The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race restart in Willow/David Weekly, Wikimedia Commons
Likely winner as unclear as future
A resurgent Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, a throwback to the Alaska of long ago, launched Saturday on the downtown streets of Anchorage normally devoted to the gas-guzzling, exhaust-spewing transport of the modern day.
Today came the disappearance into the hundreds of miles of wilderness that still separates the 49th state’s tiny road system from the old, gold-mining community of Nome 1,000 miles by trail to the northwest on the edge of the Bering Sea.
Some are expecting five-time champ Dallas Seavey from Talkeetna to become the first musher to win six races, but 2023 defending champ Ryan Redington from Knik and runner-up Pete Kaiser are back along with four more of the top-10 from that race plus 2021 Iditarod runner-up Aaron Burmeister from Nenana and Montana’s Jessie Royer who has eight times put teams in the top-10.
To describe this Iditard as resurgent seems odd with only 38 teams on the trail, less than half the number that started only nine years ago and a long way from the heyday years of the 2000s when more than 100 teams once entered the race.
With the end of that decade approaching, the Iditarod had become so popular organizers limited entries to 100 teams because of the difficulty of supporting so many mushers at remote checkpoints from the Willow restart north to Nome.
Worries about too many teams on the trail now seem to have existed a lifetime ago. Last year, the 33 teams that hit the trail were the fewest in the race’s 52-year history. An Associated Press headline described the small field as “a little scary” above a story reporting ” the world’s most famous sled dog race is getting off to a rough start.”
The 38 teams bound for Nome this year is a significant improvement despite all that happened before the race to whittle the field down from 40 and all the bad publicity that came along with that whittling.
Bad start
First the race suspended 2023 Rookie of the Year Eddie Burke Jr. from Anchorage from competition because he was facing charges of domestic violence. Five days later they let him back into the race after the state Department of Law announced the woman Anchorage Police had bloody and crying on his doorstep didn’t want to testify against him.
While Burke was announcing his return, only to later decide his race had been so disrupted it was best to stay home, the Iditarod Trail Committee, which manages the last great race, was announcing the disqualification for unexplained reasons of 2022 Iditarod champ Brent Sass from Eureka, the old home of the late Iditarod icon Susan Butcher.
Sass has been charged with no crimes and says the accusations made against him by unnamed women are baseless. Two women anonymously told their stories to Alaska Public Media and other media months after Rose O’Hara-Jolley, the Alaska director of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates and a one-time friend of Sass, sent an email to the Yukon Quest Sled Dog Race in November asking it to suspend Sass from competition.
“Over the past six years, I have been approached in my capacity as an advocate by many women from diverse backgrounds and across Alaska,” she said. “Each one has confided in our organization that they have been raped and sexually and physically assaulted by Brent Sass. We believe these women. I believe these women. Brent Sass is a rapist.”
The women who have since talked to journalists to support those claims were dog handlers at his kennel who entered into consensual relationships with Sass, who they said later forced them into non-consensual sexual activities.
Rumors of assaults on other women continue to swirl around Sass, who contends he is being set up, while a sizable segment of the Idtarod’s small but rabid fan base has been arguing about how the race treated him.
Among those weighing in were Hugh Neff of Tok, an Iditarod veteran and former Quest champ like Sass, who gave Sass’s letter of self-defense a thumbs up and four-time Iditarod champ Jeff King from Denali who posted a strong statement in support of the ITC.
“As an acquaintance of numerous female friends,” King wrote, “I am painfully aware that sexual assault falls in a completely different category in the world of litigation. Women have very little to gain and very much to lose by exposing their identity. Especially in Alaska, rated worst for sexual assault, with pathetically low conviction rates, when there are multiple accusers as based on the Planned Parenthood letter, I stand with the ITC that there is probable cause enough to warrant their actions.”
Others took a decidedly different view.
“I smell PETA!!!! This is such bullsh!t and Iditarod is totally out of line by making a call on random accusations. I am so sorry Brent Sass,” wrote a woman who lives along a remote stretch of the Yukon River in Central Alaska.
