletes in our study. Their immersion in polluted sport—training in rivers and oceans, and on beaches, with logs, splinters, sewage, silt, dust and debris—exposed them to an array of health risks, including increased respiratory conditions from the dust; splinters from logs on the beach; and skin and ear infections from polluted mud and water:

In consistent rain … they have to release the floodgates for the sewer systems, because it's so old [and doesn’t have the capacity], and then we’re postponed from being on the river for five days just because of the bacterial content. It's happening twice every month at the moment … it doesn’t even have to be a big rain for that to happen. The water can make us really sick with all the sewage in it. (rowing)

The river was so gross but we kind of had to. I just try not to swallow any water or fall in. And we all have a hot shower when we get home afterwards. (kayak)

Some also spoke of the health risks of the silt that became a fine dust when it dried, impacting respiratory health:

The other thing was the paru [dirt], the pollution, the sewage. You had to be careful because that dust and that stuff down there [by the river] was full of tūtae (poo) so it's not healthy. (surf lifesaving)

A couple of weeks after, when we were doing some cleanup, we had to wear masks because they were worried that the dried silt would make us sick. But that's not too different from how it is now. (rowing)

Surfers and surf lifesavers were very aware of the health risks caused by the large logs and debris on the beach, particularly those in roles in which they are responsible for others water-safety:

When we first came back after Gabrielle, just from that tragic thing of that person getting their head squashed [a 12 year old boy suffered fatal injuries due to large woody debris in the ocean] … and just knowing that there are sticks … I could see out there that there are sticks, waves would come through and would hide them, and then when they'd subside they'd poke out of the water. I was thinking, oh, when I'm swimming I don't want to be impaled or anything like that. Yeah, it was a bit sketchy. (surf lifesaving)

I remember last season, I was only on patrol for four hours and I had this kid bring up about five pieces of glass, one was like … just a massive window and I was like, what is happening? Yeah, just everything's in the water and it's pretty dangerous. (surf lifesaving)

For the young athletes immersed in polluted sport, climate change literally “gets under the skin,” surfacing new health concerns and worries, even hurting and making some sick. The dominant narrative that sport is “good” for young people may not be the case in a changing climate, and more research is required to ensure the long-term health and well-being of young athletes is not being compromised through their participation in toxic sporting ecologies.

Despite the highly sensory experiences and new risks of participating, many of the committed young athletes continued to train, some even continued amidst health warnings:

Whenever it rains heavy, the sewage gets let out. But some people still go out and paddle in it. You're not allowed to, it's like a high-risk thing, but people still go out and paddle in it. (waka ama)

In such examples, we learn of the material-affectivity, the more-than-human enmeshment with polluted sport, young athletes’ bodies co-becoming with logs, silt, debris and sewage. As one rower noted, after months of shovelling silt, wading through polluted mud and paddling in a river repeatedly contaminated by untreated sewage: “I think we might be mutants by now.”

As Evers (2021, p. 189) writes, participating in toxic natures “inculcates new skills, tasks, values and orientations attached to shifting valuations, for example, of risk, health, and wellbeing.” This was certainly the case among the young athletes in our study. With the goals and aspirations of upcoming competitions, expectations to continue to train amidst toxic ecologies became normalized within some organized sporting cultures (“we kind of had to”). Our data thus suggests that the “sport ethic” (criteria for what constitutes a “real” athlete, including sacrifice amidst risk; Hughes & Donnolly, 1991) evolves in a changing climate, with the expectation that a dedicated athlete will continue to train in toxic geographies regardless of health risks. While not a focus of our investigation, it is interesting to consider the roles and responsibilities of adults (i.e., coaches, parents, local scientists, the Council) in ensuring youth are fully informed of the health risks of participating in toxic sporting ecologies, and agentic in making their own decisions (to train or not) amid rapidly “shifting valuations.”

