Sustainable Symptoms: Olympism, Air Transportation, and Fetishistic Disavowal

Olympic discourse presents a story of a global movement that places “sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind” (IOC, 2023a). Conversely, the instantiation of this mythology in the Olympic Games is riven with the contradictions of contemporary capitalism, from the displacement of residents to the exploitation of workers and the transfer of private risk to public host cities. One issue has become especially evident: the substantial environmental impact of the Games. In this theoretical intervention, I explore the Olympic Movement's response to this impact and the climate crisis through an analysis of its environmental discourse. Using the post-Lacanian concept of ideological fantasy, I argue that Olympic environmental discourse mobilizes its humanist mythology to construct an imagined sustainable future in which “climate positivity” is achievable through local changes that do not disrupt the commercial structure of the event. Conversely, I suggest that air transportation emissions—the largest source of emissions but barely present in Olympic sustainability strategies—are symptomatic of the structural unsustainability of the Olympic Movement. In order to make the absent presence of this symptom more palatable, I contend that a process of fetishistic disavowal occurs in which spectator travel is dismissed as “unavoidable.”