The Arctic Race of Norway (ARN) returns to the roads of Northern Norway this week, once again selling professional cycling against the backdrop of some of Europe’s most spectacular Arctic landscapes.
But the 2026 version of what the sport director of the biggest Norwegian cycling team, Uno-X Thor Hushovd, calls the “most beautiful race in the world, comes with the caveat that the Arctic region remains one of the largest and rapidly altering regions globally.
The 2026 race
The four-stage race runs from August 13 to 16, entirely above the Arctic Circle, travelling through Nordland and the islands of Vesterålen and Andøya before finishing in Narvik.
The race’s organisers have also positioned the event as a leader in sustainable sport. ARN says it has operated with a fully electric vehicle fleet since 2023, has introduced dedicated waste-collection zones and holds Norway’s Eco-Lighthouse environmental certification.
But as the 2026 edition begins, the race’s green credentials face a more difficult question: how sustainable can an international sporting event be when its headline environmental achievement sits alongside a much larger transport footprint — and when its main partner is Norway’s state-owned oil and gas company, Equinor?
A race taking place in a rapidly changing Arctic
The ARN is unusual among professional cycling events because the environment is not simply a backdrop.
The race deliberately takes place in some of the Arctic’s most spectacular landscapes, helping promote Northern Norway to an international audience.
But the Arctic landscapes are among the fastest warming and rapidly altering places around the world.
The 2025 Arctic Report Card produced by the US government agency National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that the Arctic experienced its warmest October-to-September period since records began in 1900.
The report also found that the last 10 years have been the Arctic’s 10 warmest on record, while Arctic temperatures have been increasing at more than twice the global rate since 2006.
The same report recorded the lowest Arctic winter sea-ice maximum in the 47-year satellite record in March 2025, while precipitation across the Arctic reached a record high.
Against this backdrop, the race’s celebration of Northern Norway’s landscapes comes with an increasingly obvious climate question: what happens to the environment that makes the Arctic Race so attractive if climate change continues to accelerate?
The Arctic Race’s sustainability push
There is substance behind the organisers’ sustainability claims.
ARN says the transition towards electric vehicles began in 2019 and that the race became fully powered by electric vehicles in 2023.
Its current fleet includes 125 Hyundai electric vehicles serving organisers and cycling teams, supported by mobile charging infrastructure supplied by Kempower.
But ARN’s claims are met with scepticism around how ambitious this really is, considering over 90% of all cars sold in Norway are electric, and the majority of cars on the roads in the country are too.
The organisers describe the initiative as making ARN the first professional cycling race to operate with a fully electric fleet.
The race has also introduced dedicated waste-collection zones along its route and promotes recycling and circular-economy initiatives through partnerships with companies including Mack and Infinitum.
ARN has held Eco-Lighthouse certification since 2021, a Norwegian environmental certification scheme intended to help organisations reduce their environmental impact and improve environmental management.
These measures should not be dismissed. Professional cycling is a travelling sport with considerable logistical requirements, and replacing a large proportion of support vehicles with electric alternatives is a meaningful intervention.
But this does not tell us the full story.
An electric fleet does not make a race carbon neutral
A new analysis by Cycling Weekly has highlighted the wider environmental footprint behind the Arctic Race’s electric-vehicle achievement.
According to the race’s 2025 environmental audit, the event used 130 electric vehicles but also required 92 diesel vans and heavy vehicles. The audit also recorded 690 national and international flights and 18 speedboat trips.
That illustrates the central challenge facing professional sport: reducing emissions from one visible part of an event does not necessarily mean reducing its overall footprint to the same degree.
The electric fleet is therefore an important sustainability measure, but it should not be confused with a zero-emission race.
For the Arctic Race, the next step could be to publish a transparent annual assessment of its total event emissions — including vehicles, flights, accommodation, freight and marine transport — alongside its progress in reducing them.
The Equinor paradox
The most difficult question surrounding the Arctic Race’s environmental credentials, however, is its main sponsor.
Equinor has been the race’s main partner since its launch in 2013, but was back then called Statoil, meaning ‘state-oil’.
Equinor is not simply failing to move away from oil and gas quickly enough; its latest strategy explicitly prioritises continued oil and gas production while reducing the scale of its previous renewable ambitions.
The history of ARN and Equinor’s relationship
In 2024, the company and the Arctic Race extended their partnership through 2030, meaning Equinor/Statoil will have supported the event for 18 consecutive years.
ARN’s current partner page describes Equinor as an international energy company committed to value creation in a low-carbon future. It also notes the company’s plans for new projects in the Barents Sea and Norwegian Sea.
Equinor’s greenwashing tactics
This is where the company’s sustainability narrative becomes much more complicated.
Equinor is investing in renewable energy and has reduced emissions from its own operations. But the scale of its fossil-fuel business remains vastly larger than its renewable-energy activities — and the company’s own investment strategy increasingly makes that contrast difficult to ignore.
