sculpting ice with Junichi Nakamura at the 2004 world championships

In early 2004, I got a phone call from Greg Butauski. He was looking for fourth carver for the four man team event in Fairbanks, Alaska (specifically the IceArt World Championships). Greg and I had carved together successfully before, so I was pretty interested, but I was ready to drop everything and run to the airport when I found out that it was Junichi Nakamura’s team.

Besides winning the Fairbanks event a number of times, Junichi was a two time Olympic gold medalist (Hamar, Norway and Nagano, Japan) Apparently, two other carvers had been unable to go, so Greg had been invited and had been asked to find another carver as well. It was a tremendous opportunity, and I quickly shifted my schedule around to free up the necessary time and booked my airline tickets.

I didn’t know what to expect and I was uncertain as to what was expected of me. I solicited advice from other carvers that had competed with Junichi before so that I would have some idea as to how things would go. I had only briefly met Junichi on a couple of other occasions, once competing against him at Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada and then again when he won the NICA National Championships in Munster, Indiana (I took fourth, my highest finish so far at the championships.)

As it turned out, I didn’t need to prepare that much before the competition. Junichi and his frequent teammate and translator Shinichi Sawamura had already done about everything that you could do. Because of their extensive experience at the Fairbanks event, they knew what we would need and had already gotten all of the equipment together.

The first thing we did together was to look at the design. This isn’t as simple as you might think. We got together in a fortunately large room and we first looked at the drawing on a regular sheet of legal size paper. It looked to be a Sioux Native American on one knee with a long spear in his left hand and a massive eagle on his right arm, held above his head. Even looking at the small drawing of the sculpture, the piece was intimidating and I wondered what I’d gotten by self into.

It quickly got worse because then we got a look at the real design: the template. In order to get a sense of the size of the piece, we had to lay the paper template out on the floor. This meant we had to clear out several tables and a lot of chairs just to see how big it would be. If I recall correctly, it turned out to be 24 feet high. We had a lot of work to do.

The actual carving went by quickly even though the days were long (at least 14 hours) and it was pretty cold most of the time. At first I had a lot of energy (Junichi cautioned me to slow down on the first day), but by the end of the competition, I was beat. Surprisingly, I was never sore, but I attribute that to the fact that there was little that we could actually lift or move ourselves. When it came time to lift something, we had to call over the heavy machinery. The guys that run the lifts really know what they’re doing; their ability to maneuver sometimes delicate, always awkward pieces of ice into place is very impressive.