The annual Harvard-Yale football game was delayed for almost an hour on Saturday as climate change activists rushed the field at the end of halftime.

Unfurling banners with slogans like “Nobody wins. Yale and Harvard are complicit in climate injustice,” protesters from both schools called on the universities to divest their multi-million dollar endowments from fossil fuels companies, as well as companies that hold Puerto Rican debt.

Clad in winter coats and hats, about 150 students sprawled around the 50-yard line at Yale Bowl as loudspeaker announcements and police demanded protesters leave the field. As protesters clapped and chanted “disclose, divest and reinvest,” organizers say several hundred more fans left their seats in the stands to join in. By the time play resumed, several dozen people were issued misdemeanor summonses for disorderly conduct.

Harvard senior Caleb Schwartz, one of the protest organizers who was arrested on Saturday, told NPR the mood on the field was joyful, despite the possibility of arrest.

“That moment, when we saw people running onto the field was just really incredible,” he said. “I saw organizers around me crying because it was such a beautiful moment.”

“We know that we don’t have a lot of time to act to curb the effects of climate change, and the longer it takes for our universities to acknowledge their role in the climate crisis and accept responsibility, the longer the urgent action we need to take on climate change is going to be delayed,” he says.

Schwartz says the Harvard-Yale rivalry game has been played since 1875, and organizers knew alumni from all over the world would be tuning in.

“Although it was disruptive and some people were not too happy we were on the field, it was really important because our universities are just not listening to our voices and our generation’s calls for urgent climate action.”

In a statement, the student groups behind the protest, Fossil Free Yale, the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition and Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard, wrote:

“Harvard and Yale claim their goal is to create student leaders who can strive toward a more ‘just, fair, and promising world’ by ‘improving the world today and for future generations.’ Yet by continuing to invest in industries that mislead the public, smear academics, and deny reality, Harvard and Yale are complicit in tearing down that future.”

Harvard and Yale are not the first universities to face criticism over fossil fuel investments. The first campus divestment movements started at Swarthmore College in 2011. Harvard has repeatedly said it would not pursue divestment, while Yale has made some moves in recent years to consider climate change in its investment decisions.

Karen N. Peart, director of University Media Relations at Yale, told NPR in a statement:

“Yale stands firmly for the right to free expression. Today, students from Harvard and Yale expressed their views and delayed the start of the second half of the football game. We stand with the Ivy League in its statement that it is regrettable that the orchestrated protest came during a time when fellow students were participating in a collegiate career-defining contest and an annual tradition when thousands gather from around the world to enjoy and celebrate the storied traditions of both football programs and universities.”

Saturday’s protest during a marque rivalry football game attracted widespread attention, including tweets of support from several Democratic presidential candidates including Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The protest garnered so much interest, that Schwartz changed his bus ticket back to Cambridge on Saturday so he could stay and field the deluge of media inquiries.

“We will win this fight, and we will get the university to divest,” he told NPR from his bus home. “I truly don’t think it’s a question of if, it’s a question of when. And the more pressure we can put on them, the sooner they will.”

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Russia could find itself barred from the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games after international anti-doping regulators concluded that it has failed to comply with testing procedures by tampering with laboratory data and samples.

The World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, issued a statement late Friday, saying that it has sent a recommendation to its executive committee about Russian “non-compliance” with international testing standards. The executive committee is scheduled to meet on Dec. 9 to discuss the findings.

If the committee agrees Russia’s anti-doping agency, RUSADA, is non-compliant, the country could be banned next year as it has been for the past two games. However, Russia could appeal a decision made by WADA to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

NPR’s Tom Goldman reports that RUSADA was declared non-compliant before, touching off a long-running doping controversy:

“In 2015, the country’s drug testing lab was closed amidst revelations about a widespread state-sponsored doping system. RUSADA was reinstated in 2018. It was required to turn over data and samples for further drug testing. Two months ago, WADA found evidence some of the data was manipulated.”

At the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, 168 Russian athletes who passed anti-doping tests were not allowed to compete under the their country’s flag, but rather a banner saying Olympic Athlete from Russia.

