The Kirkenes Conference 2022 The Thorvald Stoltenberg Award to Barents Games

The Thorvald Stoltenberg Award was Wednesday night conferred on the Barents Sports Committee, which organizes the Barents Games and Young Leaders in Barents.

Barents Games is a sport event gathering 1,200 to 1,500 athletes in the age of 15-25 from several countries in the Barents region. The award was conferred during the Kirkenes Conference.

“We at the Barents Sports Committee are incredibly proud to receive the Thorvald Stoltenberg Award. It is a wonderful recognition of the job done throughout the entire Barents sports region by athletes, leaders and engaged volunteers in all four countries. We feel that this award gives extra motivation to continue the job that we do, and we are most grateful for the publicity we receive from getting this award”, says International Coordinator at Barents Sports Vera Arntsen.

70 years of dialogue

Barents Games is not just a sporting event. Barents Games is also an important contribution to people-to-people cooperation breaking barriers and prejudice. The sports cooperation had existed for more than 70 years and is built on good dialogue and good neighborly relations.

The award jury’s statement says the Barents cooperation has been solid during a period characterized by a pandemic and an unstable geopolitical situation.

“The region is still characterized by trust between neighbors, both people and states. Yet there is not doubt that relations have to be re-built after two years of closed borders. A challenge in the region is that many young people leave without ever coming back.”

Attractive communities

The jury points out how important it is for young people to remain in the High North in order to continue people-to-people cooperation and passing on the baton from Thorvald Stoltenberg, so that the good cooperation in the Barents region may continue.

“In other words, it is necessary to create more attractive communities in order to make young people stay. Barents Sports is someone who absolutely contributes to this through offering meaningful leisure activities for young people”, the jury argues.

Barents Sports has paved the way for Barents cooperation and established contact across the Norwegian-Russian border long before the signing of the Kirkenes Declaration in 1993. In the early days, the sport organized its own Barents competitions spread out on different arenas in the region, however, over time, the sport associations saw the opportunities it would bring if they were able to gather many of the sports to one joint championship, the Barents Games. Today, a total of 30 different sports are involved when Barents Games, our own Olympic games, take place.

Today, Barents Sports constitutes perhaps the most active part of Barents cooperation when it comes to the number of participants.

In 2021, Russian psychologist and human rights activist Valentina Likhoshva received the award.

The award was created after the passing of Thorvald Stoltenberg in 2018. Thorvald Stoltenberg has been called the father of Barents cooperation as he was the driving force behind the Kirkenes Declaration and the subsequent creation of the Barents Cooperation in 1993.

This article was originally published in Norwegian and has been translated by HNN's Elisabeth Bergquist.