Activist Athletes Flex Their Power

Swimmer Tara Kirk has filmed a public service announcement against overfishing for WildAid, a nonprofit devoted to ending illegal wildlife trade. Other athletes featured in the group's "World Champions for Wildlife" campaign include swimmer Amanda Beard, Ethiopian world marathon winner Haile Gebrselassie and Houston Rockets basketball star Yao Ming, China's most famous export (and the sport's tallest player at 7 feet, 6 inches). WildAid's Hollywood-produced PSAs matching celebrities with exotic animals are being shown in 80 countries, and are reaching some one billion people a week by organization estimates. With China the largest importer of illegal wildlife products -- including tiger bone and skin, ivory and shark fin -- the summer Olympics in Beijing has offered the group a way to target the exact demographic that's responsible for much of the loss of the world's most endangered species.

"I grew up around the ocean," says Aaron Peirsol, the boyishly handsome three-time Olympic gold medal swimmer. Peirsol wanted to work with a conservation organization and found a ready partner in Oceana, an international group dedicated to protecting the world's oceans and its inhabitants, whose board of directors includes actor-activists Ted Danson and Sam Waterson. The nonprofit has set Peirsol up with his own campaign and website, Race for the Oceans, to directly link his training efforts with fundraising for their causes.

For other Olympic athletes, an environmental cause offers an outlet -- a way beyond the confines of their sport and the rigors of daily training. Twenty-eight-year-old gymnast David Durante has spent the last four years living at an Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs with some 170 resident athletes who train year-round for both the summer and winter games. He formed the OTC Green (Olympic Training Center Green) committee, made up of himself, a cyclist, a fencer, a pentathlete, a shooter, a wrestler and a wrestling coach. Their goals, he says, are to green the facilities, starting with the athletes.

...