Team Alberta North won the overall medal race at the 2004 Arctic Winter Games in Ft. McMurray. They finished with 138 medals to Alaska’s 136. Fifty of the Alberta medals were gold, including all four available in hockey.
Ten of the Slave Lake athletes who attended the Games came home with medals – or ulus as they are called. One athlete – Nikki St. Martin, won multiple ulus.
St. Martin’s fourth ulu was a silver for all-round points in the Inuit Games, giving her one gold, two silvers and one bronze altogether. She won gold in the Junior Female Kneel Jump, silver in the Triple Jump and Bronze in the Two-Foot Kick.
Dana Miller, who competed in the Dene Games, won a gold ulu in the Hand Games. It’s a traditional Dene game in which teams of four compete with each other in an effort to fool the other team as to which hand under a blanket contains an object that has been passed around from hand to hand.
“You try to make the other team guess the wrong hand,” says Karl Hill, who was on the Team Alberta North mission staff. “If they guess the right hand they get one of your sticks. The team with the most sticks wins.”
Team Alberta North had the most sticks, and according to Hill, Miller turned out to be one of the most adept at the game, despite not having played it before. His teammates were three boys from Fox Lake.
Tim Horsman, one of the Arctic Sports coaches, says he’s really pleased with the way the Slave Lakers competed, whether they won medals or not.
“They all set personal bests in everything,” he says.
Horsman says he and St. Mary of the Lake gym teacher Curtis Hodge have been accepted into a coaching development program for Inuit and Dene Games, respectively. Over the next couple of years they’ll be taking coaching clinics and recruiting athletes in the area for ‘Arctic challenges’ – small competitions in Arctic sports set up to prepare northern Alberta athletes for the Arctic Winter Games. It’s Hodge, Horsman says, who deserves credit for recruiting the Slave Lake Arctic Sports contingent that competed at the Ft. McMurray games.
In snowshoeing, Thomas Olsen, Pepper Harlton and Denise Potvin won a bronze ulu in a relay race, along with teammate Trevor Isaac of Grande Prairie. The other Slave Lake medals went to the hockey players (see separate article).
According to Hill, Pee Wee hockey has been dropped from the 2006 games, which will be held on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska. The governors of the Games are also considering dropping or reducing other sports.
“It’s just getting too big and expensive for the host communities and limiting the regions it can be held in,” Hill says.

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