A hidden cost of journalistic fandom?

With accusations of sexual assault swirling around a former champion of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race only days before the start of Alaska’s “Last Great Race,” the state’s largest newspaper on Monday took to its editorial pages to say this:

“We also share a personal responsibility for combating it ourselves, anyway we can. It’s not enough that we quietly spread the word among our friends or family members when an uncle or a cousin is known to prey on children.”

The Anchorage Daily News (ADN) didn’t specifically mention the Iditarod, even though the appearance of the editorial when sexual assault accusations against champion musher Brent Sass are the biggest story in the state, makes the connection hard to miss. 

And while the ADN was quick to brag about its role in previously echoing government reports about the crisis of sexual assault and domestic in violence in Alaska as a whole and rural Alaska in particular, it didn’t say a word about journalism’s role in the latest saga.

It should have given what one of the alleged victims of Sass has said. This is how she explained to Alaska Public Media and other select new organizations why she didn’t report being sexually assaulted years ago:

“I have little faith the result would be positive for me. I struggle with the fact that he is a quasi-public figure with a sunshiney, heroic reputation.”

Her statement begs the question as to how Sass became that “quasi-public figure” and achieved that “sunshiney, heroic reputation.”

The two-part answer is simple. Sass became a quasi-public figure by once winning the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and three times winning the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race.

And he became “sunshiney, heroic figure” because the Alaska media lionized him as a Quest victor and a sadsack Iditatord contender for years before a breakthrough win in 2022.

Media heroes

Once mushers were characters in a story about the Iditarod Trail upon which the world’s first, great long-distance sled dog race is staged. This was true to such an extent that legendary competitors like five-time champ Rick Swenson and the late Susan Butcher would complain about all the nobodies who grabbed the spotlight by racing first to McGrath before their teams wore out or were featured struggling against the cold and rough trail to reach the Yukon River.

Over time, however, as the media world became ever more about celebrity and the Iditarod evolved from an adventure across Alaska with a sled-dog race along the Bering Sea coast to a doggy NASCAR, this changed.

With Alaska short on celebrities, the Alaska media by accident or design increasingly focused on making celebrities of the top competitors in the state’s biggest sporting event.

By the time the late Lance Mackey, possibly the most colorful character ever to enter the Last Great Race, exploded onto the scene by winning both of Alaska’s long-distance, sled-dog races in 2007, Iditarod coverage had become largely about celebrity mushers.

Against this backdrop, it was easy to highlight Mackey’s down-and-out beginnings and his tough battle with cancer and ignore his almost constant problems with the law because the former shined and the latter didn’t.

In the end, Mackey ended up getting the best of it all in the world of celebrity journalism – a bad boy image sans any real bad boy baggage. The general public was given just enough of a hint of the former to make this latter work with the greatest attention focused on Mackey’s fun-loving nature, his rare ability to get the best out of his canines, and his skill at delivering a sound bite.

Mackey thus achieved Alaska hero status, and other mushers noticed.

Enter Brent Sass of Wild and Free Mushing – a young immigrant from Minnesota, a no-name Nordic skier for the University of Alaska Fairbanks, a musher with a dream of following in the footsteps of a Bush-dwelling Butcher, and a man who got his start the same way Mackey did in Alaska’s second-tier, 1,000-mile Quest from Fairbanks to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada.

The Quest was the race that forged Sass free from the heat of the spotlight focused on the Iditarod in the new millennium as animal-rights activists tried to kill it. Hoping to build a world-class, long-distance sled dog team, Sass could push dogs hard in the Quest without worrying about the fallout if one dropped dead.

The first dog died of his to die was in the 2011 Quest. Another died four years later as Sass chased Iditarod veteran Dallas Seavey toward the finish line. The dead dog was barely noticed. Sass finished fourth in the Quest that year and was considered a musher on the rise.

He entered the Iditarod the next year, and when the race finished, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the closest thing Sass had to a hometown newspaper, was able to headline “Brent Sass wins Iditarod Rookie of the Year.”

A personable guy by nature, Sass played that success for all he could back home in Fairbanks, but the 2013 Iditarod didn’t go as well – he finished 22nd – and by 2014 he was again focused on the Quest.

Sass’s team ran with the front pack of mushers for much of that race from Fairbanks to Whitehorse, but was weakening towards the end when the team of eventual race winner Allen Moore from Two Rivers sped past with Hugh Neff from Tok and Jake Berkowtiz from Big Lake in hot pursuit.

