#073 The Biggest Sports Story

Climate, business & a sense of ultimate success, with Amy Steel & Lily Brazel

Amy Steel and Lily Brazel are outstanding international athletes. Well, Amy was. Until a heat stroke after a pre-season game prematurely ended her career. Still suffering the effects today, she’s set upon a path of working with big business to help achieve perhaps humanity’s greatest milestone - meeting the Paris Climate Agreements. Amy’s quickly established herself as Senior Manager, Sustainability and Climate Change at Deloitte, while also being a global Ambassador for EcoAthletes and the Australian Sports Environment Alliance.

“You find that story that connects with you, right to your core sense of purpose. And you feel like that is a message that you can take home and do something with. Rather than just watching something and going, ok, interesting, that was a good episode of Friends - what’s for dinner?”

— Amy Steel

Lily’s a slightly different story. Still at the outset of her international sports career, as part of the Hockeyroos – the successful Australian women’s hockey team – Lily was in training for the postponed Tokyo Olympics. This was a lifelong dream. But dropping a bombshell just prior to this conversation, she revealed she’s resigned from the team. In Lily’s case, it was the start of her international career that was transformative. And living by her values is forging a changing path. That path includes founding a business called Stature Clothing, a sports clothing brand with the mantra to ‘repair, repurpose and regenerate – that waste is not an option’.

Leading into the next Australian summer here again evokes images of last summer’s horror fires. Caught up in that cataclysmic event were mass cancellations of sporting events, and extensive damage to sporting facilities and clubs across the country. Since then, the northern hemisphere fires, and of course the related pandemic (another symptom of destabilised planetary conditions), rammed home the message - just how vulnerable we are on our current trajectory. That has spurred another level of engagement by sports people and organisations everywhere, to help us change that trajectory. Sport is such an important, enlivening and powerful part of societies everywhere, so the value of sport in this transition can’t be understated.

Here’s my conversation with two international athletes who have felt all this acutely, and are stepping up in brilliant ways.

Pics below: supplied. Click on the photos for full view.