March 14, 2007

• “…huge Alaska hero.”

  Last night in Nome when someone told Lance Mackey that the governor wanted to speak to him, he said, “You’re kidding me.”  When Governor Sarah Palin finally got Lance on the phone, she told him that he is, “a huge Alaska hero.”  There are a lot of us today in agreement with her on that.

  I can’t remember another Iditarod that has held this much excitement for me, and Greyfox said the same thing last night.  I suppose part of it is that Lance Mackey is an easy person to empathize and identify with.  As Greyfox put it, he has that quintessentially Alaskan combination of cockiness, unpretentiousness, strength and humility.  I guess it’s his wife’s good luck that the man doesn’t realize how good looking he is.  He has even referred to himself as “ugly” but I’ve gotta disagree.

  photo credit:  Bob Hallinen

  That’s Larry and Lippy there, celebrating their second major victory in about a month’s time.  At the Yukon Quest, Lance referred to the dogs he has this year as a “once-in-a-lifetime team.”

  I wished I could have been there in Nome yesterday, but the best I can do is quote some people who were there.  Someone asked him in Nome if he would try it again.

  “Yeah, I’d love to come back and repeat that performance, but I’m really realistic here. Once in a lifetime is probably a rare opportunity,” he said while one of his dogs licked frost off his goatee.

  He acknowledged that his dogs were a one-of-a-kind team — and that next year they will be older.

  “I owe it to them. I think I’m smart enough to know when enough is enough, to back off a little bit. They’re in their prime, they proved that. So I think it’s time for a little R&R,” he said.

  But Tuesday night, the down-to-earth musher planned a little whiskey for his own rest and relaxation and to celebrate the feat with his family. Both his father, Dick, and half brother, Rick, are past Iditarod champions.

  “This is a damn dream that I’ve been living, you know, dreaming about since I was a little, little boy when my Dad won this race,” said Lance Mackey, 36.

  . . .

  About a thousand fans braved subzero temperature to cheer Mackey to the finish. He lived the moment, slapping high-fives with fans as his dogs led him down the last block, sometimes jumping off the sled and running with them until his family mobbed him at the end.

  “Dreams do come true, Mama, they do,” Mackey said, fighting back tears.

  

  “This is my passion,” he said, adding he was proud to follow in his father’s footsteps and joked about being thankful his father was a musher and not a lawyer.

  “It’s our lifestyle, it’s something we breathe, eat and sleep,” he said of the Mackey family’s love of mushing. “This is what we do.”

  On Feb. 20, Mackey won his third consecutive Yukon Quest, starting in Whitehorse, Yukon and finishing in Fairbanks.

  With only 10 days rest, Mackey took most of his 16 dogs from the Yukon Quest to Willow for the start of the Iditarod. In the two races, the dog team covered a distance equivalent to mushing from Boston to Salt Lake City.

  Mackey’s father, Dick, and brother, Rick, both won the race wearing bib No. 13, and each did so in the sixth time they ran the Iditarod. Lance Mackey camped out for days at the Iditarod headquarters last June to be the first person to sign up for this year’s race, enabling him to select the No. 13 bib.

  “I didn’t know exactly what this bib was going to do for me, but what an honor,” said Mackey. “This is the most cherished piece of memorabilia I’ll ever own.”

  Many mushers have long believed it would not be possible to win both races in the same year with the same dogs because the animals would need more time to recover from one grueling race before starting another. But Mackey said he wasn’t pushed much in the Yukon Quest, and it served as a good mental and physical training run for the dogs.

  “I kept saying I want to be the one to prove that wrong. For those who don’t believe it can be done, I thrive on underestimation. Don’t ever doubt that I can’t do something. I lived through cancer,” he said. Mackey was diagnosed with neck cancer in 2001 and underwent surgery and radiation. He had the cancerous tumor removed from his neck and is now considered cancer free.

  Canadian Hans Gatt, 49, a three-time Quest winner who was also runner-up to Mackey twice in that race, said Mackey’s team was the best-looking on the Iditarod trail this year. Instead of tiring, his team recovered faster than any of the others, and maintained their speed.