Ongoing battle
The organization has labeled fishing “aquatic agony.’‘ It has declared “the war that so many cities, towns, businesses, and individuals try to wage on rats (is) completely unjust.” And it is leading a campaign to bleed the Iditarod of sponsors in the belief that “this pointless, cruel race is a matter of life and death for dogs.”
There is, however, no indication PETA is in any way connected to the Iditarod’s latest problem despite the beliefs of some fans. The woman Burke was accused of assaulting is a Trump supporter who participates in family fishing and hunting activities. The women known to have accused Sass are former dog handlers for Iditarod and Quest mushers.
Though PETA forces from Outside, as Alaskans call the rest of the country, showed up in Anchorage to protest the start of the race this year as they have now for several years, the major distractions now following mushers on the trail north are largely self-inflicted and were probably to be expected.
The Last Great Race has a long, rich, unwritten history of sexual hanky panky from the many mushers sleeping with their dog handlers to groupies flocking to Anchorage to embrace a musher at the start of Iditarod or to Nome to bed one at the end.
Many long involved with The Last Great Race say they are surprised the sexual antics of some mushers and the dog-yard behavior in which some of the Iditarod crowd has engaged over the years hasn’t made for bigger news in the past.
Some have also noted that “what happens with Iditarod stays with Iditarod,” and the Alaska media have been reluctant to report much negative about Iditarod mushers.
Tonga Mackey, the then-wife of the late four-time champ Lance Mackey, was in 2012 accused of assaulting him, but that was quickly hushed up as a family issue that shouldn’t be discussed. State court records reflect that she spent several days in jail before getting out on bail and eventually entered a guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge of assault with “reckless force.”
Her conviction was never reported. The arrest warranted a short story by a now-defunct TV newscast in Anchorage and four paragraphs in the state’s largest newspaper. Another musher on probation after a conviction for domestic abuse and facing new charges of domestic assault that included breaking his partner’s arm ran the 2016 Iditarod with the approval of Iditarod officials.
Only after the race did the digging of then Palmer Frontiersman reporter Matt Tunseth reveal the charges and the Iditarod’s knowledge. A judge later ordered the man into treatment and, according to all accounts, including those from mushers who did not like him, he has learned to control his temper and is a new man.
There have been other incidents, but these things – which do not reflect well on the Iditarod but are no more and no less than a reflection of the large problem of domestic abuse and sexual assault in the cold, dark north of the nation’s northernmost state – are not the Iditarod’s biggest problem or problems these days.
Who luvs ya?
The Iditarod’s biggest problems these days are identity and money.
Some of the luster has gone off “The Last Great Race on Earth” as the late Ian Wooldridge, a reporter for England’s Daily Mail labeled the event in 1977. He returned to the trail two years later to report an Iditarod documentary aired by the BBC in 1979.
The Iditarod was then a rugged affair. Mushers harnessed long, heavy dog sleds to big, furry huskies that looked like the dogs of writer Jack London’s day and didn’t need coats to survive at 50 degrees below zero. They were tough dogs, too.
Sometimes there was a trail and sometimes there wasn’t.
“Hung up a couple days because of snow problems, no trail,” Emmitt Peters from the Yukon River village of Ruby told Wooldridge, but it was better than the 90-degree below zero windchill the year before.
“It was the best Iditarod race I’ve been in,” he said at the finish. “It was the best weather. We had the best trail conditions….”
In those days, the Iditarod was an adventure across the wilds of Alaska from Cook Inlet in the south to Unalkakleet on the Bering Sea Coast in the northwest where the race actually began.
These days, someone running Swenon’s pace 1979 pace would be removed from the race for going too slow. And someone making Butcher’s observation might well be disqualified for letting a dog limp along on two legs for 40 miles even if it was pulling.
Gimpy dogs are fodder for animal rights activists, and slow races require the Iditarod spend more money to support people and dropped dogs along the trail.
