Elite Sport's Hidden Waste: How Unused Olympic Kit Gets a Second Life

An Olympic athlete trains for years, sacrifices everything, and finally earns the right to wear the official kit. But somewhere in a warehouse on England's south coast, boxes of that same clothing sit unopened—tracksuit bottoms, jackets, hoodies, ceremonial wear from Paris 2024 and Milan Cortina 2026, all pristine, all unworn. This is the hidden cost of elite sport: the surplus that never reaches an athlete's body.

The scale is staggering. A sustainability consultancy called 5thread estimates that up to 100,000 items of sports kit end up in UK landfill every year. UEFA, the European football governing body, reckons that as much as 60% of professional team apparel gets disposed of at the end of each season—though that figure has never been independently verified. The waste spans the entire ecosystem, from national Olympic committees to individual clubs, and much of it never even enters a measurable waste stream because it sits in warehouses or athletes' garages, invisible to counting.

The reasons are structural, not careless. Joanna Czutkowna, a director at 5thread and doctoral researcher in sports apparel and the circular economy, explains that organizations often order kit before they know which athletes will actually compete. That creates excess stock at the moment of purchase. Sponsorship contracts also contain what's called "value in kind"—meaning suppliers provide free product rather than cash—which can create a perverse incentive to order more than needed. Performance requirements complicate things further. Athletes need clothing engineered to help them compete, so simply ordering less or switching materials isn't always an option. Then there are the contracts themselves: some explicitly prohibit reuse because sponsors don't want surplus gear flooding the market or because they're holding back a particular innovation.

For British kitesurfer Lily Young, preparing for a shot at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, the pressure to find any competitive edge means trying equipment that ultimately doesn't make the cut. "You end up with a lot of waste, a lot of things where you're like, 'this is basically brand new, but it's not quite good enough to maybe win,'" she says. When sponsors change, athletes are left with clothing they can no longer wear. Young and her peers have passed gear to younger squad members and youth teams, but there's a gap between what elite athletes need and what could genuinely help someone trying to enter the sport.

Now organizations are beginning to close that gap. Team GB has partnered with Kitround, a specialist resale platform, to redirect surplus clothing and unsold merchandise. The initial launch includes 700 items from Paris 2024, with proceeds supporting the Team GB Foundation. Adam Stevens, Kitround's co-founder, notes that sponsorship agreements remain financially crucial to sport, but there are ways to honor those contracts while still allowing clothing to be used again. "There are an awful lot of people, whatever sport they do, whatever teams they support, who simply can't afford to buy new," he says.

Team GB is also rethinking how it orders in the first place. Jen Rouse, managing director of the Team GB Foundation, says the organization is becoming more precise about quantities and exploring ways to produce clothing without dates or event-specific names, so garments can be worn across multiple Olympic cycles. Athletes are being given the option to return clothing they no longer need. Rouse pushes back against the idea that excess kit has simply accumulated unused: "It's always found a way out," she says.

The broader shift is toward what Czutkowna calls "common sense"—a waste-not, want-not approach to kit that keeps clothing in circulation through reuse, repair, and resale. Sail GP and the Royal Yachting Association are already using specialist platforms to sell second-hand elite equipment to the public at much lower prices. For Stevens, the principle is straightforward: "A kit was made to be worn. It was made to be out there on the field, on the water, in the pool, and it should be back out there." The question now is whether enough organizations will embrace that logic before the next Olympic cycle begins.