Robert Milkins and Joe Perry were playing their first-round tie in the World Snooker Championship Monday when a man ran down the arena floor, leapt onto the table, and emptied a bag of bright orange power over the green baize.
The man was accompanied by a female protestor who tried to glue herself to the other table but was stopped by the referee before she could bind herself to the fixture.
The sudden intrusion took both the players and the crowd in attendance at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England by surprise. However, the purpose of the protest became apparent moments later by the message emblazoned across the man’s t-shirt: Just Stop Oil.
The incursion was a political protest—the latest in a trend of Green Rage disruptions taking place across UK sports.
Soon afterwards, World Snooker declared that the table cloth had been damaged beyond repair and would need to be replaced overnight. Play was suspended while footage of the incident went viral on social media.
According to its website, Just Stop Oil is a UK-based environmental group founded in 2022 that uses “civil resistance” and “direct action” to pressure the British government to halt new fossil fuel licensing and production. The group is best known for a series of protests targeting public art galleries where activists glued themselves to famous works and, in one instance, threw tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 work The Arles Sunflowers.
This is not the first time that Just Stop Oil has disrupted a UK sports event. An activist representing the group previously attached himself to a goalpost during an Everton vs Newcastle United game on March 17, 2022. He used a metal zip-tie to attach himself to the goalpost by his neck and stayed there from several minutes until he was cut free and removed by officials.
Four months later, five activists from the group snuck onto the track at the 2022 British Grand Prix during the opening lap of the race. The campaigners were quickly dragged off the circuit by security.
While Just Stop Oil’s initial targets were obvious choices—Newcastle United is sponsored by Saudi Aramco, the kingdom’s oil and natural gas company, while the Formula 1 remains one of the biggest gas guzzlers in sports—it wasn’t immediately clear why the environmental activists had targeted the World Snooker Championships? Why snooker? And what was the sport’s connection to oil and gas?
In an article published Tuesday, a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil explained the group’s reasoning
“Why not snooker? Why should any cultural expression be outside the domain of climate action? Nothing is safe from climate breakdown. No-one gets a pass from the collapse of the life systems that make human society possible in the first place. You can’t sit comfortably and spectate while life breaks down around you: this crisis makes neutrality impossible.”
In a sense, they have a point. Sports have long been utilized as platforms to champion causes or raise awareness about socio-economic and political issues.
More often than not, the concept of political protests in sports makes spectators uncomfortable, as it distracts from their enjoyment and forces them to wrestle with difficult topics they would rather ignore. It challenges their views and threatens their favorite form of escapism. And while some critics argue that such disruptive protests do little to change peoples’ minds, there is also a case to be made that a protest that is not disruptive is hardly a protest at all.
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