December 31, 1953
Sharon and Shirley Firth
Sharon and Shirley were members of the Gwich’in First Nation and were among the first Indigenous athletes to represent Canada at an Olympic Games. In 1972 they were both members of the first Canadian women’s cross country ski team at an Olympics.
Shirley and Sharon learned to ski while members of the Territorial Experimental Ski Training Programme (TEST) which received federal funding with the intention of motivating indigenous youth and to help build their leadership skills. The programme had been initiated in Old Crow, Yukon, but soon expanded to Inuvik, where Shirley and Sharon were attending residential school.
Ski training required the athletes to be outside for many hours each day, and in Inuvik that also meant training in the dark in temperatures well below zero. Summer training included long runs across the tundra, but the two sisters were motivated partly by their desire to travel as well as to succeed as athletes and by 1968 they competed at their first Canadian Junior Championships.
They dominated Canadian cross country skiing from then until the mid-eighties when they retired (Shirley in 1984 and Sharon the following year). In total they won 48 Canadian championships and 79 national medals overall. Shirley won 42 national championship medals (29 gold, 10 silver and 3 bronze) while Sharon won 37 national championship medals (19 gold, 14 silver and 4 bronze).
The Firth sisters were four time Olympians: Sapporo 1972; Innsbruck 1976; Lake Placid 1980; and Sarajevo 1984. They received multiple awards in honour of their skiing career, including being named as Members of the Order of Canada in 1987, and receiving the National Aboriginal Achievement Award (Sharon in 2005 and Shirley in 2006). Both have been inducted into the Canadian Ski Hall of Fame (1990) and Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame (2015). In 2017 Sharon was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws by the University of Alberta. In 2018 Canada Post issued a stamp with their photograph on it as part of a series commemorating Women in Winter Sports.
Photo: Canadian Ski Museum 
Firth Sisters, 1971
Shirley died of cancer on 30 April, 2013 in Yellowknife, NWT .
Sources: The Canadian Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, CBC archives