The slowest musher to finish last year took 12 days and 2 hours. The last musher to reach Unalkaleet, Eric Kelly, was well under a 15-day pace as headed up the coast, but at the next checkpoint the Iditarod announced he had decided to drop out “in the best interest of his team.”
That’s Iditarod shorthand for a musher being asked or forced to leave the race for going too slow. Kelly was by the time he quit in Shaktoolik hours behind the teams ahead of him and the Iditarod was rolling up its costly to maintain checkpoints.
Speedracer
The quest for speed has radically reshaped the Iditarod. It is now a doggy NASCAR with short-haired dogs as much hound as husky, dogs that now need coats to help them survive in the cold. The trail is marked and, at least for the period when the dog race is underway, maintained as best a wilderness race track across snowy terrain can be.
Racers are still required to carry snowshoes, an ax and other survival gear, but they are rarely if ever used and almost never needed. Gone are the days when mushers cut wood for fires around which they gathered to tell stories during the Iditarod.
The adventure is gone. The race is all business now.
The last campfire along the trail might have been that built by Canadian Ross Adam when he stopped to camp with his team of old-style huskies along the trail to the deserted outpost of Cripple in the long-abandoned “Inland Empire” in 2010 with the temperature near 50 degrees below zero.
The 57-year-old Adam was on a gentleman’s tour of the Iditarod. It took him 13 days to reach Nome. Race records reflect that he and his team took almost 7 days of rest during the journey. When they were moving, they averaged a pace of nearly 8 mph on the trail, more than a mile per hour faster than Lance Mackey, who won the 2010 race.
Among the top-10 teams, only those of Ramey Smyth of Willow and Sebastian Schnuelle of Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada, traveled faster than Adam’s teams. But they finished sixth and seventh, respectively, because – to continue the NASCAR analogy – they pitted more often than Mackey and the other teams in front of them.
The pace of the race has played a part in killing the mystique that once surrounded the event. It is now a race for people who like dog racing. That is a pretty small fan base, especially in a world dominated by motorsport, esport and the myriad distractions of the internet.
Many Alaskans left interested in serious speed racing now turn their attention to the rip-roaring Iron Dog Race, a 2,000-mile, high-speed snowmachine chase from Big Lake to Nome and back. It is more popular than the dog race in the villages through which the Iditarod Trail passes. The reasons for this are simple. Few villagers keep sled dogs anymore because they are more expensive than snowmachines and require way more day-to-day care – care that is required 365 days a year.
The Iron Dog sent 86 riders up the trail this year. Its “Expedition Class” offers an opportunity for those who want to make a once-in-a-lifetime run along the Iditarod Trail to Nome while also working as a feeder for the race’s competitive class.
On the other end of the sports spectrum from the Iron Dog is the Iditarod Trail Invitational, a human-powered event that this year dispatched more than 100 fat bikers, runners and skiers north on the trail.
The Invitational has stolen some of the Iditarod mystique. When Invitational bikers on the trail near Nome ran headlong into a howling, Seward Peninsula ground storm in 2018, they stopped to check on the Iditarod mushers and dogs they found stalled along the trail, judged them safe enough to await the rescue the Iditarod was then organizing, and pushed on into the storm.
The Iditarod later played up the storm for its dramatic value, which no doubt appealed to some in its small fan base, but a strategy of making much of “life-threatening conditions” in which others are happily pedaling or pushing bikes doesn’t seem a good, long-term marketing strategy.
It takes some of the shine off the mystique. Some could be left wondering if the Iditarod is reel or just more reality TV?
Money, money, money
All of the above feeds into the Iditarod’s biggest problem: financing.
It is again reported to be living sponsor check to sponsor check. The entry fee was this year up to $4,000 ($3950 for past champions) rising to $8,000 for late entries after November 30. The Invitational fee was $950 for those going all the way to Nome or $800 for those ending their race at McGrath on the north side of the Alaska Range.
