A few years ago, Jon Wyatt took a call from a professor at Ghent University in Belgium that changed his whole outlook on how to approach sustainability in his sport.

You see, field hockey had – and still has – a big water problem. One field can require up to 10-15,000 litres of water before it’s ready to play on. Multiply that by the number of hockey fields around the world, take into account the issues multiple places have with water scarcity globally, and it’s clear that the status quo can no longer continue.

Wyatt, the director of sport and sustainability at the International Hockey Federation (FIH), recognised this and put out a call to the industry to come up with a type of turf that doesn’t require water.

Then one day, he received a call from Professor Dagmar D’hooge of the university’s Department of Materials, Textiles and Chemical Engineering, who told him that the turf didn’t need to be changed at all. The answer was in the ball.

“He told me he could reduce water consumption down to five or 10 litres, and I asked him how he was going to spread that amount of water over a football-sized pitch!,” Wyatt recounts. “‘We’re going to put the water inside the ball’ he said.”

D’hooge and his team had developed a “self-wetting ball” that releases water when it comes into contact with friction, giving the ball the same fast and consistent roll that a wet pitch would. It was piloted at the FIH World Hockey5s Championship in Oman to acclaim from many of the athletes using it.

Adapt and grow

Acknowledging that the ball is “just part of the solution”, Wyatt adds: “The current challenge is now the sole of the show. The current grip of the sole is used to a wet surface and now it is going to be drier with much higher friction, which leads to a risk of injury.

“That’s why when we talk about sustainability, we talk about it in terms of sustainable performance.”

Wyatt tells The Sustainability Report that the challenges thrown at sport by the climate crisis and other environmental risks should be embraced and recognised as an opportunity to adapt and grow stronger. The lack of a totally wet pitch may limit players’ ability to “slide around everywhere”, but it gives them the opportunity to hone their skills in other areas, Wyatt says.

This open-minded and innovation-first approach to sustainability has helped the FIH gain recognition as the ‘most improved’ international federation based on criteria set by the Sport Ecology Group researchers and the organisation’s progress between the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2021 and Paris 2024.

If we’re continuing to talk water, Wyatt explains that, between the 2016 Games in Rio and Tokyo, the FIH managed to reduce the amount of water used on turf at its events by 40%, with a similar reduction between Tokyo and Paris.

More broadly, the FIH has put in place a number of governance mechanisms that means sustainability is part of the conversation when big decisions are getting made. It released its sustainability strategy, based on People, Planet and Prosperity, in late-2022, signed the UNFCCC Sports for Climate Action Framework and offered the sustainability brief to Wyatt, then director of sport, after he noticed and reported on a pattern: athletes wanted to know what the FIH was doing about climate change.

“I was spending a lot of time with athletes and I started to get all these questions about sustainability,” he says. “I started to dig around and the word sustainability didn’t feature anywhere; it wasn’t part of the vernacular. But, in the broadest sense of sustainability, which I know encompasses a lot, we were doing quite a bit.”

With the International Olympic Committee (IOC) asking questions as well, the FIH found itself in a “pincer movement” with pressure from the top as well as pressure from below regarding the athletes.

“There’s nothing like the IOC taking a subject seriously for an IF to start taking it seriously as well,” Wyatt laughs. “So without any initial expertise but a lot of passion, I took it on.”

Task force

Shortly after taking over the brief, the former Olympian set up a task force with board member backing and representation from across the globe to start sketching out what a sustainability vision could look like.

The culmination of that work was the creation and publication of the FIH’s first sustainability strategy, titled ‘A Sustainability Strategy for Hockey’, which includes several targets around water, climate and material consumption. But, more than that, the sustainability journey embarked on by Wyatt and his task force helped to uncover good work and practice being undertaken by national federations and other hockey institutions across the globe, which were turned into a selection of case studies on the FIH website.

And while the FIH’s work is just beginning, Wyatt is clear that hockey will only be able to have an optimal positive impact on the whole ecosystem – from suppliers, to federations, to clubs – is supporting the movement. Poligras, which is supplying the turf for the Paris Olympics, has developed what it has called the “world’s first and only carbon zero hockey turf” at the request of the FIH. And Wyatt suggests further collaborations in this area.

“If we change the rules of our sport to facilitate sustainable innovation, that changes demand and our suppliers will be more likely to invest in research and development,” he says. “It’s very much a partnership between us and the industry.”

Wyatt adds: “I feel we’ve done a reasonable job of setting a global direction. We have five continental members and 140 national members, and we need to start filtering down the work we’ve done so that we’re consistently delivering. There’s some cultural and behaviour change that would need to filter down – if we get millions of people doing something small, that makes a massive difference.”

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