  “I can’t run my dogs like that,” Gatt said Tuesday, almost 100 miles back on the trail. “He obviously has figured out something we have not figured out yet.”

  Sled dog racing is a sport where mushers perform more for glory than big-time payouts, having to rely heavily on sponsorships to continue feeding their dogs.

  For winning the world’s longest sled-dog race, Mackey will pocket $69,000 and be handed the keys to a $41,000 pickup.

  Mackey had been thinking about that truck along the trail and for good reason. One year, when he was trying to get to the start of the Quest, he was fined $500 for missing a meeting for mushers. The reason he was late was that the two trucks he was driving broke down. One lost an engine and the transmission went out in the other.

  Just before this year’s race, he splurged on a used, 14-year-old pickup.

  Thrusting both arms high in the air, he yelled out an elongated, “Yeah! Oh, the truck!”

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  Last time I looked at the standings, nine teams had finished:

  1. Mackey 9 days 5 hours 8 minutes 41 seconds
  2. Gebhardt 9:7:28:12
  3. Steer 9:12:46:7  People keep referring to Zack Steer as the surprise of this year’s Iditarod.  This is just the fourth Iditarod he started and the third he has finished.  He came in 22nd in 1998, and 14th in 2000.  In 2004, he ran his first Yukon Quest and finished in second place, earning Quest Rookie of the Year.  In 2005 he ran the Iditarod again and scratched at Ophir.  This year he got out in front at the start and either led or chased hard behind the leaders all the way.
  4. Martin Buser 9:13:7:4
  5. Jeff King 9:15:5:17
  6. Ed Iten 9:16:34:10
  7. Ken Anderson 9:18:28:48
  8. John Baker 9:18:36:22
  9. Mitch Seavey 9:19:30:23

  Lots of fast teams out there this year, and several very close finishes.

  Craid Medred wrote today about Eric Rogers, “600 miles back and struggling.”

  As a smiling Lance Mackey rolled toward victory in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on Tuesday, an Eagle River musher far back down the trail was being helped to reach a spot where an airplane could land just so he could quit.

  There was no report on his mood.

  What exactly happened to 59-year-old Eric Rogers and his team was unclear, but by Tuesday afternoon they had been gone for more than two days from the Ophir checkpoint without reaching the Iditarod checkpoint 90 miles down the trail.

  By Tuesday evening, Iditarod executive director Stan Hooley was able to report trail sweeps on snowmobiles had Rogers safely with them, but further details were sketchy.

  Eric Rogers was out of Ophir for 65 hours.

  The run between the two checkpoints usually takes 12 to 20 hours.

  Concerns grew because the 155 miles of Iditarod Trail across the Innoko River country from Takotna, population 50, to Shageluk, population 139, crosses some of the wildest country left on the continent.

  Most of the time, there isn’t even a trail there. Only for a few weeks in odd-numbers years, when the Iditarod traces its southern route for 1,100 miles from Anchorage to Nome, is a trail put in.

  Often it is drifted in with snow and impossible to find by the time the first musher crosses the race’s finish line. This year, with little snow in the area, that wasn’t a problem. But the rough trail was smashing sleds and making life tough for the trail sweeps, who follow the Iditarod on snowmobiles to make sure all the dogs and drivers make it through safely.

  There were unconfirmed reports the sweeps found a frostbitten Rogers and a sled with two broken runners at Don’s Cabin, a shelter about halfway between Ophir and Iditarod on Tuesday. Rogers was running in last place, well back of any other musher.

  “I think part of that is accurate,” Hooley said when reached on his cellphone as he waited for Mackey to cross the finish line in Nome. “The last thing I heard, he was going to scratch. I knew he was getting an escort.”

  “The only thing that (race manager) Mark Nordman told me is that the trail sweeps met him at Don’s Cabin, and they were going to take him to a place where a plane could land,” [Jan] Newton [in Takotna] said. “Evidently, there was nothing too seriously wrong with him.”

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