Sustainability and performance can go hand-in-hand: Marion Thénault on her Olympic journey towards carbon neutrality

Marion Thénault is an Olympic bronze medallist with 11 World Cup podiums to her name as an aerialist. After Beijing 2022, Thénault set some big goals for the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games—but not just related to her athletic performance.

In addition to eyeing the Olympic podium, Thénault set a goal of making her journey to Milano Cortina 2026 carbon neutral.

To help her, Thénault enlisted the help of engineering and consulting firm, WSP. Thénault, an aerospace engineering student herself, and WSP worked together to quantify the carbon footprint of her lifestyle as an elite freestyle skier who has to travel around the world for training and competition.

Olympic.ca has checked in with Thénault at each stage of the project, and now after her third year, we chatted about what this undertaking has taught her.

Start of Project: Staying carbon neutral on the road to the Olympics: a welcome challenge for Marion Thénault

Year 1 Update: Marion Thénault shares updates on her carbon neutrality journey

Year 2 Update: Marion Thénault shares lessons learned about journey to carbon neutrality and other actions for sustainability

It’s hard to believe that this is our fourth time checking in with you on your carbon neutrality project! When you look back from 2022 up to now, what would you say have been some of your key learnings?

MT: I’ve definitely learned a lot of things, that’s for sure. I didn’t really know what I was getting into and then every year after getting the results I was like: how can we do this better, or communicate this better, or have more relevant data? It’s a lot of work to get all of that data—I want it to actually have an impact, instead of doing it for the sake of doing it. 

Last year I found it hard to compare between seasons because my calendar was so different. Every year we have different World Cups, which impacts my air travel, which impacts my overall emissions. And no matter how much I try to make efforts, well, an extra World Cup in China will change everything, right? 

So this year we made a baseline. Basically, the baseline would be doing everything that I’m doing [in terms of training and competition], but without making any additional efforts [to curb emissions] and then we would have [that to compare to] my actual emissions. That was very relevant and I’m really happy that we did that.

For this year, we have data that shows that my efforts translated into a 27% reduction of GHG [greenhouse gases] emissions versus had I not done any emission reduction efforts for the same tour.

As you mentioned, air travel is a real sticking point as a huge source of emissions. I know you were in contact with FIS [International Ski and Snowboard Federation] about how the competition calendar could be tweaked to reduce the need for extra air travel—is there any update there?

MT: We gathered the data, which was the biggest part. The goal was to have a more global idea of how the calendar influences our total GHG emissions as the aerials tour. 

How can we do the World Cups in clusters? What’s the impact of doing the World Cups in clusters, versus just doing them kind of randomly and crossing the ocean like three times a season. I want to have data for that, and FIS is very keen to have a look at my numbers. They know I’m working on it and I’m not working against them—quite the opposite actually. I want to give them more data so that when they’re at the decision-making table, they can consider that as at least one of the factors. I know they have a lot of factors to create the calendar.

Will you continue to work with WSP on this project beyond the Olympics? What’s the future of this journey for you?

MT: I really hope we can continue after the Games because I think the work we’ve done is very relevant. 

But the main thing I think I’ve realized is that now that we have the numbers, it’s more about a cultural shift that’s not translated solely in numbers. So if it were to continue, I think that would be the way I would be heading. 

The project has allowed me to talk with a lot of people in the green sports sphere. Talking to athletes, everybody says, “Well, we’re not the ones making the decisions.” And I was one of them. I was like, “Well, I can’t decide what my calendar is, and I want to participate in World Cups, so I’m going to have to take the plane.” But then when you talk to FIS, they say, “Well, we can’t do anything the athletes don’t want.”

So it’s like FIS is saying it’s the athlete’s responsibility and the athletes are saying it is FIS’s responsibility. So I think my vision is more collaboration on that and be like: okay we all agree on the goal, how can we get there? 

It can be hard because some athletes are not that sensitive to that topic, and they need to be comfortable as well in that competition circuit. So I think that’s where I’m heading more in the next four years, how to manage that. But I really hope that WSP still wants to work with me because through their expertise I’ve learned so much. 

There are other reasons to not want to have to travel back and forth all the time that are purely performance-related! No one’s body does particularly well switching time zones, a bunch of times throughout a season

MT: That’s something I’ve realized too—most of the things that I implemented [to reduce emissions] were actually beneficial for me, performance-wise and for wellbeing. The easiest example would be that I started using my bike to get to training, which is 17 kilometres from where I live. I put a battery on it so it became an electric bike. And now I treasure that 30 minute bike ride instead of 15 minutes driving. 

It’s the same thing with planes. I try to minimize connections and small flights that can be done in another way. That’s actually where most of my reduction comes from is avoiding those short flights. I generally go one night earlier by another mode of transportation and I get to sleep at someone’s place from my family that I know lives nearby. It just creates more opportunities and it actually has been, I think, beneficial for me. 

So I think it’s not true to say that climate action as an athlete is detrimental to performance. I’ve had some pretty good results too, so I think we need to deconstruct that misconception.

I’m also involved with the World Cup in Le Relais. I had an OLY Canada Legacy Grant for that. Last year we continued to implement new measures and now it’s very exciting because FIS actually created a tool to calculate the greenhouse gas emissions from the World Cup. It allows you to know how many tons of CO2 your event generated and then in the future there will be objectives and then requirements to hold events. I think that’s really exciting. 

And then Protect Our Winters, I’m still involved with them. There’s chapters all over the country. The main thing with POW is really the community that it creates.

You’ve done some touring through schools with Protect our Winters. What sorts of questions do students have for you about climate change and sport?

MT: I would say most students are very aware of climate change. They have heard about it. They know how it works. So you can skip that part. 

It’s more about climate action and I think for them something that comes up frequently is: “I don’t have any power as an individual, so my actions don’t matter.” And it also comes up with adults, right? Feeling powerless. 

That’s why I’ve changed the way I’m presenting a little bit and I talk way more about cultural shifts because that’s exactly what we need. That’s exactly where every member of a community becomes important because that’s how we make things change. 

I give the examples of how we almost got rid of cigarettes in Canada, how that was a cultural shift. I talk also about fashion, how in the 2010s, wearing skinny jeans was super cool and in the 2020s it’s only baggy jeans; my sister sees pictures of me when I was like 15 and she thinks I was so uncool. But it’s a fun example to show that mentalities do change, and that’s just what we need to have about climate change.

I think the main thing that I’m trying to carry on is to give hope to them because I really get that feeling of being powerless.

Individual action can look tough, but my 27% reduction is very relevant because it’s a quarter of my emissions and that did not involve me skipping any competitions. It didn’t involve anything drastic like that. It was mainly from cutting short haul flights, carpooling, and riding my bike.

So, individual action can seem powerless, but if everybody cut their emissions by a quarter, that’s still global emission down by quarter, which is more than we’ve ever achieved so far. So, I think we should not underestimate our own actions in the process too.