From Eco-Grief to Environmental Care

Eco-grief has been defined as “the negative emotions experienced by [those] who witness ecological loss (i.e., such loss may result from various impacts, including climate change, development, biodiversity loss, and others)” (Zurba, 2025, p. 2). While our focus is on affect—as more than emotions—some of the young athletes described experiencing a deep sadness, embodied forms of “ecogrief” (“heartbreaking”), through their immersion in polluted sporting environments:

It was heartbreaking to see it. Even just looking at the ocean, just driving past when we were looking at stuff, it was just so sad to see the ocean looking so disgusting when it's always so beautiful and glistening and inviting, and it just all – everything in town looked destroyed. (skateboarder)

It's just sad that we’re doing all this training and stuff, and we’re keeping our river nice and then it just comes and destroys everything, like our wakas, our whole bank was just ruined, and we had to restart all over again. (waka ama)

Young athletes also expressed frustration and anger at ongoing poor land and water-management practices, and their perceptions of a lack of action from local leadership:

Just the constant slash on the beach and then the state of our river and all of it has suggested a sense of inactivity from the people who could be doing long term solutions to it. It's disheartening. It makes me kind of angry sometimes. I’d like to see change. (rowing)

Any time there's bad weather here, and is quite often now, the pipes will overflow, and they just let it out into the river and the ocean. I just think that is very, very, very silly. It doesn’t make sense. It's ruining our water. Going swimming and knowing that there's sewage in the water, it's just yuck. I think it's so important that the higher up people get a move on with it, because the sewage overflow plans across New Zealand suck so bad. They need to stop using the ocean as an out, as an easy out. (skateboarder)

These highly affective, embodied experiences of sadness, loss, anger and frustration emerged through their entangled relations with polluted sporting environments.

Some researchers have shown how “eco-grief” can lead toward transformative learning and action among “environmental observers” (Zurba et al., 2025), those paying close attention to the environment. According to Borovica et al. (2026, p. 199), decolonial approaches to “eco-grief can honour the scale of loss while inspiring collective transformation toward more ethical and accountable futures.” To date, sport scholars have yet to consider the potential of eco-grief for environmental activism. However, as our research shows, athletes’ visceral and highly sensory and affective experiences of polluted sport may prompt new environmental concerns, as well as care and responsibility.

Over the past decade, researchers have shown that participants involved in nature-based sports (i.e., surfing, skiing, snowboarding) often develop intimate relationships with the natural environment—for example, oceans, mountains—that can foster environmental sensitivities and awareness, care and concern, and in some cases, more sustainable practices and activism (Booth, 2023; Brymer & Gray, 2009, 2010; Olive, 2016; Wheaton, 2007). For example, Wheaton's (2007) early work on Surfers Against Sewage showed how close relationships with the ocean led to collective activism to address sewage pollution. Building upon and extending this work with an ecofeminist perspective, Olive (2023, p. 679) examined immersive nature-based sports of swimming and surfing to explain how “encounters that highlight our vulnerability” can help to reveal how “ecologies are part of our everyday lives in real ways,” and thus “encourage greater environmental awareness and care across communities.” Drawing on fieldwork and interview data with recreational ocean swimmers and surfers, she explores how their participation shapes intimate relationships with ocean and coastal ecologies, and how more-than-human encounters (i.e., sharks, swell, plastics) can surface feelings of vulnerability that act to “remind us we are part of the ocean ecology” and in so doing, can activate “a greater sense of how human and environmental futures are interconnected” (p. 679). Others have revealed the power of experiential learning and more-than-human outdoor movement practices for environmental pedagogies, ethics and justice (Jukes & Reeves, 2020).

To date, most of the research exploring the environmental sensibilities of nature-based sport participants has been focused on adults, and few (if any) have considered the radical potential in eco-grief among sporting communities. However, our research suggests that young athletes, particularly those involved in immersive water-based sports (surfing, kayaking, rowing, waka ama), have developed intimate and embodied knowledge of how the environment (ocean and rivers) are being impacted by climate change. For some of the rangatahi in our study, and this was particularly (but not exclusively) among the Māori participants, such affective and embodied experiences of polluted sport not only prompted “eco grief,” frustration and anger, but also prompted some to embark upon journeys toward environmental care:

It definitely gave me more of a drive to really figure out what's actually happening to our environment, like what lives in the sea, how they need to live. I started a project with my Dad to learn about what's going on with all the things living in there. The impacts on all the kaimoana [seafood]. After that, you kind of understand: what are we if the sea's gone or the land's gone? And so, I learnt to respect it a lot more. (surfing)

They’re releasing the sewage every time it rains hard, and it's just going straight into the river. It's not just waka ama; it's affecting kayaking and rowing and all these other water sports. And it's pretty much toxicating our animal life in the water. … Can’t they put the sewage anywhere else? … They need to hear our voice. (waka ama)

