GSSport24 Speaker

Ukaleq Slettemark, OLY

Olympian and Biathlete

My name is Ukaleq Slettemark and I’m a 22 year old biathlete from Nuuk, Greenland. I grew up doing all sorts of sports, going skiing every weekend and hunting in the summer, but I started competitive sports quite late. When I was 15 I participated in Arctic Winter Games because Greenland was in need of representatives in biathlon. I won all races, fell in love with the sport, but because there are no shooting ranges in Greenland, I moved to Norway to pursue it there. The Greenlandic national team is very small, it basically consists of me, my brothers and my parents. So when we compete in the World Cup and IBU cup it’s basically a family trip. My best results so far is a gold medal in the 2019 jr. World Championships, a 21st place in World Cup and a qualification to the 2022 Olympics.

Growing up, climate change was often discussed at the dinner table, we rarely threw away food, always biked everywhere instead of taking the car, and wore a lot of secondhand clothing. However, my own sustainability journey didn’t start until I was about 17, when I learned about the clothing industry, and I quickly decided to never buy new clothing again. After this, it has been small steps to try and reduce my own emissions wherever I can. In 2022 I decided that it wasn’t enough that I just sat in my own bubble making my own personal decisions, I had to share them with others to make an impact, so I started posting on social media whenever I made some progress, or made an active choice to be more sustainable. It could be whenever I repaired some training clothing or equipment instead of discarding, using up food that most people would throw out, being self sufficient in food, keeping food containers to reuse. It didn’t really matter that it was small things, what mattered was that my followers saw the choices, and saw that this was something I cared about. I applied for the IBU sustainability ambassador program because I wanted to be a part of something bigger, and to learn more about what was happening behind the scenes in the IBU. I found that talking to like minded people, and posting about it on social media, has inspired me and given me hope. Now I make an effort to buy everything I need secondhand, and I’ve slowly changed my diet for a plant based one. I also dumpsterdive almost all my groceries.

In my journey I found that I really cared about this issue, and felt a lot of anxiety about it, but it wasn’t until I actually talked to people and heard what concrete actions they were taking, that I got pushed towards making changes. So I hope everyone who are making conscious choices are daring to be open about it with friends, family and on social media, because this is what pushes change! Just telling someone “I’m trying to eat less meat” or “I’m not going going to fly out of the country this summer” is more powerful than you think