The race walker, who placed third in the 2024 Olympics in Paris, had to figure out how to manage her career as a professional athlete and her advocacy for environmental sustainability.
“I have known about climate change since I was a young child, but in Australia, we had these huge bushfires in 2019 and 2020 that burned for months on end,” Cowley told the news.
“The ‘Black Summer’ was what we termed it. It was extremely upsetting that for many days, cities like Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane were just suffocated with smoke and that it was nearly poisonous to step outdoors.
Over the last year, the 33-year-old has taken on the role of spokesperson for the external Rings of Fire report, sharing his own experiences with heat and competitiveness to draw attention to the effects that climate change has on sportsmen.
He stated that during COVID, when we were confined indoors and had some alone time to reflect, I came to the realization that climate change would not resolve itself.
I can’t sit back and let someone else handle it. I have to go provide a hand outside.