The human-powered race costs much less to stage than the dog-powered race because of the costs of moving supplies along the trail. Invitational racers are limited to gear drops of five or 10 pounds of food and whatnot at checkpoints along the trail. The weight limit for the drop bags of mushers is 50 pounds.
These numbers quickly add up. One hundred, five-pound drop bags can easily be flown into a remote checkpoint in a Cessna 206, the workhorse of small-plane freight haulers in Alaska. The same plane is going to have to make at least two trips to haul in the food for half as many dog teams and drivers.
And when dogs get dropped along the trail due to injuries or fatigue, they have to be flown back to Anchorage, which is yet another big cost. Then there are the costs of the fanfare that surrounds the Iditarod start, something the Invitational largely ignores, and the Iditarod finish in Nome, and along the way the costs of the Iditarod providing “news” coverage of itself to try to satisfy its small fan base, and more.
Financing all of this has never been easy. It has gotten harder as deep-pocket companies have abandoned the Iditarod due to pressure from animal rights groups or because animal rights groups provide an easy excuse for departing.
The problem in attracting new sponsors is the limited marketing appeal for Iditarod. Cabelas, once a major sponsor tried to use the race to promote its business. It went all in, not only backing Iditaord but teaming with champion musher King to design and market a whole line of Iditarod-themed winter outdoor gear.
The gear didn’t sell well enough to keep Cabelas interested so it bailed as had Timberland, another major sponsor before it. Alaska Airlines hung in for a long time before deciding it could get more bang for its sponsorship dollars elsewhere. It was the same for Anchorage Chrysler Dodge, long a big Idit-a-backer.
PETA claimed credit for torpedoing its giveaway of new Dodge Trucks to Iditarod winners, but the reality was Anchorage Chrysler never got the value out of Iditarod to match the funds it pumped into Iditarod. It hung around because company owner Rod Udd was a big fan, and when he died, that was it.
Dodge, itself doesn’t seem particularly worried about animal rights blowback. Ram Trucks partners with onX Hunt, “the number one hunting app on the market, trusted by more than 5 million hunters nationwide.”
Those hunters aren’t consulting onX for information on running dogs that might occasionally, and not very often, die. They’re looking for help in finding animals they can shoot and kill.
Iditarod’s major sponsors now are Donlin Gold, which needs anyone it can get to support a gasline it would like to push up the Iditarod Trail corridor to provide fuel for a proposed mine on the Kuskokwim River, and a couple of smaller petroleum industry companies – Harvest Midstream and Hilcorp – looking to buy a goodwill by supporting the closest thing Alaska has to a big-time sporting event.
Most of the other sponsors are largely trading out services for the status of an Iditarod partner or throwing in small amounts of cash.
Newer ideas
Iditarod once had high hopes for the Iditarod Insider – its pay-to-view, online version of the NFL Network. The Insider coverage once won an Emmy, too. But given high production costs and a very small number of viewers, it never made much money.
And then along came IditaCoin, the vision of a new and still Iditarod Executive Director Rob Urbach.
A cryptocurrency, IditaCoin was in 2022 pitched as the solution to generating “funding not only for staging the historic race, but for animal welfare grants and financial support for the rural communities that share the heritage and tradition of this great race.”
This is now: “iditacoin.io has expired and is parked free, courtesy of GoDaddy.com.”
A pitch for “IditaCoin – The official place for Iditarod fans to run off trail – on chain,” whatever that means, still exists at Iditarod.com. Signing up brings only an email pitch for a team “breaking trail for all Alaskans and the whole Iditarod Nation with the development of the Last Frontier’s first crypto coin” and the suggestion that “as the Latin proverb goes, Fortune Favors The Bold!”
The bold in this case took a beating. IditaCoin and the NFTs, non-fungible tokens, that were launched with it didn’t appear to last long. Before the year was over, the whole operation had been turned over to Dogatopia, “a dog lover’s platform that is unlike anything you’ve seen before!