In 2025, Equinor produced 780 million barrels of oil (bbl) equivalent of oil and gas on an equity basis, while generating 3.67 terawatt hours (TWh) of renewable electricity.
Its annual report, which converts different forms of energy into a common fossil-fuel-equivalent measure, recorded 4.47 million terajoules (TJ) from oil and gas production compared with 34,279 TJ from renewables.
Equinor’s capital allocation tells a similar story. The company spent $13.1 billion on organic capital expenditure in 2025, including $2.9 billion classified as investment in renewables and low-carbon solutions.
However, that latter figure includes low-carbon activities beyond renewable energy itself.
Why are Equinor abandoning its renewable energy targets?
More significantly, Equinor’s strategy has been moving away from some of its previous renewable-energy ambitions.
The company had previously targeted 10–12 GW of installed renewable capacity by 2030. In June 2026, it abandoned that target altogether.
Instead, Equinor now plans to build an integrated Power business combining renewable energy with gas-fired power generation, energy storage and trading.
The company expects to allocate around 10% of its capital expenditure to this wider Power business between 2028 and 2030, with power production expected to rise to more than 20 TWh by 2030.
At the same time, Equinor plans to allocate around 60% of its capital expenditure to the Norwegian continental shelf and a further 30% to international oil and gas projects.
In other words, the company’s own current strategy envisages around 90% of its capital spending going towards the oil and gas business, compared with around 10% towards its broader Power business.
And Equinor plans to increase, rather than reduce, its oil and gas production. It now expects production to reach 2.3 million barrels of oil equivalent per day by 2030, an increase of 150,000 barrels per day (bpd) from current levels.
This is difficult to reconcile with the image of a company rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuels.
Equinor has also reduced its operational emissions. Its operated Scope 1 and 2 emissions fell 34% between 2015 and 2025, to 10.1 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, and it retains an ambition to halve these emissions by 2030.
But the emissions associated with the use of its products remain on a completely different scale. Equinor reported 258 million tonnes of Scope 3 emissions from the use of sold products in 2025.
Reducing the emissions generated by producing oil and gas is not the same as reducing the emissions generated when that oil and gas is ultimately burned.
For a company sponsoring a cycling event that promotes itself as one of the world’s greenest races, that distinction matters.
Sportswashing or a complicated partnership?
Environmental campaigners have argued that fossil-fuel companies use high-profile sports sponsorships to associate their brands with popular, positive and environmentally friendly activities.
The Arctic Race is particularly interesting in this respect because the environmental message is so central to the event itself.
Cycling Weekly’s recent investigation quoted Marius Heide, a Green Party councillor in Harstad, arguing that the emissions savings achieved through the race’s electric cars are tiny compared with the emissions associated with Equinor’s oil and gas business.
The cycling publication also highlighted the unusually close relationship between Equinor and the race. Equinor has supported the event since its beginning, while Harstad — the home of the race’s co-organiser — has a long history with the company and its predecessor Statoil.
That does not mean the Arctic Race’s sustainability initiatives are meaningless.
However, it does raise a legitimate question about whether the sustainability benefits of an event can be separated from the wider activities and reputation of the company funding it and what genuine sustainable achievements the race organisers are actually achieving.
What would a genuinely low-carbon Arctic Race look like?
The Arctic Race has already demonstrated that major elements of professional cycling’s transport infrastructure can be electrified, but not on its own; for the past three years, the fleet Uno-X, brought to Tour de France, the world’s largest cycling race, been largely electric.
Genuine emission reduction efforts
The next challenge is to address the parts of the event that are harder to decarbonise.
That could mean reducing the number of flights required by teams, organisers and media; setting a target date for replacing remaining diesel vehicles; minimising marine transport; increasing the use of lower-carbon accommodation and logistics; and publishing a complete annual carbon footprint, with year-on-year targets for reducing it.
It could also mean asking a more fundamental question about its sponsorship and setting company requirements if they want to continue their sponsorship.
The missing piece around legacy
And crucially, it should be about legacy too, creating long-lasting investments in the areas it travels through, such as the creation and establishment of new protected forests and woodlands, biodiversity-enhancing initiatives, clean energy deployment, sustainable education-focused permanent installations, and fundamentally the promotion of active mobility such as cycle lanes, hiking and water trails, children’s sustainable adventure and sports facilities and forest schools.
If professional cycling wants to position itself as part of the climate solution, should fossil-fuel companies continue to be among the most prominent sponsors of its sustainability-focused events?
The Arctic Race of Norway provides a particularly vivid case study because the contradiction is so visible.
A peloton of cyclists travelling through a rapidly warming Arctic, supported by a pioneering electric fleet, offers a powerful image of a cleaner sporting future.
But behind that image lies an international transport operation and a long-term partnership with a company whose business remains overwhelmingly based on fossil fuels.
The Arctic Race may therefore be genuinely greener than many other professional sporting events.
The harder question is whether it is green enough.
Anders Lorenzen is the founding Editor of A greener life, a greener world.
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