The young athletes in our study are more than “environmental observers” (Zurba et al., 2025), as their visceral and entangled experiences with environmental degradation have prompted highly affective responses to climate change. For the young people of Te Tairāwhiti, climate change is not something “far away,” a threat looming in the distance, but rather they are immersed in and “living with the affected atmospheres of climate change” (Verlie, 2019, p. 3). Through such experiences, many came to an embodied sense of responsibility to care for the environment (see Figure 3). For the young athletes in Te Tairāwhiti, climate change is “intimately enmeshed with all the ways in which we are becoming-human” (Verlie, 2019, p. 3), with such experiences of sensing, feeling, smelling, even inhaling, polluted sport prompting some to pursue new knowledge and action. While the young athletes did not offer further details about the individual or collective environmental actions they were looking to pursue, this study highlights the potential for immersive experiences with the climatic affective atmospheres of polluted sport for new environmental pedagogies and politics to surface.

Conclusion: Polluted Sporting Futures

In a changing climate, weather events—hurricanes, cyclones, flooding—are predicted to become more extreme in magnitude and more frequent. Such events will continue to cause extensive damage and destruction to the built and natural environments of sport, inevitably transforming human physical, social and affective relations with sport. Through the case discussed herein based in Te Tairāwhiti, this paper highlights the importance of centering young athletes’ experiences of participating in polluted sport in a changing climate. While a growing body of research is focused on “polluted leisure,” we hope our extension of the concept into “polluted sport” encourages others to consider how those involved in organized, competitive sport (rather than informal sport and leisure activities) are similarly and differently entangled in toxic ecologies.

In this article, we bring the concepts of “polluted sport” and “climatic affective atmospheres” into dialogue. In so doing, we reveal the embodied and highly affective experiences of youth involved in the water-based sports of surfing, surf lifesaving, waka ama, rowing and kayaking. We reveal the value in bringing affective atmospheres into dialog with research on sport and the emotional and embodied responses to climate change. As Verlie (2019) writes, such approaches can enable us to attend to “the myriad, multiscaled, networked ways in which climate and (human and more-than-human) bodies affect each other” and to “explore the more elusive, surprising, more-than-human relational ways in which climate change affects us” (p. 8), which may or may not translate into environmental action. Drawing upon focus groups and photographic cocreation with young people living in a community significantly impacted by climate change-related extreme weather events, we reveal how the experiences of young athletes immersed in polluted sporting environments—particularly rivers and oceans—surface new emotional and affective relationships with bodies, places, objects and human and nonhuman others, that in some cases translate into new practices of environmental care and possibly action. These embodied experiences are much more effective than climate change statistics in activating awareness and care, revealing how young athletes’ relationships with natural environments, which are even stronger for Māori participants, can be activating and constraining.

Adopting a more-than-human approach, we also revealed the agentic capacities of polluted sport—logs, silt, dust, sewage and debris (from fences to dead animals)—that transform young people's affective relations from pride in place, and joy through movement, into disgust, fear, anger and ego-grief. For many young athletes, the highly sensory and visceral experiences of polluted sport—the changing colors, smells, textures and interactions (with flooding debris)—disrupt their relationships with their sport and the places of participation. To paraphrase Verlie (2019, p. 5), for young athletes, participating in nature-based sport is “an attunement to climatic-affective atmospheres” that “affords attention to how the climate is not only “out there,” impacting bodies, but that bodies are engaged in socio-affective processes of becoming (with) climate change.” For some, such environmental attunement and embodied experiences with polluted sport is deeply disconcerting, unsettling new worries and concerns that are negatively impacting their pleasure, passion and commitment to sport. In a future in which extreme weather events will become more frequent, we need to continue to ask how the changing environment is impacting youth health and well-being, and the responsibilities of local and national leaders, sports organizations, coaches and parents, and athletes, in caring for sporting environments that sustain us in so many ways.

Our research also revealed the importance of Indigenous ways of knowing polluted sporting environments as highly relational, agentic and intimately connected to health, well-being and healing. Polluted sport in the context of climate change cannot be separated from the environmental devastation caused by colonization and capitalism. While this article is the first to share insights into how climate change is affecting young people's entangled affective relationships with sport, future research would do well to focus more specifically on the experiences of Indigenous youth, as well as young women and those with disabilities. The climatic affective atmospheres of polluted sport will be felt differently by those with different embodied experiences and connections to the environment. Finally, our article reveals creative methods with youth as having the potential to support new ways of articulating and amplifying the highly visceral, embodied and affective dimensions of their bodies-becoming in and through climate change.