Self-reliant Alaska athletes pay their own way

Alaska is sending a delegation of more than 350 athletes, coaches and officials to the Arctic Winter Games — with little government assistance.

The total cost for the Alaska’s team participation in the games is more than $500,000 US.

All AWG participants from Alaska get a complimentary parka, pants and hats, bearing the blue and gold Alaska colours, to wear during the games.

To help cover expenses, every participant will be pay about $700 US.

“Unless there’s some value attached to the participation, the athletes will feel there was no value,” said John Estle, Alaska’s chef de mission, in an interview from Fairbanks.

All Alaskans get a dividend cheque every October from the North Slope oil revenues worth $1,800 US, money that many participants drew upon to help pay their contributions.

Despite the high cost, their large team, and daunting logistics, the organization in charge of the Alaska’s participation in the games is small.

Estle is the only full-time paid worker at the state’s 2002 AWG office.

“Sports in Alaska is way less organized than in Canada,” Estle said. “For the most part, there’s no organized preparation.”

Most of the sports have no sport association, so this complicates team selection. It also means many AWG teams never get a chance to meet or practise together until they make it to the games.

Estle said Alaska has full teams entered in every sport. More than half the athletes selected come from Anchorage, about a quarter from Fairbanks, and the rest from other regions in Alaska, including the North Slope Borough.

“That’s a reasonably accurate reflection of the population distribution of the state,” Estle said.

Not that this organizational difference has hampered Alaska’s past success at Arctic Winter Games.

Brian Randazzo of Anchorage is still the king of high-kick. He set world records in the one-foot high kick and the two-foot high kick at the 1988 Arctic Winter Games.

Although Randazzo won’t be accompanying the team this time around, another Alaskan star, Jesse Frankson, will participate in the senior male Inuit Games in Iqaluit.

Last year, Frankson beat martial arts expert Michael Blanks, the brother of tae-bo creator Billy Blanks, in a made-for-TV kicking contest that aired in September.

Both beat the previous world record of eight feet, nine inches for a one-foot high kick and both hit nine feet, three inches.

Blanks bowed out of the competition at nine feet, six inches. Frankson went on to win and set a new world record with a kick of nine feet, eight inches.

This result put Frankson in the 2002 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records.

Frankson, who comes from Point Hope, told the Anchorage Daily News he just kicked the way Inupiat did back when a whale had been landed, and the news needed to be signaled to villagers so they could beach and butcher the animal.

In 1998, as a high school senior, Frankson scored nine feet, two inches at the Native Youth Olympics in Anchorage. In Grade 6, he said he was already able to kick more than six feet.

Frankson coaches Point Hope’s Native Youth Olympics program and was an assistant coach this season for the high school volleyball team.

To keep in shape, Frankson does a lot of skateboarding. His upper body is strong, he said, because he does “house chores.”

“The elders don’t like drinking water from the faucets, so I drag a sled load of ice from the lake into town and they drink that,” Frankson told the Anchorage Daily News, describing one of his chores.

But despite the presence of elite athletes like Frankson on the Alaskan team, Estle said the promotion of sportsmanship, rather than winning medals, is the most important aspect of the games.

“Of course, you hope that you sent the teams that have a chance to be successful. It’s more fun to win than to lose. But I would rather have a team and a coach that plays well and plays within the rules,” Estle said.

To promote competition, the Alaskan team is sending a basketball team whose members are three years younger than those from the Northwest Territories, Yukon or Nunavut.

Basketball, wrestling and Inuit games are all popular in remote villages in Alaska. Smaller communities have no arenas, Estle explained, so hockey is more of a city sport.

Estle said a non-athletic event involving the Alaska delegation is particularly worth watching — that’s the March 16 arrival of a huge jumbo jet from Anchorage in Iqaluit.

When it begins to disgorge its passengers, with their skis, hockey bags, luggage, sleds and even dogs, Estle said Iqalungmiut will start to feel the full force of hosting the games.

Estle said it’s an “overwhelming” event when hundreds of athletes descend on the games’ host community.

The entire Alaska delegation — including dogs — is travelling on the same jet from Anchorage, a trip of about five and a half hours.

Half of them will continue on to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, and from there, to Nuuk.