US discus thrower Sam Mattis at the World Championships Oregon22 (© Getty Images)
As a teenager, Sam Mattis always had his finger on the pulse of social and political issues. Born in New York and brought up in New Jersey, his mother’s side of the family had fled Europe in the early 1900s due to antisemitism, while his father’s side had found a way out of slavery in Jamaica.
That family history meant Mattis, a two-time Olympian in the discus, has long had an acute awareness of the value of activism. When it came to global warming and climate change, he knew in his youth how big of an issue it was but always felt like “the grown-ups in the room will take care of this”.
But as he says now: “Turns out, that didn’t really happen at all.”
Mattis is one of World Athletics’ Champions for a Better World – athletes who advocate for more sustainable practices in the sport and encourage their peers to take a more active role in addressing environmental concerns. He also sits on World Athletics’ Sustainability Management Review Team and Steering Group, bringing the athletes’ voice to that decision-making table.
Through his personal experience and via stories from his peers, he knows sport is not incubated from the effects of climate change. “It’s a lot harder to be consistent throughout the year with our workouts, whether it’s forest fires and having more difficulty breathing because of the smoke, or extreme heat and changes in the weather,” he says. “Last year, when Canada had those massive wildfires, a lot of the smoke blew down to where I’m at in Pennsylvania, we also had a couple fires two miles from where I train, and that made practice really, really difficult.”
He believes the dial is shifting among athletes when it comes to awareness of the climate crisis.
Sam Mattis at the World Athletics sustainability display in Budapest
“Most of our championships the last few years have come during extreme heat events,” he says. “There’s a broad acknowledgement of climate change making things difficult and I think the next step is getting people to communicate that to people who follow them and trying to get their organisations and (national governing bodies) to take action.”
Mattis thinks back to the US Olympic Trials in 2021, when temperatures in Eugene soared above 43C/110F. “Some athletes were getting burns on their hands and knees on the starting blocks,” he says. “It’s almost impossible to find someone who’s been completely insulated from the effects of climate change. Everyone is aware of it enough that they connect it to climate change rather than saying, ‘Oh, it’s just some weird weather.’ There’s something weird and bad just about every year that’s new and worse than the last year.”
Mattis’s first involvement in sustainability practices in the sport came when he took part in a survey conducted by World Athletics in 2022 in which more than 76% of athletes said they were very concerned about climate change. A survey the following year found 85% of athletes believed athletics has been impacted by climate change, up from 72% in 2022, while 77% and 83% of athletes, respectively, said they were either extremely concerned or very concerned about the climate crisis and air pollution.
In Zurich ahead of the 2022 Wanda Diamond League Final, Mattis took part in a workshop organised by World Athletics that sparked his interest in becoming one of the Champions for a Better World. Last November, he spoke remotely as part of an athlete panel at COP29, the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
US discus thrower Sam Mattis adding his tree to a crowd-sourced painting in the Green Zone in Budapest (© Bob Ramsak)
He says it was “amazing” to be a part of that and he learned much about the role sport should play in this area: “It crosses political divides and can speak to so many people. Athletes are really inspiring figures for a lot of people because of our work ethic and the dedication we have to have. We can use that to inspire people to take action.
“Sport can have a positive impact on climate change, whether that’s using our voice to communicate to fans or encouraging organisations to step up and transition to clean energy, or being proactive about sponsorships or net-zero plans.”
Mattis notes that among athletes, “everybody’s at their own individual point” when it comes to taking action but he says “a lot of people are closer to that point now than they were a couple of years ago.”
He’s been encouraged by the progress he’s seen around sustainability in recent years. “They have a grading scale now of the World Athletics sanctioned events – recognised from bronze to silver, gold and platinum – and you score up to platinum depending on certain steps you take as an organising committee or your sustainability measures, whether that’s encouraging public transportation or ditching single-use plastics and water bottles and having refill stations. That’s been very noticeable.”
Committing time to this cause has certainly had no negative impact on Mattis’s performances, the 31-year-old making a “dream start” to the 2025 season and setting personal bests in his first three competitions – the best being his 71.27m throw in Ramona in April, which moved him to second on the US all-time list.
“We’ve been super mindful of everything we do in training, from diet to quality of sleep and obviously the actual training,” he says. “It’s all paying off.”
Mattis made the world final in 2019 and 2022 and the Olympic final in Tokyo in 2021, finishing eighth, but having never truly nailed his best on the biggest stage, he hopes to do just that on his likely return to the Japanese capital in September. “I would love to really try to reach my potential and do that at a World Championships,” he says. “I’ve made finals, but not done what I thought I could do.”
His plan for the rest of the season is “hopefully continuing to train, get better day by day, and then show up when it counts.”
And away from the throwing circle, he will continue to use his platform to advocate for positive change.
“It’s all of our responsibilities to fight for a better world, not for ourselves but for future generations and for the generations before us that have been through really, really tough times,” he says. “We’re for the most part living pretty privileged lives compared to what most people used to live, so thinking about the people who came before and after us is really important, and every step we take makes things better in the future.”
Despite the severity of the situation, Mattis retains hope, knowing climate change is a huge issue for the younger generation, with 74% of athletes surveyed at last year’s World Athletics U20 Championships saying they were extremely concerned or very concerned about it. “I think everybody always looks to youth for hope,” says Mattis. “I would love if the not-youth would take some steps to make the world a better place.”
In the meantime, he’ll do what he can to raise his voice and encourages others to do the same.
“If you do one small thing, is it going to fix climate change? No, but that can ripple out and inspire other people to do good,” he says. “Thinking about those ripple effects keeps me going.”
Cathal Dennehy for World Athletics
