The organisers of the Olympics have always been into appearances and grand theatre. And the International Olympic Committee has always been keen in keeping them up, from the barely credible notion of political neutrality to the now popular goal of carbon neutrality. In 2015, the IOC decided to fully hop on the sustainability bandwagon, though it claimed to have been "an important topic for the IOC for many years". Indeed, in the 1990s, the body echoed the sentiments of the UN's sustainable development plan Agenda 21 by publishing
Olympic Movement's Agenda 21, though that report displays, rather prominently, the company logo of the oil behemoth Shell. Sustainable development was, according to the then IOC chief Juan Antonio Samaranch, "totally in conformity with the goal of Olympism, which is to place everywhere sport at the service of the harmonious development of man."