South Slave organizers gear up for 2018 Arctic Winter Games

Today is the final day of competition at the 2016 Arctic Winter Games in Nuuk, Greenland, and organizers for the next games in the Northwest Territories are already gearing up for 2018.

"Our clock is now ticking. It's probably 738 days to 2018 opening ceremonies," said Greg Rowe, president of the 2018 South Slave Arctic Winter Games host society.

Rowe and other representatives from the host society were in Nuuk this week observing and learning from the Greenland hosts.

The 2018 games will be co-hosted by Hay River and Fort Smith, two communities with a combined population of about 6,000. Hay River last co-hosted the Arctic Winter Games in 1978, with the now-defunct mine town of Pine Point.

Since then, the games have grown and Rowe says South Slave organizers are feeling pressure to show smaller communities can still successfully host them.

"We want to showcase that smaller communities can do this," he said. "We feel that we are on task to prove this to the international committee. We're up for the challenge."

He says one of the biggest challenges for the towns will be accommodations for athletes' families and spectators, who are important economic drivers for a host community.

"The accommodations will be eaten up by the games people involved so we need to be creative so that mums, dads, aunts, uncles, grandmas, can get to the games," he said. "There's homestays, there's lots of different ways to get creative." 

And one thing they're taking away from Nuuk is that an Arctic Winter Games legacy isn't necessarily measured just in infrastructure.

Dana Ferguson, who is working on the Care and Comfort aspect of the 2018 games, says she's inspired by how the Greenland games are building volunteers' employable skills.

"We didn't really think about that in what we were doing, but it's something we should look at… that would really benefit us."

Meanwhile, the AWG International Committee has been looking even further ahead.

The Games are hosted in rotation among the six permanent members of the Arctic Winter Games — the N.W.T., Yukon, Nunavut, Alberta, Alaska, and Greenland.

Yukon Community Services Minister Currie Dixon says games officials and have agreed to bump up Whitehorse as a host to 2020 because Nunavut has pulled out as host.

He said the Yukon Government is on board but there's more to do.

"One of the important things is getting the OK from the City of Whitehorse and the sports organizations themselves," he said.