The Suzuki Foundation awarded a bronze medal to the organizers of the Vancouver Olympic Games for emphasizing, at one and the same time, the importance of and the inadequacy of their efforts to reduce the ecological footprint of the Games. The Foundation, however, only considered the physical environment, and it evaluated an isolated event without taking into account the domino effect of this event on the notion of sport everywhere else in the world. And it is this notion that weighs the most in the global scale. For example, several days before the opening of the Games, we learned that the region of Magog, Quebec, had decided to increase the size of its sports centre, as it might have done 50 years ago: “The Memphremagog regional sport centre project” says the press release, “will involve the addition of two gyms, a training room for wrestlers (a palestra), a semi-Olympic size pool, a dance studio, development of a synthetic soccer and football field, as well as the retrofitting of the weight room.” Everything will happen inside, and if we have to play outside, it will be under a synthetic sun!

We know however that between 1992 and 2004, while sports centres of this kind continued to spring up across Canada, the percentage of adults participating in sports dropped from 45 to 28 percent. We also know that when people do physical activity, their preference is for outside activities, like walking, gardening, and bicycling. Now the region of Magog is the perfect spot for taking up these kinds of activities. The authorities in the secondary school, where the new sports centre will be located, certainly don’t dissuade young people from taking advantage of the mountains, the forest, and the lakes in the area to devote themselves to open air sports they will continue to do all their lives. Nevertheless, the emphasis is clearly being placed on indoor sports, borrowing from the philosophy of professional sport and the Olympic Games, a phenomenon reflected in and encouraged by local media. Nature has long since been abandoned to wealthy families that have cottages in the area.

The time has come when a different model should be proposed for sports and physical activity in general. This other model is that of sustainable sport. Elsewhere on this site, you will find a short essay on this notion of sport. Here we present its five primary characteristics:

(1) Sustainable sport respects the rules of sustainable development, notably by giving priority to outdoor sport over indoor sports, with their concomitant higher energy costs.

(2) They can be practised throughout a whole lifetime, and they are better for health than performance sports. Walking, cross-country skiing, swimming, bicycling, and non-competitive team sports are all good examples.

(3) They fit into a gentler vision of the body and the world, centred not on the desire to dominate one another through the exercise of a will of iron, but on the pleasure linked to natural and spontaneous exercise, a pleasure doubled by the joy of being in contact with the beauty of nature and one’s friends at the same time.

(4) They reinforce the feeling of belonging to the universe, to nature, to the community, whereas performance sports – which are also sports spectacles and sports propaganda – by these very characteristics only reinforce the sense of belonging to the nation-state.

(5) They are an invitation to coherence, extended to all those who have sustainable development at heart. What good does it do to eat only foods that are in season or that come from less than 100 kilometres away if we multiply the number of kilometres we travel in the car to get to this or that indoor stadium?