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Jake Burton Carpenter, whose snowboard business and promotional efforts transformed the sport into a global sensation, died Wednesday at 65 from complications from cancer.

Carpenter, the founder of the iconic Burton Snowboards company, was born in 1954 — when snowboarding was radically different from what’s seen today. During the mid-1900’s, snowboards looked more like long sleds, with a light weight and nylon straps.

His attachment to snow stemmed from childhood ski trips with his family, which allowed him to escape school, where he said he was the “proverbial ‘underachiever’ and wise ass.”

“My dad sort of figured it might be something fun for a family to do when I was around seven or eight and he would take the whole family,” Carpenter told NPR’s How I Built This. “I just always had this attachment to snow, to me it meant no school.”

After graduating from college and jumping from job to job, Carpenter moved to Vermont in 1977 and started Burton Boards out of a barn where he was working. There, he started turning existing designs into the snowboards that have been used by global superstars such as Shaun White and Ayumu Hirano.

“He created bindings that attach you to the board so you can actually carve and control the board much better,” Vermont ski shop worker Fischer Van Golden said.

Carpenter’s initial goal was to use the company as a get-rich-quick scheme, but he later turned his attention to nurturing the sport.

“After a couple of years, it became much more important to me that I was right about the decision that there was a sport there,” Carpenter told StoryCorps. “And I focused not about my own material needs or accomplishments or whatever; I just thought about the sport.”

As time continued, Carpenter’s influence on the snow sports world grew. In 1983, he persuaded the Stratton Mountain ski resort in Vermont to open its slopes to snowboarders. By 1984, Burton Snowboards had become a major brand, with sales reaching $1 million.

Carpenter never let his business ruin his passion for snowboarding. He visited the slopes 100 days a year and snowboarded on six different continents.

It was this passion that helped him start a relationship with his future wife, Donna Gaston, in 1982. Ironically enough, she said her first experience snowboarding was “awful.” They married in 1983.

Together, they expanded Burton’s presence in the U.S. and eventually entered the Europe and Japanese markets, selling a vast array of snow sports gear. For their efforts in pioneering snowboarding, the Carpenters were inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 2007.

“Snowboarding brought kids back to the slopes, giving them a sport and a culture they could relate to, and Jake & Donna were a driving force behind the sport for over 30 years,” their Hall of Fame tribute said.

Carpenter is survived by his wife and three sons, George, Taylor and Timi Carpenter. Burton employees were informed of his passing on Thursday. In typical fashion, they were asked to honor their late founder by going snowboarding.

Paolo Zialcita is an intern on NPR’s Newsdesk.

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Jake Burton Carpenter, whose snowboard business and promotional efforts transformed the sport into a global sensation, died Wednesday at 65 from complications from cancer.

Carpenter, the founder of the iconic Burton Snowboards company, was born in 1954 — when snowboarding was radically different from what’s seen today. During the mid-1900s, snowboards looked more like long sleds, with a light weight and nylon straps.

His attachment to snow stemmed from childhood ski trips with his family, which allowed him to escape school, where he said he was the “proverbial ‘underachiever’ and wise ass.”

“My dad sort of figured it might be something fun for a family to do when I was around 7 or 8 and he would take the whole family,” Carpenter told NPR’s How I Built This. “I just always had this attachment to snow, to me it meant no school.”

After graduating from college and jumping from job to job, Carpenter moved to Vermont in 1977 and started Burton Boards out of a barn where he was working. There, he started turning existing designs into the snowboards that have been used by global superstars such as Shaun White and Ayumu Hirano.

“He created bindings that attach you to the board so you can actually carve and control the board much better,” Vermont ski shop worker Fischer Van Golden said.

Carpenter’s initial goal was to use the company as a get-rich-quick scheme, but he later turned his attention to nurturing the sport.

“After a couple of years, it became much more important to me that I was right about the decision that there was a sport there,” Carpenter told StoryCorps. “And I focused not about my own material needs or accomplishments or whatever; I just thought about the sport.”

