January 23, 2006

• opinion, attitude, and mismatched images

  Someone wanted to see my new glasses.  I think it was Ren.  Or, maybe it was Ren. 
  Anyway, whoever it was that asked, now you can all see my new bifocals
  and as a free bonus you have a closeup of my freckles and the hot pink
  nose that indicates a cold day.

  I have something to say today, and some pictures to show you from a
  walk I took yesterday.  I think you’ll be able to distinguish my
  snowy shots of the neighborhood from the pics I stole off the web to
  illustrate my text.

  The text was elicited by this comment:

  I wondered when it [presumably the Iditarod, although my topic was the dog racing season in general] was starting this year.
  Is the competitor from last year who was blind competing this year?

  Posted 1/22/2006 at 2:02 PM by spinksy

  
  The answer is YES!  Emphatically and delightedly I say, yes, Doug
  Swingley is back.  The four-time champion had to scratch from the
  race in 2004 after freezing his corneas during the crossing of the
  Dalzell Gorge, widely reputed to be the trickiest stretch of the
  trail.  It was a sad moment when Doug had to fly back to Anchorage
  with the Iditarod Air Force that year, sad for him and his fans and for
  his fellow-mushers.

  Swingley
  has the distinction of having finished in the top ten, ninth place, the
  first time he ran The Last Great Race.  Some chauvinistic fans
  (and Alaskans are probably more chauvinistic than the average American)
  were unhappy when this Outsider from Montana started winning the
  Iditarod.  I  haven’t heard any of that crap lately,
  especially since a foreigner  (two-time champ Robert Sorlie from Norway) started winning.

  Doug
  Swingley is a charismatic, humorous, and plain-spoken competitor whose
  love of dogs may be the most evident thing about him to those of us who
  see him only in the media in connection with his racing career. 
  In his official Iditarod bio he, “lists his hobbies as dogs, flying and
  Melanie,” his wife, musher Melanie Schirilla, who finished third in
  this year’s Atta Boy 300 World Cup sled dog race. 

  After three wins in a row, Doug Swingley announced his retirement and,
  in 2002, took a “victory lap,” a leisurely run of the Iditarod in which
  he revisited all the friends he had made on the trail and finished in
  fortieth place.  He took a year off, had laser eye surgery, and
  came back in 2004 for that disastrous run in which he frostbit his
  eyes.  He attributed the frozen corneas to tear duct damage from
  the surgery.   In  2005, he raced again even though his
  eyesight was very bad.  That year, he finished in fourteenth
  place.  Now he has had surgery on his tear ducts.  News
  reports say that his corneas are beginning to heal.
  
  Okay, that was the disingenuous (though true) answer.  I know that
  spinksy wasn’t asking about Doug Swingley, even though last year when
  someone asked him about Rachael Scdoris, the “blind girl” who was
  competing for the spotlight but not for the musher trophy, he said
  tersely, “She can see better than I can.”

  Blind once meant unable to see.  Now, there is a state known as
  “legally blind” that refers to vision impaired in certain ways and
  within defined parameters.  By that legal definition, my Old Fart
  is blind, even though within about an inch and a half of his beautiful
  watery eyeball he can see more detail than I can see using a jeweler’s
  loupe.  Greyfox’s uncorrected vision is more severely impaired
  than Scdoris’s.  The official Iditarod bio again:

  “Rachael was born with Congenital Achromatopsia, a rare vision disorder.
  She is colorblind and her acuity is 20/200. She is extremely light
  sensitive.”

  Rachael
  Scdoris has registered for this year’s Iditarod.  She is listed
  again as a rookie because she failed to finish the race last
  year.  From her Iditarod bio:  “It has been my plan to race
  the Iditarod since I was eight years old,
  as it is the biggest and most prestigious sled dog race in the
  world.”  That might be true.  Who knows?  I have seen no
  indication yet that she intended to “race”, to compete in the race.  By all appearances, last year she was on a book-promotion tour.

  She (or her father, there’s some uncertainty about who instigated all
  this hoopla) tried to register for the race a year or two before she
  actually got in.  They started out demanding that she be allowed
  to travel in the company of a “support staff” riding snowmobiles. 
  When the Iditarod Trail Committee shot that idea down, and Mr.
  Scdoris’s sponsor, a snowmobile dealership, withdrew, so too did the
  Scdorises withdraw from the field.

  They turned up later with a new plan and invoked the Americans with
  Disabilities Act to force the committee to allow Rachael to be
  accompanied by another musher to guide her on the trail.  Previous
  to that, one musher being helped by another in the race had meant
  disqualification.

  Rachael’s
  keeper in 2005 was Paul Ellering, who had taken 13 days to finish the
  race in 2000, entering Nome in 54th place in his rookie year.  He
  hadn’t tried it again until the run last year with Ms. Scoris.  It
  is unclear whether these two will be joined at the hip again this
  year.  In his official bio, Ellering says ambiguously, “Sometimes
  you have to see what you got. This year we race!,” confirming what
  everyone who saw last year’s race knows, that they were not racing that
  time.

  In the time leading into the race last year and in the early days of
  it, there was speculation about how these two would arrange their
  finish, the final run into Nome.  Would the guide-musher drop back
  and let Rachael finish ahead of him?  Then the two of them fell
  far behind the race leaders very early and speculation turned to how
  long it might take them to get to Nome.  Eventually, after it
  became apparent that they would not be able to get to Nome within a
  week or two after the rest of the pack, we started wondering when they
  would give up and go home. 

  Feeding
  the speculation that Ellering was holding Rachael back, and confirming
  the doubts many of us had that she really needed her guide-musher,
  several times in the last few days before they dropped out race
  standings showed Rachael entering a checkpoint ahead of Ellering. 
  Maybe they will be racing separately and really racing this year. 
  News on them is scarce.  To the media, they aren’t news. 
  Whether Rachael Scdoris can live down her image as a shameless
  publicity hound milking a handicap for all it is worth, and become
  accepted as a serious dog musher, will depend on how she conducts
  herself henceforth.

  Our woodpile is looking more like a wood mine now.

  

  • 8:53 pm
  • 4 Comments