Musher Brent Sass at a Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race checkpoint/Wikimedia Commons
Worst lead-in to an Iditarod start in history
A week away from the start of Alaska’s self-proclaimed “Last Great Race,” what began as an Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race trainwreck has now become a total shitshow.
After the race allowed 2023 Rookie of the Year Eddie Burke Jr. back into the event on Friday, having never specified exactly why he was booted in the first place, it kicked out 2022 race champ Brent Sass using the same nothing statement it used when it booted Burke.
Shortly thereafter, Sass turned to Facebook to shed some light on the situation. He posted a letter he’d earlier written to the Iditarod Trail Committee saying that accusations of sexual assault that had been made against him were false. He charged that were women lying to try to destroy his career.
The reference was more than apparent. Sass was the only musher disqualified by the Iditarod on Friday. There was no one else to whom the statement could have been referring.
“Our clients retained counsel and sought to remain anonymous because of the high risk that disclosure of their identities and experiences would subject them to retraumatization, invasion of privacy, litigation, and potential violence by their assailant or others,” the statement said.
While all of this was going on, Burke was on Facebook claiming fealty to the “Iditarod’s strong condemnation of violence and abuse against women, recognizing, as the Iditarod does, that these are significant ongoing issues in Alaska.”
Burke was originally booted out of the race because there were charges of domestic assault filed against him in court in May 2022, charges that were ignored by the Iditarod for 18 months until the Kuskokwim 300 Sled Dog Race told him to stay home and this website reported on what the Kusko had done.
Those charges were then dropped by the Department of Law who said the woman Anchorage Police described as having found sitting outside his apartment “bloody” and “crying” in 2022 had decided she didn’t want to testify against Burke.
Alaska’s ugly reputation
All of this helped fuel debate about fairness, false accusations, domestic assault and sexual violence in a state with huge problems with sex and violence. Alaska by far the highest rate of rape in the nation.
Nearly twice as many rapes are reported each year in the 49th state than in any other state, and most rapes in Alaska as elsewhere go unreported.
Meanwhile, the state has the nation’s third-highest rate of domestic violence. Both the problems with domestic violence and sexual assault are well known to Alaskans.
But Iditarod mushers are iconic figures in the 49th state, and thus it is being debated whether they should be kept out of the Last Great Race solely because charges have been filed or accusations made.
One side now argues the Iditarod should consider all mushers innocent until proven guilty in a court of law while the other side argues that this is too high a standard with some contending the whole premise of innocent until proven guilty should go away.
As one woman posting to this website wanted to “remind you all that, while our laws in the U.S. are rooted in the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ concept, we continue to watch rapists walk away free each year, meaning this concept is failing us – which should make you mad. It should make you want change.”
Many sports have already changed in how they handle these difficult matters. Three of the nation’s major sports – professional football, baseball, basketball and hockey – now have formal policies addressing domestic abuse and sexual assault. They are all relatively new policies.
The sole major sport lacking such a policy is the National Hockey League (NHL), which has a policy similar to that of the Iditarod that allows it to discipline players “guilty of conduct that is detrimental to or against the welfare of the League or the game of hockey.”
The league is now under fire in the wake of Philadelphia Flyers goalie Carter Hart and four other now-NHL pros from Canada’s 2018 world junior hockey being charged with sexually assaulting a London, Ontario, Canada woman in 2018.
“No mention, even, of the words ‘sexual assault,’ ‘domestic violence,’ or ‘victim.’ The policy is (NHL commissioner Gary) Bettman, and how he’s feeling that day, and what his opinion is.”
In the latest case, or what Coffey called a “debacle,” “none of those players have been suspended and are currently on paid leave through the end of the season.”
Still, it is worth noting that they are not playing. This appears to be in line with the general policy in most major sports: if someone is charged with a serious crime, they are removed from competition until the charges are resolved.
Many banned from competition
NASCAR, for instance, indefinitely suspended driver Cody Ware after he was arrested for domestic violence in April 2023. “Ware faces a felony charge of assault by strangulation and a misdemeanor charge of assault,” CBS News reported at the time. The charges were similar to those lodged against Burke, although in Ware’s case, his girlfriend was later charged as well.
Golfer Thorbjørn Olesen was suspended by the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) in 2019 after he was charged with sexually assaulting a woman while on a flight from Nashville to London. But the suspension was lifted a year later as he awaited trial with the European Tour citing unprecedented court delays to due to Covid-19.
Olesen testified that he had taken two Ambien/Zolpidem pills to help him sleep after he boarded the plane and had no memory of his behavior after being served a glass of champagne before take-off. “The court was told the medication can cause side effects including amnesia, loss of coordination and sleepwalking,” The Guardian added.
The jury found Olesen not guilty.
Against this backdrop, the Iditarod’s handling of the charges filed against Burke seems largely in line with the actions taken by other professional, semi-professional and collegiate sports even though the Iditarod, like the NHL, has no specific policy on domestic violence and sexual assault.
As for the Sass allegations, there are fewer precedents for what Iditarod has done, but there are those who have lost their jobs due to allegations of sexual misconduct without charges.
