Beach volleyballer Lina Yanchulova-Taylor on the ‘Olympic mindset’ that helped her step-up climate action through education
As one of four winners of the 2024 IOC Climate Action Award, she shares with Olympics.com, how she is raising awareness in sports by coaching athletes and NOCs on their roles to mitigate the negative environmental impacts on and off their fields of play.
Beach Volleyball
Bulgaria’s two-time beach volleyball Olympian Lina Yanchulova-Taylor wasn’t quite ready to leave the sport behind.
But she had felt her priorities changing from the need to ‘create a better life’ for herself to ‘creating a better planet’.
Her mentality shift as an athlete was huge, and after years of learning how to hit on the beach, she decided to use her background as a scientist to balance her love for athleticism with research.
“When I thought about my experience as an athlete, I realised that as athletes, we are learning some very important skills that can actually be the bridge to the wider society being able to solve the climate crisis,” she tells Olympics.com in a recent interview from her home in San Diego.
“I realised that just like sport was a vehicle for me to create a better life, now sport is becoming a vehicle to create a better planet.”
Her relentless desire to win her matches during her playing career carried on, as Yanchulova-Taylor began her new role as a Climate Executive coach, training individuals on environmental solutions.
“I realised that the end of my career is the beginning of the rest of my life, and I became excited about it. I realised that just like sport was a vehicle for me to create a better life, now sport is becoming a vehicle to create a better planet.”
Her work off the court has contributed to addressing climate change inside and outside the sporting world. Her efforts were recently recognised by the IOC as one of the four winners of the 2024 IOC Climate Action Award which rewards innovative projects from National Olympic Committes (NOCs), International Federations and athletes that are aimed at reducing the environmental impact of sports while inspiring the entire Olympic movement to take action.
How the Olympics inspired Lina Yanchulova-Taylor to learn a new sport
For Yanchulova-Taylor, putting her energy towards sports was the most natural thing to do as an active child growing up in Sofia.
Watching the Olympics sparked her passion for beach volleyball after years of playing the indoor version.
“When I saw beach volleyball on TV for the first time, I hadn't even tried playing it before. I had already graduated from college, and I was working full-time in a laboratory with a big white coat and a hairnet,” she told us.
“And then, when I saw this exciting sport on TV, I said, 'this is what I want to do...I want to play beach volleyball in the Olympics'.”
Taking advantage of her strength and prowess in indoor volleyball, where she had won the national title four times with her club Levski, she got back training, doing what she had done for many years.
The 5ft 11 inches [180cm] outside hitter, who also played for the University of Idaho, teamed up with her sister Petia Yanchulova. They competed professionally on the Beach Volleyball World Tour, which culminated in their Olympic qualification for Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004.
“Playing with my sister, that was a really interesting combination, and we had our ups and downs, but we always came together in the tough moments and then also being able to face a challenge and work on it and overcome it. That's another thing that I really miss, being on a team, having my teammates around me,” the 49-year-old warmly recalled the joy and pressure of competitions.
**“**We got to see the most beautiful places, the most pristine places. But then it was also kind of disheartening to see all the damage that humans have done to a lot of those beautiful places on our planet.”
Lina Yanchulova of Bugaria dives for the ball during a beach volleyball match in 2001.
Lina Yanchulova-Taylor: ‘Applying the sustainability lens in what you do, helps solve the climate change challenge’
These thoughts opened a new frontier for Yanchulova-Taylor. Consumed by her scientist passion, she committed herself to addressing climate change.
"I was having a lot of success in my professional life, being an executive coach for some of the biggest companies in the world, I started realising that we have to address this challenge of climate and sustainability from the many different angles that our society is built on. And at first it was a little bit frustrating,” she admitted, "I didn't exactly know how I could contribute to this challenge.But then I thought, ‘Well, if I do what I'm already good at, but apply this sustainability lens to it, then this is exactly what we need to do all around the world’."
"So no matter what our role in society is, whether we are mums, whether we are athletes, whether we work in the corporate world or in cities and governments, if we apply the sustainability lens and do what we're already good at, this is how we get to solve the challenge.”-Lina Yanchulova-Taylor to Olympics.com
Using her non-profit Climate Executive Coaching, the former Olympian who is married to retired NFL offensive lineman Aaron Taylor, began championing climate action through science-based climate education, professional coaching and collaboration with professionals from government, corporations and NGOs.
“I thought that what if I could select different projects that are working on these three different areas that contribute to climate solutions? And what if I could make executive coaching, professional coaching, leadership development available to initiatives and people that are working on these three areas? That’s how I was able to plug my own strengths into finding different solutions.”
Lina Yanchulova-Taylor on the role of athletes in the fight against climate change
The symbiotic connection between sports and environment, and her ever present appreciation of nature whenever she practised sport also influenced her choices.
“I thought about my experience as an athlete, I realised that as athletes, we are learning some very important skills that can actually be the bridge to the wider society being able to solve the climate crisis,” said the retired volleyballer, who is passionately supporting fellow athletes and NOCs, coaching them individually on climate solutions.
“You can see the connection to nature very closely when you look at beach volleyball. You can ask yourself, ‘we want to play this sport for a long time. Well, if we have rising sea levels, some of those beautiful beaches that we have, and we're taking for granted right now, they may disappear’. This shouldn't scare us. It should motivate us to do everything that's within our power.”
She became acutely aware of simple things, for instance, the impact of artificial light at night in marine ecosystems, that tend to attract hatchlings away from the oceans and interfere with their daily habits like eating and mating.
“If a competition is held on a natural beach, you can think about what lights are we leaving on during the night and is that going to be confusing to marine life that depend on light to navigate back to the sea,” she expounded.
“You can see little turtles instead of going to the sea, when they see light, they may be directed to a venue or something?” It doesn't have to be a lot of big changes that we have to do all at once, it could be small, little things. Every sport has an opportunity because they're played in different environments, even indoor sports, they can have an opportunity to make positive changes within the cities that they're being played at.”