February 27, 2008

• Iditarod Hall of Fame

  The Last Great Race starts four days from now.  Last weekend, seventeen-year-old Jessica Klejka’s team won the Junior Iditarod, two seconds ahead of the team driven by Lance Mackey’s stepson Cain Carter, sixteen, in the closest finish of the Jr. race’s history.  The leaders finished three minutes ahead of veteran Iditarod contender Ed Iten’s son, Quinn.

  Next year, Jessica will age out of the Junior Iditarod and be eligible to run the Iditarod, if she has the requisite qualifying finishes.  Cain Carter is at least two years away from the Iditarod, but most of his team will be running the big race this year in Lance Mackey’s team.  Another past Junior Iditarod champion, Rohn Buser, who aged out last year, is signed up for this year’s Iditarod.  Earlier this winter, he finished the Kuskokwim 300, a very tough trail that is going down in history as the Kuskoswim, ahead of his father, Martin Buser, four-time Iditarod champion and current holder of the Iditarod speed record.

  Martin is upset about plans by the race officials to attach radio locator beacons to twenty of the top mushers so that fans can log onto the website and follow the race by virtual reality.  Martin believes that this could reveal his secret resting places to other contenders.  He says if the Committee does this, they should also raise the purse.

  Race Marshal Mark Nordman was quoted in the Anchorage Daily News
  making one of the most absurd statements of all time, a complete insult
  to the dogs and drivers who put so much work into running this race: 
  “You’ll win or not win with or without a tracking device,” he said.
  “It’s either your year to win or it’s not.”  If it really were all in the hands of fate, that would tend to dampen the enthusiasm of a lot of hard working mushers and their sponsors.  Strategy is definitely one of the factors in winning.

  Lance Mackey, defending champion this year and first musher to win the Yukon Quest four consecutive times, doesn’t mind being tracked.  He believes that the competition can’t keep up with his team anyway.  The VR tracking is for the fans, and Lance says if it wasn’t for the fans there wouldn’t be a race. 

  That could be true.  It was a race in name only for its first two years, 1973 and 1974.  Those years, the front runners took 20 days to get to Nome.  Insiders call those years The Iditarod Trail Camping Trip with Dogs.  Then along came Emmitt Peters, an Athabascan from the Interior village of Ruby.  He won the 1975 race, cutting the time by six days and setting a speed record that stood for five years although he never won another Iditarod.  He was an innovator in the resting and running strategy, and in his dog care and training techniques.  Others watched and learned, and the race got faster.  Peters went on placing in the money on most of his attempts until he had a severe knee injury in 1986.  He tried a few more times before retiring.  In 2000, he came out of retirement for one race, turned in his fastest time ever, placed 40th, and was voted Most Inspirational Musher.

  The race had a loyal fan base by the mid-1980s, but few people outside of Alaska had ever heard of it and organizers were having money trouble.  Then in 1985, along came Libbymania.  Libby Riddles lived up north.  The final portion of the trail, along the coast, between Shaktoolik and Nome, was where she had trained her dogs.  When a deadly storm hit the coast and left the other leaders pinned down in Shaktoolik, Libby’s dogs wanted to go home.  She couldn’t see trail markers, but she could hang onto the sled, pedal, and push along with the dogs.    She trusted them, and knew they knew the way home.  I remember listening to her describing her run between the last checkpoint, Safety, and the finish in Nome, as she listened to KNOM radio with Hobo Jim singing, “I did, I did I did the Iditarod Trail”.   There’s a line in the song that says, “With no tracks up ahead and no one out behind….” She said she cried at that moment.  I get misty every time I remember it.

  As the first woman to win the race, Libby got a lot of attention.  President Reagan sent her a congratulatory telegram.  Her picture appeared in Vogue magazine.  The Women’s Sports Foundation named her Professional Sportswoman of the Year.  She had been a mediocre competitor in two previous attempts:  finishing 18th in ’80, 20th in ’81.  She tried again in ’87 and scratched, finished in 16th place in 1989 and 32nd in ’95.  Some still refer to Libby’s win as a fluke.  I think this ignores the fact that she had the courage, and the trust in her team’s ability, to get out on the sea ice in that blizzard, while everyone else was holed up in Shaktoolik.  Race organizers love Libby.  Many Outsiders who got Libbymania ended up with Iditarod Fever, and the race began to attract fans and mushers from Outside, and the Committee’s checks stopped bouncing.

  Nobody knows who would have won in ’85, if Susan Butcher hadn’t gotten herself and her team stomped by a moose early in that year’s race.  She scratched, and Libby made history as the first woman champion.  Susan’s winning streak, first, first, first, second, and first in 86 through ’90, coming along right behind Libby’s victory, drew a lot of international attention, and won more fans for the race.  Her accomplishment was immortalized  in the saying, “Alaska, where men are men, and women win the Iditarod,” on bumper stickers, coffee mugs and t-shirts.  Susan’s dog care, breeding and training set standards everyone else then had to try to meet and beat. 

  Susan died of leukemia at age 51, in 2006.  Of the seventeen Iditarods she ran, she finished twelve of them in the top five.  She was loved for her compassion and down home humility… by just about everyone except the man who had been her main competitor at the start of her winning streak:   Rick Swenson, the Iditarod’s only five-time champion (so far).  The last time he won, in 1991, when asked why he set out from White Mountain in a blinding storm that had turned back other veterans, he said, “Desperation, I guess.  I wanted to win the Iditarod.” 

  He still runs, but desperation apparently isn’t enough now and either his dog care and training hasn’t kept up with the competition, or he can’t keep up with his dogs.  Swenson’s record has been going downhill (scratched ’05, 26th in ’06, 25th in ’07), and his dour, misogynistic demeanor on the trail doesn’t win him many fans or friends.

  In 1978, Rick Swenson lost to Dick Mackey in probably the most memorable finish of Iditarod history.  The two teams had seldom lost sight of each other through 800 miles of jockeying for position at the front of the pack.  Reporter Doug O’Harra of the Anchorage Daily News wrote:

  By the time the two men reached the streets of Nome, they were virtually running side by side.  One hundred yards out, they were even.  By the time they entered the 50-yard chute, Mackey had a slight edge.  Both men were running [behind the sleds].

  Then Mackey’s dogs trotted under the burled arch, the finish line [and the teams tangled].  His sled stopped just short of the finish line.  Mackey collapsed.

  Swenson… kept going and dragged his sled across the finish line.  Though his leaders crossed second, Swenson himself crossed under the arch ahead of Mackey.”

  The decision of who won that race had been laid down by the rules.  Officials said, “the lead dog’s nose, not the musher’s behind, determined the winner.”  Dick Mackey stopped running the Iditarod more than twenty years ago, but has served in several official posts, and as he emceed the awards banquets and announced starts and finishes, his voice became the voice of the race.  When Dick won in ’78, on his sixth attempt, he was wearing bib #13.  His son Rick Mackey won in 1983, also wearing bib #13.  Dick’s younger son, Lance, camped out at the Iditarod office last year, to assure that he was first in line and got his choice of bibs.  He took #13, and won.

  …and this just about leaves me where I started out.  I have just covered a few of the winners and some mushing highlights.   Many of the race’s biggest heroes never won a race, and some of them never entered the race.  Unless something intervenes (something like death or disaster), I will work on that next time.
   

  • 6:02 pm
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