”When you become a member of Dogatopia, you earn DGZ tokens, just by participating in our community via our smartphone app.”
A “Lite Paper” linked on the website explained that Dogatopia was all about “promoting dog welfare and nurturing a vibrant community of dog lovers and owners.” It promised that “as our community grows, it will accrue a tremendous amount of network value which, in turn, will translate to earnings. These earnings will be reinvested in the ecosystem according to DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) governance decisions, as well as donated to dog-related charities and communities.”
What happened to that Dogatopia is unclear. The Dogatopia.io website now also goes to a message saying it is “parked free, courtesy of GoDaddy.com. A Google search for Dogatopia redirects to Dogtopia.com, which bills itself as “the leading provider of dog daycare in North America.”
The company has no Alaska affiliates.
The old Dogatopia – Dogatopia.io – billed Urbach as its CEO and described him as a “renowned leader, financer, and business builder. Rob’s experience is unparalleled when sports, finance and innovation intersect. He is well versed at taking a nascent project from the very early stages through successful exits – benefiting the organizations he represents and the shareholders involved.”
There is no mention of the IditaCoin or Dogatopia innovations. But Urbach, a graduate of the Wharton School of Business, hasn’t given up.
He described the latter as “a for-profit affiliate” of Iditarod that serves as “a platform company in the multi-billion dollar dog industry: Our business model consists of content – think the Netflix for all things dog – events, products, and services. Since I joined Iditarod, Dogz acquired DockDogs, which hosts 120 events across the country where dogs jump off docks into pools for height, distance, and speed.
“We plan to grow Dogz over the next three to five years. Iditarod has a minority share that ultimately creates a liquidity event for investors and – for the Iditarod – an endowment. We have a network of veterinarians, over 40,000 dogs that compete in our events, and a fan base in the millions; we are well-positioned to be a thought leader in the space.”
What exactly Iditarod’s association with Dogz is, however, is unclear. Iditarod in 2021 described Dogz as a “streaming service,” and said it was “spinning… its Insider Network into a new channel, DOGZ.”
A media release at that time said DOGZ was “announcing its purchase of the leading
canine aquatics event producer, DockDogs based in Medina, Ohio.”
DockDogs, according to its website, is a 24-year-old company involved in “Big Air,” “Extreme Vertical” and “Speed Retrieve” events for dogs. There is no mention anywhere there of Iditarod, although the DockDogs Facebook page has at various times pitched The Last Great Race and Iditarod fundraising events.
The DockDogs affiliate page, however, lists no Alaska affiliates. But the company is a player in the doggy “dock diving” business that the American Kennel Club-affiliated North American Diving Dogs, a competitor in that space, claims to be one of the fastest-growing sports for dogs….North America Diving Dogs is open for all breeds and mixes. We have created divisions so any size and age of dog can achieve excellence.”
ESPN has covered the AKC Dog Diving events with Apple TV covering some DockDog events.
Both are regularly streamed as competition and appear at times on TV. They seem somewhat better suited to the short attention spans of American views today than the slower-moving Iditarod.
Whether Dog Docks is generating any revenue for Iditarod is unknown. But at least none of the events appear to have attracted any protest from animal rights groups. Not even when a dog named Sounder hurled himself a record 36-feet through the air before bellyflopping into a pool in San Diego in June.
The Sounder video is actually fun to watch, but for real Alaskans, nothing can match Iditarod no matter how fast or slow it moves toward Nome.
And in a country that now seems interested in betting on pretty much anything and everything, Urbach might be onto something at last with an Iditarod betting scheme. At this time, there seems to be room in this space, too. It was today hard to find betting odds or anyone taking book for Iditarod 2024.