Alaska Olympians sexually assaulted
Alaska snowboarder Callan Chythlook-Sifsof, who competed in the Winter Olympic games in Bejing in 2022, started a firestorm with Instagram posts accusing Peter Foley, then the head coach of the U.S. Snowboard Team, of inappropriate sexual behavior with his athletes.
At least five women eventually filed complaints against Foley. He was fired and banned from coaching for 10 years. He appealed, a lengthy investigation followed, and earlier this month an arbitrator upheld the suspension, ESPN reported.
Foley has never been charged with a crime, but Chythlook-Sifsof and Fletcher, an Olympic bronze medalist from Alaska, in February joined former national team member Erin O’Malley in a lawsuit accusing Foley, the national snowboard federation, its former CEO and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee of sex trafficking, harassment, and a cover-up of sexual assault and misconduct.
At the same time, “Chythlook-Sifsof revealed for the first time that she was ‘sexually assaulted and raped by a male coach nearly three times her age from an opposing team’ when she was 16 during her first junior world championship event in Zermatt, Switzerland, in 2005,” ESPN added.
“‘Although it was not a USSS coach that sexually assaulted Callan, USSS set the stage for the assault to occur and failed to change the toxic environment,’ the lawsuit said.”
The case is as complicated as the Sass affair given that Lindsey Jacobellis, the nation’s most decorated Olympic snowboarder, has defended Foley.
“I can speak very highly of his character and he’s always been supporting me through everything that I’ve gone through,” she told Fox Sports in 2022. Jacobellis was later photographed embracing Foley at the finish line of the Women’s Snowboard Cross event in the 2022 Olympics at a time when an investigation had begun and he had been banned from “one-on-one interaction with female athletes,” according to ESPN.
Sass, like Foley, has both women who strongly support him and those who say they believe his unnamed, unidentified accusers. The investigations against him remain wholly unsubstantiated. They could be true; they could be false.
Categories: News
Third party allegations should be treated as the hear-say that they are. Either bring charges and prove the case or stop the third party stuff, which can ruin a person’s name even if not true. If Sass is guilty, let his accusers come forth and confront him. Then let a jury decide his fate. Or do we still live in an innocent until proven guilty society?
Ban sports. Problem solved.
In the days of yore, I was assigned to cover mushers for the AnchTimes. I did it once and came back saying, “Get someone else.” The super hype plus press attention gave many of those $%^ the idea they could do anything! Sass needs to pull up his big-boy pants and deal with this.
Iditarod is now a sh*tshow. The last great joke of a race.
Apparently Alaskan female Olympians are willing to identify themselves as victims of sexual abuse. So why can’t Alaskan females alleging sexual abuse from Sass identify themselves? If it really happened someone should be able to come forward like the Alaskan female Olympians did. That would give more legitimacy to the accusations. Anonymity too easily veils lies and ulterior motives.
Ironically there is a female Olympian on the Iditarod Board of Directors. She can see her fellow Olympians identifying themselves, but votes in favor of the anonymous unidentified accusers. Why the double standard?
The real problem here is not if Sass is a good guy or a bad guy. It is the total lack of transparency from an organization that was once the cherished backbone of Alaskan sports. But has now devolved to a trainwreck caused by moronic woke groupthink. The BOD could fix this by admitting they don’t have a provable reason to DQ Sass. And let him back in. But that would involve admitting they were wrong. Which of course is something they don’t want to do for the SECOND time (Burke was the first). There are no adults in the room, so the Iditarod will continue to make the wrong decisions. Until there is no Iditarod.
The Iditarod has turned into a Gong Show.
My first boss in Alaska laid it out to me…you can go big in AK but most guys wind up “Hero to Zero” in the end. – Old crusty logger from Maine.
I’ll bet he limped on back to the Lower 48.
It’s not a stretch of the imagination to see that someone is capable of mistreatment of the animals on which their livelihood depends, which has been covered here for Sass as well as others, would be equally capable of lacking self-awareness of the amount of coercion that existed in the relationships described by the anonymous complainants. They describe being in isolated locations with Sass providing their employment, their access to shelter and all the things necessary to live. Presumably these young women were interested in the sport and wanted to work with someone they perceived as a champion. Even if he was incapable of being charming they were not in a place or situation where it would be easy to continually rebuff inappropriate advances. The fact that they seem to consider some of their sexual relationships with Sass consensual doesn’t at all preclude their right to refuse to continue that relationship or to refuse to submit to sexual practices they were uncomfortable with. I think it’s more likely they’re assigning themselves more agency after the fact as a coping mechanism than I find it likely none of these abuses took place. Look at your own coverage of his statements about losing races due to losing dogs that are unable to continue the race. It’s never about him taking responsibility for his actions, it’s always about how he’s holding up against his poor luck. It’s not luck with the dogs and it’s not a coincidence or a character assassination with the women’s claims either.
That’s why you don’t sleep with the boss, especially if you’re serious about your job or to be profession.
Sounds like Brent is trying to start a breeding program huh