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| Brian Wallace / Juneau Empire |
 Memorabilia on display: One of the displays featured at the Arctic Winter Games exhibit at the Alaska State Museum, hundreds of trading pins. |
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Brian Randazzo's agile body leaps into the air and bends in half like a jackknife. His toes flick the tip of a leather ball, sending it swinging like a pendulum on its string. His kick won him a golden ulu at the 1986 Arctic Winter Games and set the world record at eight feet, eight inches for the two-foot high kick, an Inuit winter sport.
A photo of Randazzo's high kick hangs in a current exhibit at the Alaska State Museum.
The Arctic Winter Games collection features photos, posters, flags, uniforms, trading pins and other memorabilia from over 35 years of AWG, a circumpolar sport competition for northern and Arctic athletes. A 40-page catalog offers a history of the games, an overview of the organization, descriptions of the events and photos of memorabilia and competitors in action.
"What we wanted people to come away with, first of all, is an appreciation of the history of the games and what makes them unique," said George Smith, exhibit curator.
The games allow "non-elite" athletes to compete with peers in an international environment of competition and cultural sharing. Competitors come from Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Northern Scandinavia and Russia.
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Exhibit
What: Arctic Winter Games exhibit.
When: Nov. 3 through Jan. 10.
Where: Alaska State Museum.
For more information on the AWG, view the catalog at: www.museums.state.ak.us/awgcatalog.pdf.
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The games include indoor sports like basketball, volleyball, badminton, gymnastics, table tennis, indoor soccer and wrestling, and outdoor sports like hockey, skiing, snowboarding, dog mushing, speed skating, figure skating and snowshoeing.
"Probably the most watched sports in the games are the Inuit sports," Smith said. The events include the one- and two-foot high kick, arm pull, kneel jump, airplane and the grueling knuckle hop, in which a competitor hops on his or her knuckles across the floor until he or she collapses.
The world record for that game is 191 feet, 10 inches, held by Rodney Worl.
The Dene, or interior Native sports, feature the finger pull, pole push, stick pull, hand games and snow snake, in which a spear is thrown underhanded along a snow field.
Smith said the highlight of the exhibit, and the games, are the trading pins brought from the various regions.
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| Brian Wallace / Juneau Empire |
| The gold, silver and bronze ulus show the medals given to the first-, second- and third-place winners. |
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"It's often called the 21st sport because kids spend so much time trading the pins," he said. "As far as we know (the exhibit) is missing only five or six pins. ... So we think its essentially a definitive collection of all the Arctic Winter Games back to the beginning."
Pin designs vary, using Arctic themes from ulus and polar bears, to seals and salmon, to cartoon characters and animals on ice skates.
Posters show the changing styles in design over the history of the games. Team uniforms show the character of individual teams. They are traded too.
"Some team uniforms are more attractive than others, or you're simply interested in somebody's uniform, so near the end of the games you'll see kids trading them," Smith said. "It's not unusual to see a kid in Alaska wearing a team uniform from Nunavut."
There's naturally a spirit of competition at the games, but it's the spirit of cooperation that distinguishes them, Smith said.
"Particularly in the Inuit sports you see where a kid who's missed the first, or first and second attempt at the high kick, and all the competitors come out and talk to the kid, telling what he's doing wrong. They just all talk with each other then go back and sit down and the kid goes for the third effort," he said.
"The most important thing is for the individual to do the best that he or she possibly can, so it's incumbent on all of the others to help the person do that," Smith said.
• Teri Tibbett is a writer and musician living in Juneau.