I’ve been very casually checking on updates of the race every other day or so and started thinking back to the years that Cabela’s sponsored the race. That was the heyday of my participation as a fan. I lived and breathed the Iditarod in those days. And so I stumbled upon this post by searching for “remember when Cabela’s sponsored the Iditarod”. I tried to hang in there for a few years after Cabela’s pulled out but when the Iditarod organization went to restricting the best information to those who paid a fee, my participation as a fan fell precipitously. And now Anchorage Daily News articles are behind a paywall. It seems that subscription services have invaded almost every aspect of life and I am experiencing severe subscription fatigue. Facebook is a good source of information but that too has grown old for me and I have not participated in Facebook for a year or more.
The “bad actors” do not dissuade me from being fan. There are bad people in all walks of life and I do believe there are more good people than bad. My love is for dogs and for people who love dogs. It’s just hard to remember all the great content for free in those Cabela’s days that now costs money. I was definitely spoiled as a fan. I guess at the end of the day, everything changes and sometimes you just have to move on to new things. Thanks for posting this Craig. I always have enjoyed your articles about the race.
It is so sad
i was once enamored with the race, though not so much anymore
As usual and expected of you, Craig, a lot of good observations. However, one glaring wrong to those of us intimate with the Anchorage Chrysler Dodge sponsorship withdrawal, is your statement of their reasons. Call me sometime if you wish to be plumbed up from the inside.
Here’s a novel idea…go out & explore the Iditarod trail whenever you want, stay at lodges at Deshka landing and out on the Yentna…spread your activities out between ski-joring, biking, running & snowmachining during the winter months.
I have spent over 100 days on the trail since the snow fell last fall and never had to once pay “entry fees” or kowtow to my sponsors, fans, peers or a board of biased directors.
I don’t get a new belt buckle, but I don’t care to wear belts for the most part…I just choose to wear the pants that fit me best!
Does anyone remember, back before Insider, when you paid to be a member of Iditarod? You were invited to the picnic each June, and voted for members of the board. I don’t know when that ended, but I’ve got a sock drawer full of the little membership pins they sent every year.
After they stopped the “membership” model for fundraising, I kept on because it gave me access to the GPS tracking. GPS was the only way to have any timely updates on musher location. But now I get more accurate information through friends on the trail and social media. I’ve run out of reasons to buy an Insider subscription.
well all and all this is a good article, except for the part that Iditarod dogs rarely die, not very often. Unfortunately a lot die on the way to get to the start. As culled puppies or dogs that get no vet care, or get put down cause they don’t make the grade. Not to mention the tour dogs that support the “contenders” etc etc etc etc
“Iditarot” seems to be an emerging viral name for this event. Rot, in anything generally sets in slow, then accelerates until finally crumbling what it has manifest in. I suspect the Iditarod has now entered the final stages of this process.
After all, why would any one want to support an event increasingly being exposed as a platform for dog abusers, drug abusers, domestic abusers & rapists….alleged or not, we know the dog abusers and know the common connections to them and domestic abuse and we`ve all seen how the current “champion” finishes races (at least ITC now has a “Reddington” rule to prohibit such methods by him or others, probably the only thing positive he contributes to mushing) , so gain, why would anyone of decency, anyone with an ounce of ethical regard for dogs, for mushing or the state of Alaska, support an event that has become little more than a platform for assorted abuse ?
Its seems an increasing number, don`t, support this travesty. The diminished field of participants is as notable by who is not on the line up, as much as it by those that are on it. After all, what decent musher would want to share a trail or compete with one driver mired in doping allegations, an offspring of another little man who even wrote a book on dog abuse ! Or, share a trail with another sorry excuse for a musher…only a cursory glance at how he finished his performance last go around, sustains that.
All this, and more, does beg a question when “The Last Great Race” does indeed, become the last. Calling this years event a “resurgent Iditarod” is a stretch. Resurgent of what ? Little of the current crop of participants or the ITC, seems to reflect much of the past. We seem to be in an era where cover up is the primary name of the game by those in charge rather than people who could actually stand up for some decency. When a participant from Nenana once hung a dead dog from a tree, he was banned from the Iditarod for life, probably the least of action that should have been taken, but at least ITC had the balls back then to ensure he infected their event no more. Roll forward a few years to yet another Hugh Neff incident…yes that other serial dog abuser…..he was “banned” for his usual ineptitude and abuse, yet somehow, managed to slither back into the event in a subsequent year. How does that work ?
