Snow of Tomorrow | The mountains are political - Part II

But what does the skiing community have to do with any of this?

Honestly: pretty much everything. Most of us would probably agree that we want to live in a peaceful society where we can freely pursue what we love. Protecting that is anything but optional.

Skiing is also more than just a hobby. It is deeply woven into Austrian and alpine culture. It belongs to the national self-image. Kids grow up going on school ski trips, families spend winter holidays on the slopes, and ski races are broadcast like a shared ritual on TV. Skiers are admired, influential, and highly visible figures in society. And with influence comes responsibility. Sport is not neutral. Sport has political power.

The suffragettes understood this more than a century ago. In 1911, Annie Smith Peck climbed Nevado Coropuna in the Peruvian Andes and unfolded a “Votes for Women” banner on the summit. The following year, Fanny Bullock Workman led an expedition to the Siachen Glacier in Baltistan and was photographed holding up a newspaper headline demanding women’s voting rights. These suffragette-mountaineers knew that access to the outdoors was never separate from politics. It was part of the struggle itself. And the same is true today: outdoor sports are entangled with the climate crisis, and with the fight for a liveable future.

The Hypocrisy Trap

From there, it’s only one step to the endless debate about hypocrisy. Whether outdoor people are hypocrites for traveling to ski destinations, buying gear, consuming a carbon-intensive lifestyle while claiming to love nature. And yes. We are. We’re all hypocrites, because we are all embedded in the most consumerist society humanity has ever built. But the obsession with hypocrisy is a trap. Blaming ourselves, or blaming each other, distracts from the real problem: the continued and expanding extraction and burning of fossil fuels for the profit of a few. This system is broken, and it won’t be fixed through individual purity. Perfection doesn’t exist, and none of us chose to be born into a fossil-fuelled world. But we do have a responsibility now. Not to be perfect, but to fight for radical political change. And to stop letting guilt and self-policing keep us quiet.

So, what can we do? First, we need to emotionally reconnect with what is happening and with what is at stake. We need to ask ourselves: What really matters? What is worth fighting for? And we need to rebuild our political confidence, because speaking out does matter. It makes a difference. Saying “I’m just not political” often comes from a place of privilege, and it quietly allows the status quo to continue. The truth is: everything is political. Mountains are political. Skiing is political. And once we accept that the system is broken, we also have to accept the uncomfortable consequence. Broken systems don’t fix themselves. They change when people make them change. In public, loudly, and sometimes disruptively.

When Athletes and Activists Shift the Power Balance

In recent years, we’ve seen more and more climate actions that directly target winter sports, ski racing, and the industries surrounding them. In Germany, Letzte Generation interrupted downhill FIS races, forcing major media attention not only on the protest itself, but on the climate crisis. In Norway, I was part of a protest where we disrupted a national cross-country race that was livestreamed on national TV, sparking public debate around Norway’s continued expansion of oil extraction. Another striking example happened at the World Ski Championships in Trondheim last year. Activists announced they would block the biggest race of the event unless the organizers removed Equinor branding, Norway’s state-owned oil company. By making civil disobedience unavoidable, they created leverage and shifted the power dynamic. Suddenly, they weren’t just ignored protesters anymore. They became a negotiation partner, invited into a meeting with competition leadership to present their demands.

But what really made that campaign powerful wasn’t only the disruption. It was the athletes. A group of them took the demands seriously and agreed to speak up against fossil fuel sponsorship. Turns out, most athletes don’t actually like to be walking billboards for oil advertisements. And that matters, because there’s a reason corporations invest in athletes. They shape culture. People listen to them. When athletes publicly challenge the narratives pushed by the fossil fuel industry, they add authority and moral weight to what small groups of activists have been saying for years. They also have huge platforms, and the media pays attention to them in a way it rarely does to ordinary people. The campaign sparked an immense media debate, putting the topic to the forefront.

A Fight for the Future of Winter Sports

In the end, climate protest is democracy protest. It’s a fight over what kind of future gets to be considered normal, and who gets to decide. Recently, I’ve noticed a shift in the outdoor community’s narrative. There’s less focus on individual lifestyle tweaks and more honest debate about systemic change. That feels genuinely promising.

A prime example is Norwegian skier and filmmaker Nikolai Schirmer. For a long time, his climate messaging mostly stayed within an individual frame, trying to reduce his own footprint. But his tone has clearly shifted. He had to realise that as so many of us also he himself got distracted by trying to live the perfect life. Now he is openly advocating for the need for radical political change and a phase-out of fossil fuels. Right now, a broad coalition of athletes is coming together under the campaign Ski Fossil Free, calling for an end to fossil fuel sponsorship in winter sports.

Big names are backing it, including Kilian Jornet, Hedvig Wessel, Alex Hall, Elias Elhart, Markus Eder, and Cody Townsend. Ski and wintersport federations around the world are still and more than ever sponsored by the fossil fuel industry, one of the Milano Cortina Olympics sponsors was ENI, an Italian oil and gas company. The campaign aims to deliver a letter with 20,000 signatures from the winter sports community to the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC), making one thing clear: we are fed up with competitions advertising the very industry that is driving the climate crisis and eroding the winters we depend on.

Fossil fuels are killing winter sports, yet the industry keeps sponsoring it. Imagine the impact if the International Olympic Committee and national federations banned fossil fuel sponsorship altogether. There is a bitter irony in winter sports giving oil and gas companies a platform to polish their image, while that same industry is eroding the very winters these sports rely on. Sport has enormous reach - and with that comes responsibility. If winter sports want a future with snow, they must stop partnering with those who are melting it away.

Two days before the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics kicked off, Norwegian skier Nikolai Schirmer handed IOC sustainability chief Julie Duffus a petition with more than 21,000 signatures demanding a break from fossil fuel sponsorships.

Seeing the community come together like this gives me real hope. A letter alone probably won’t be enough. But now that we’ve organized around this fight, I’m convinced there’s more than enough creativity and courage to take it further. Because we all know this is the moment where we have to do everything we possibly can, with a clear mind and in solidarity, to get ourselves out of this mess.