Then a funny thing happened.

“Worries that he could no longer care for the 13 dogs that pulled him from Fairbanks to within 100 miles of the finish line forced racer Brent Sass to withdraw from the Yukon Quest…a decision that cost him a shot at his first win in the grueling race,” the Anchorage Daily News reported.

The Quest offered no details on the events, leaving Sass on his Facebook page to claim he’d fallen off his sled because of fatigue, hit his head on the ice and suffered a concussion.

As Sass told the story, his team then stopped only a short way down the trail “probably wondering why I was laying on the trail behind them.” That was unusual. Dog teams are famous for running miles after a musher falls off. When Eddie Burke Jr. fell off in the Iditarod last year, his team ran 15 or 20 miles to the Eagle Island checkpoint before stopping. 

After regain his team, Sass said he then decided to feed them, something again unusual only dozen or so miles from the next checkpoint, and after this, according to his social media account, “was not confident in my ability to drive the team and take good care of the dogs.”

With the next checkpoint close, there wasn’t much dog care to worry about, and a strong and healthy team would happily pull the sled onto that checkpoint without encouragement as Burke’s team did sans musher in last year’s Iditarod. Instead, Sass decided to use a satellite locator to  summon a rescue.

At a press conference in Whitehorse after the race, Sass said, “you guys all saw my Facebook post…and we don’t have to go through that,” and then launched into a tearful tale about how hard it was to ask for that rescue, but how he had to do so because his team “knew something was wrong with me” and thus didn’t want to go on.

Poor Brent

More tears were shed by Sass as he went on to talk about “how I let that dog team down” and lament a “serious concussion.” But a couple of interesting details also emerged. Sass mentioned the “second time I stopped,” which indicated he got on the trail and moving again before deciding to summon rescue, and in response to a question, he admitted that one of his dogs was so dehydrated that veterinarians had to put it on an IV when the team was finally brought into the checkpoint.

But no reporters pursued those statements as Sass insisted his team was in great shape. Nobody bothered to talk to the vets, either, and Quest officials had nothing to say, which is normally the case when dogs falter.

Sass later, according a former Sass handler, revealed that he’d made up the concussion story to cover his team quitting on him.

Dogs faltering would become a norm for Sass going forward with the media always sympathetic. The problem was never the fault of Sass, who was adept at turning on the tears; the problem was always the result of bad luck stalking a talkative but tearful Sass.

Sass clearly didn’t gain his “sunshiney, hero reputation” by accident. He worked at it.

But the state’s legacy media helped by ignoring the dogs that dropped dead in his teams, portraying Sass as a deeply pained musher when he encouraged teams to run until they collapsed, providing an ear to cry on when he was disqualified from Iditarod 2015 after being caught illegally using a two-way communication device, and willfully allowing themselves to be played by the hard-luck stories Sass told, the biggest of them involving the “mysterious” death of a lead dog named Basin.

When Sass in 2016 drove his team so hard to White Mountain, the penultimate Iditarod checkpoint, that they refused to go on after the mandatory eight-hour rest there, a pair of reporters from Anchorage’s now-gone KTVA-News blamed a dead Sass lead dog.

“Sass’s team made their own decision to stop, something that might not have happened if Sass’s team had still included his former lead dog, Basin,” they reported.

ADN reporter Tegan Hanlon, meanwhile, described the team’s shutdown as just one of those “things (that) went wrong.”

The online version of the ADN story included a video of a tearful Sass talking about how “proud” he was for not dragging the dogs out of the checkpoint because “I could easily have drug them out of their, probably, and got them down the trail and got them moving again,” but not after he looked at “10 of my best friends, saying I don’t want to go anywhere.”

In that video, Sass also claimed all of his dogs “gained weight” during the race. Anyone knowledgeable about Iditarod dog care knows that it is almost impossible for dogs to gain weight during the race for the simple reason that they are burning more calories per day than they can consume.

“Dogs completing the race lost a mean of 8.9 percent of body weight, and (the) amount of weight lost was not related to finishing order,” veterinarian Ken Hinchcliff and colleagues reported in a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association in 1998 before a single team had cracked the nine-day barrier.

