The good, the not so good and the Gulags
With three impressionable teenage grandies, 17(M), 15 (M) and 13(F), who are all into sports, your dutiful Grandpapa was curious to learn if they had any role models or favourite players they liked to imitate or copy.
The replies were three enthusiastic affirmatives, in descending order: Chase Elliott #9 (NASCAR), Lionel Messi and Christine Sinclair. Three excellent choices.
When I told them I was writing about Arctic Sports, the showpiece events of the upcoming Arctic Winter Games (AWG), returning to their hometown in 2026, one of them asked (can’t recall which) if Arctic Sports had an all-time great, like Babe Ruth in baseball, Wayne Gretzky in hockey, Michael Jordan in basketball, or Tiger Woods in golf?
I didn’t know offhand, but had a copy of all the performance record-holders for over 50 years and figured we might be able to figure it out by looking at the team results:
Contingent Records
Alaska 15
NWT 8
Russia 6
Nunavut 4
Kalaallit Nunaat 1
AB North 1
Yukon 1
It seemed pretty obvious the best-ever had to be from Alaska by the sheer numbers of records they hold, so we got out our magnifying glasses and began going through the tiny fine print like we were looking through the Yellow Pages searching for legendary sporting greats.
It was all serious and thoughtful business until we collectively came to the bottom “sport” in the Dene Games which is called Snow Snake. “What can that be?!” asked 13(F), noticing the results were given in distance thrown from 200′ to over 500′. “Do they see who can throw a frozen dead snake the farthest?”
“Can’t be,” opined 15(M), the family scholar. “There aren’t any snakes in the Arctic.”
“You sure about that?” asked 17(M).
“Nope.”
In fact, Grandpa found one species of adders that do survive above the Arctic Circle in Sweden and Russia.
Meanwhile, 13(F) was searching her browser and found the answer: “It’s just a short stick sharpened like a spear, a weapon to hunt small game like squirrels, grouse and hares. You have to throw it straight and far to win. The record throw was almost 160 metres.”
We also found two brothers who hold both records for the airplane exercise, one for distance and the other for length of time when the rules were changed to make the event more fair.
And Anna Rivard was a junior gymnast for the Yukon Polarettes who entered the triple jump at the 2010 AWG in Grand Prairie, Alta, and remains the lone Yukon record holder with a leap of 8.31 metres.
We also found a couple Alaskan brothers who hold records, a father-son combo, and two Russians from the infamous town of Magadan on the “Road of Bones, which serviced at least 15 gulags (forced labour camps) during Josef Stalin’s killing purge of dissidents from 1938 until his death in 1953.
Modern-day Magadan is now a tourist destination for nature lovers who want to visit the gulags and Kolyma goldfields where a tearful statue welcomes them and venerates the victims of Stalin’s murderous tyranny: The Mask of Sorrow, Magadan, Russia. The presence of Russia’s most disreputable town in our playful record book is proof that it hasn’t always been fun and games in the circumpolar Arctic. The “Road of Bones” runs from Yakutsk to Magadan, and 1.3 million prisoners died building it