As time continued, Carpenter’s influence on the snow sports world grew. In 1983, he persuaded the Stratton Mountain ski resort in Vermont to open its slopes to snowboarders. By 1984, Burton Snowboards had become a major brand, with sales reaching $1 million.

Carpenter never let his business ruin his passion for snowboarding. He visited the slopes 100 days a year and snowboarded on six different continents.

It was this passion that helped him start a relationship with his future wife, Donna Gaston, in 1982. Ironically enough, she said her first experience snowboarding was “awful.” They married in 1983.

Together, they expanded Burton’s presence in the U.S. and eventually entered the Europe and Japanese markets, selling a vast array of snow sports gear. For their efforts in pioneering snowboarding, the Carpenters were inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 2007.

“Snowboarding brought kids back to the slopes, giving them a sport and a culture they could relate to, and Jake & Donna were a driving force behind the sport for over 30 years,” their Hall of Fame tribute said.

Carpenter is survived by his wife and three sons, George, Taylor and Timi Carpenter. Burton employees were informed of his passing on Thursday. In typical fashion, they were asked to honor their late founder by going snowboarding.

Paolo Zialcita is an intern on NPR’s Newsdesk.

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Let’s start by stating the obvious: Australia is not the U.S.

Now, self-evident as that statement may seem, it is one thing to simply accept the lesson when reading it on a page — and quite another to experience the lesson viscerally, day after blazing day, mile after grueling mile, as you try to run the entire length of each landmass.

Katie Visco knows that difference.

One decade after the American tackled the U.S., crossing some 3,000 miles alone from Boston to San Diego in her early 20s, Visco decided to try a similar feat half a globe away. On July 13, she set out from Darwin, on the very tip of Australia’s Northern Territory, intending to cross the dusty heart of the continent — and on Nov. 8, more than 2,200 miles later, she arrived in Adelaide, on the country’s southern coast.

Her trek across the U.S. was “100% different than the run that I just completed in Australia,” she tells Morning Edition, describing the former as an attempt to inspire others and the latter as an attempt to satisfy what she calls a “pinch” of her own.

“You know, if you have something that you’re thinking about or dreaming about and can’t just let it die,” she explains. “I had been dreaming about this for a while, and I just wanted to pinch myself in life so that I can learn more about myself, be a better person, and just get through life in a stronger, braver way. And this run was a vehicle for me to do that.”

Nevertheless, Visco says, she still underestimated the gargantuan task she had laid out for herself. It was one that involved dirt roads through the Outback, blistering sun, wind so strong she could feel it “emotionally” even more than physically — and not a whole lot of other humans.

“Man, there’s not very many people in Australia, so the back roads were incredibly desolate,” she laughs.

Luckily for her, she also had a partner: her husband, Henley Phillips, who trundled more than 350 pounds of gear and supplies on a bike beside her as she ran between 28 and 38 miles a day.

“I thought I would mainly have to focus on the emotional support of Katie. And then I pretty quickly realized that it was going to be a massive physical effort for me as well,” he recalls. “I tried to stay stoic and strong about that — but that only lasted for a little while because it got very, very tough.”

There were moments when the sheer effort and agony demanded of them rendered the pair hopeless or even reduced to sobbing. But still, they carried on.

And that, both of them say, is one lesson they have taken away from this experience: “Whatever it is,” Visco says, “if it’s miserable, if it’s joyful, if it’s anything, it is brief. And so I didn’t necessarily learn this, but it was full-on in my face: a huge rediscovery.”

It’s a lesson that applied even in Adelaide, as they finally caught sight of the ocean that for nearly four months they had dreamed about and occasionally despaired at ever reaching. There too, at the end of their journey, the fact remained.

“This moment you’ve been waiting for is, again, just another moment. At the same time, I wished we could just keep going, which is so ironic because I wanted it to end like every single day,” Visco says.

“I still feel a bit sad. But I’ve got to continue to dream,” she adds. “And the dreaming will be a salve for those emotions as well — not to cover them up, but to honor them, be vulnerable to them, yet continue to dream about things that will tick that box next.”

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