The race got faster in the years that followed, and for better or worse, the faster the race pace, the harder it is to get enough food in the dogs. It’s possible a dog here or there might gain weight during the Iditarod, maybe even several in one team. But Iditarod vets would consider a whole team gaining weight a miracle. None of the media in Nome, however, bothered to question Sass about the claim.

Reporters were much more interested in his devastating personal defeat and his tears.

When Sass the next year drove a team to collapse in the 2017 Quest, the ADN again sympathized with the driver not the dogs: “Eureka musher Brent Sass, whose career has been plagued with a series of mishaps, absorbed another Sunday.”

This time, it was Sass himself who summoned the ghost of Basin to explain his overdriving the 2017 Quest team as he’d overdriven the 2016 Iditarod team.

“When I saw his boys crash like that, I feared the worst,” he told the ADN. “I’m thankful that they’re happy and healthy today! I don’t know what to think about what looks like some sort of genetic issue and the future careers of these boys and their siblings. We have a lot to figure out … ”

Poor Brent

Basin was the dog Sass for years milked for sympathetic media coverage.

When Sass showed up for the 2016 Kuskokwim 300 Sled Dog Race in remote Southwest Alaska in 2016, he told a reporter at KUAC public radio in Bethel that he didn’t know how his race might go because he was “coping with the loss” of Basin, who “died unexpectedly.

“I left the dogs camping like I always do and when we came back down to the dogs, something had definitely happened. He’d gotten sick and was not in a good way. It went downhill fast.

“We did as much as we could. We gave him fluids and warmed him up and put him in a cabin – we did all we could to try and get him warmed up. But we couldn’t (save him). We did all we could given the circumstances.”

“We’re all still in the grieving process. When we get out on the trail… time will tell, you know? I think it’s going to be a healing process. Whether it makes us go fast or slow… I think I’m going to find out when we get out there.”

A listener to the KUAC story or someone who read it online at APM could almost feel Sass’s pain at the unexplained death. And by the time Quest rolled around a month later, Sass was amping up that pain.

“Less than a month after losing his five-year-old lead dog to a sudden, unknown illness, Brent Sass will hit the Yukon Quest trail Saturday in an attempt to defend his 2015 title,” the Whitehorse Daily Star reported.

“This race is completely dedicated to Basin,” Sass told a Star reporter. “I’m sure there will be a lot of moments in the Quest this year, where I’m like: ‘Wow, this is difficult. It’s not the same without Basin.’

“But because my team is so deep and I have so much confidence in my other leaders, I feel like if I lean on them … they are going to do an amazing job and we can do what we did last year without Basin.”

The reporter did ask what happened to Basin, and Sass answered what had become his standardized answer – “I don’t know” – before offering up a possible seizure as the cause and a sad story about racing the Kusko with tears in his eyes and Basin’s collar dangling from his sled.

It was a good story, and a couple of parts were true. Basin was dead, and Sass planned to lean on his team. He proceeded to lean on them so hard that several collapsed, and he and the team had to be rescued again because they couldn’t go on.

This collapse only became fodder for the new Sass stories of Basin’s boys and the “genetic issue.”

None of the legacy media bothered to follow up on this claim despite the fact a genetically passed trait that cause well-trained sled dogs to unexpectedly collapse would be of some interest in Alaska. When this website contacted Sass to find out about testing he had promised to do to look for that genetic link, he wouldn’t talk.

No genetics studies were ever produced. One of the dogs that collapsed and needed to be rescued was later found to be running a team of a Sass friend. That musher wouldn’t talk about genetic issues either.

The big lie

That’s because there was no genetic issue. The only part of the story Sass told about Basin that was close to true was the camping part.

Sass parked his team, including Basin, outside of a lodge along the Denali Highway during training in 2015. He then went inside to chat up a woman who worked there.

Another musher arriving at the lodge found a huge dogfight going on. He broke it up. Sass was apparently so busy in the lodge that he didn’t hear the dogs going at it.

The fight left Basin mortally injured. Sass, the other musher and lodge staff tried to save the dog, but they were unable to organize a rescue flight to the lodge and Basin died. The story of what happened to Basin was known to a variety of mushers.

It wouldn’t have been hard to track down the musher who broke up the fight, and he wasn’t going to lie about what happened, which was reported here in February 2017.

None of Alaska’s legacy media wanted to touch it.

Days after the story appeared, the ADN reported Sass had withdrawn from that year’s Iditarod because of what happened in the Quest where “two of his dogs had fallen over on the trail, according to a post the next day on his kennel’s Facebook page, Wild and Free Mushing.

