| Summary: | The Arctic Winter Games (AWG) are a high-level circumpolar sports competition, which includes wide participation sports (such as hockey), 'traditional' Arctic sports, Dene games as well as emerging/potential sports (such as archery) (reports on past games; Lankford et al. (2010; 2015)). In such a context, "where tradition and modernity meet to create unity in diversity” (Thomsen et al., 2018), the question of athletic identity, widely studied in terms of "measurable achievement and social recognition” (Ronkainen et al, 2016), may not be as evident for participants from some Northern communities, where the cultural logic of cooperative practice tends to downplay the symbolic importance attached to results (Heine, 2013). We interrogate the place of sport in the lives of participants of the AWG 2023 through interview and a survey answers where they describe and define themselves as athletes. As the AWG develop "by integrating local cultures and territorial identities" (Fuchs, 2022), we can expect results in line with other studies of regional games that show a more participatory and less excellence-oriented approach (Dallaire, 2007) presenting sport as a means to "build bridges between cultures" (Skogvang, 2021). However, based "around a sporting reference, which remains dominant" (Fuchs, 2022) we can assume the existence of variations between the different sporting practices of the AWG.
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