“Sass questioned whether a genetic issue was to blame and apologized that his team did not make it to the finish. Sass had won the Yukon Quest in 2015 and placed second last year.”

The fact that Basin’s true cause of death, which made a  joke of the genetic issue, was already out there went unmentioned. Sass’s 2016 Iditarod collapse was left for the very end of a story that said Sass “followed up”’ his second-place finish in the 2015 Quest “with a 20th-place finish in the 2016 Iditarod. In that race, Sass slipped from third place to 20th after his team refused to leave White Mountain….After a long rest at the checkpoint, an emotional Sass eventually pulled into Nome with his team.”

Sass didn’t return to the Iditarod for four years after this, which now begs another question no one has ever bothered to ask: Why not? Was he secretly suspended in the wake of his pattern of collapsing dog teams?

Whatever the case, when he came back in 2020, Alaska’s News Source reported he was a “completely different musher.” Sass told reporter Patrick Enslow he’d taken a year off and “had some dog issues that year – really, really concerned about my dogs.”

Enslow said Sass had gained “a new perspective” and raised a new dog team with which he’d won the 2019 and 2020 Quest races. 

“I think, in a way, I’m a more composed musher,” Sass told Enslow, “and my patience level has skyrocketed.”

Enslow didn’t bother to ask – or didn’t report, if he did ask – whether Sass’s lack of patience had contributed to his driving dog teams to exhaustion in 2017, 2016 and possibly 2014.

There are things that Alaska journalists don’t report on because they might take the shine off Iditarod mushers now considered iconic figures. Up until now, the media treatment given Sass has been little different than that given five-time champ Dallas Seavey after his dogs failed a drug test in Nome in 2017.

Seavey at first claimed he’d never heard of the drug in question – tramadol, a synthetic pain killer that works much like opiates. He later changed the story to admit that it was in use in his kennel but that his wife Jen, now his ex-wife, was in charge of all medications.

None of the reporters with whom he was willing to sit for interviews ever asked why if the Seaveys had tramadol in their kennel Dallas first claimed not to know what it was, or how a man as deeply involved in dog racing as he was could have no idea what drugs were being used in his kennel, especially given that the race’s doping rules clearly state mushers are responsible for any drugs found in their dogs.

No legacy media ever investigated the doping. No legacy media ever reported that Morrie Craig, the Iditarod chief of drug testing at the time, had gathered together a group of experts to study the metabolites that had popped up in the urine of the Seavey dogs and that they concluded the tramadol was most likely given within an hour of the dogs being drug tested.

The Iditarod refused to consider that report, apparently because Jen Seavey, Dallas’s then-wife, was in the Nome dog lot at the time, and the report could have undercut the Dallas argument that he had been sabotaged by animal rights activists who slipped into the dog lot to drug the dogs, something those working the dog lot always found hard to believe.

The Iditarod instead announced – sans any evidence of sabotage – that after several meetings with Dallas its board decided it “did not believe that Dallas had any involvement with, or knowledge of, the events that led to the positive test in his team. The ITC concludes that it is not credible that Dallas was involved, and he is found to have committed no wrongdoing.  Whatever happened was completely beyond his control.”

Or, in other words, because he was an Iditarod musher he had to be innocent.

Unfortunately for Sass, charges of sexual abuse are taken far more seriously than accusations of doping dogs and now even his one-time biggest fan, Casey Grove, the current host of APM’s Alaska News Nightly, has now turned on him.

That he has been accused but not proven guilty of anything in this case seems a secondary issue, and he may be guilty or partially guilty or innocent. Or guilty in some cases and not in others. Or who knows what given that all of the charges surrounding Sass appear to be tied to women in relationships with him.

No one has emerged to say she was picked up at a bar and then raped or attacked on the trail, and in relationships, things sometimes get messy after the relationships end. People regularly leave them with anger, resentment and more. Some look back and decide they shouldn’t have done things that they did. Some want they view as justice. Some are willing to do anything it takes to get that justice.

And the really, really difficult part about this is that the vast majority of humans, close to all, lie at some time or another, although most don’t lie to the extent Sass has, which really complicates this story.

Update: This is an edited version of an earlier story. It was updated to include a report from a former handler that Sass confessed to his handlers that he’d made up the story about a concussion in the Quest to cover up the fact he’d pushed his team so hard they quit.