I guess for some races, it does not. The former event known as Yukon Quest, is no more. As much due to the childlike spats between two boards of “directors” but mostly due to a financial deficit brought on by the moral & ethical failures of that race to deal with serial dog abuse…no surprises in the same names featuring in that either. No sponsor wants, nor the public, want to be connected with the values displayed by events that simply become platforms for everything bad in society to manifest in.
Mushing has lost all credibility among anyone but a few remaining myopic die hards and a larger demographic of the ignorant equally blind to reality in the face of social media spin and BS. Every sponsor that once supported this sport, this event and this State, have long since departed leaving the dregs who are simply supportive in the hope to garner support from the few remaining Ititarot supporters for their own exploitative and environmentally abusive agendas in Alaska. PETA may well have had some influences, quite significant probably, considering most of the “facts” they circulate are out of date or largely inaccurate, just imagine if they go hold of the real stuff, the annual material that what is left of mushing provides, what damage they could do ! This event and sport does not have to worry about entities such as PETA doing damage to it, it does terminal damage to itself on a consistent basis through its own failures to acknowledge the rot and the very visible causes of that rottenness.
Clearly, there are sides taken in some of the most recent blights on Iditarod and the sport of mushing. No surprises to see Hugh Neff standing up for Sass, at least there are no longer allegations against Neff, he is a proven abuser of dogs…at very least…allegations against Seavey, why would he not, dope dogs ? At least his methods are, publicly at least, a little less pathetically nasty as his old Man recommends in his written directive on dog abuse ! Reddington…well he`s on plenty film displaying his particular brand of abusive dog driving, so no contest there and Sass, only those with thick tin hats can overlook those “allegations”. The rot in all its clarity and probably, just the surface.
As a former, actual, real winner of the Iditarod is eloquently quoted as saying “Women have little to gain and very much to lose by exposing their identity…….when there are multiple accusers…there is probable cause enough to warrant their actions” when referring to a rare display of an ITC doing the right thing.
Now they also need to do the right thing based not on probable cause, but actual evidence, and boot out the dog abusers as well, restoring at least a little dignity back to the Iditarod, not to mention exhibiting they actually do care about dogs, ethics, mushing and Alaska.
I see you posted this twice. You should know these comments are moderated, but I’m pretty openminded in allowing people to say what they want to say. So I’m clearing this to post because I know you and know your long experience with sled dogs.
That said, I am going to add my personal view that you’ve gone a step too far. There are a lot of good people involved with Iditarod these days, too. And on the whole, everything is far better than in the old days when the laws of the jungle prevailed. There isn’t the culling going on now that there was then, and even the doping appears to have decreased, though it’s hard to tell because the Iditarod doping program has always been something of a fraud.
Even when it was at its best, the lack of out-of-season controls, ie. any time other than except dogs were on the trail, was a giant invitation to doping for anyone with the money to dope. My gut feeling has long been that the real reason that doping chief Morrie Craig got dismissed was that he and others were working on how to pull hair from dogs to test for doping in all the months piror to Iditarod.
The race clealry isn’t as neat and clean and dog friendly as some diehard fans seem to want to believe, but it can be run without being cruel or harmful to dogs, and there are people who’ve run it that way. Some have even won.
“but it can be run without being cruel or harmful to dogs, and there are people who’ve run it that way. Some have even won.”
I strongly disagree with this statement and Dallas just crunching a lead dog into a moose shows just one hazard these dogs suffer.
Only half that start finish & only dogs that die on the trail are counted as “dead”.
If they suffocate in a plane flying home or die a few days later, they don’t make the tally sheet for the year.
The protocol of mushers these days is to cull early before anyone knows the puppy exists…runts and mistake litters get buried quickly in the backyard before anyone knows.
All top contenders are running puppy mills of some sort…this aspect has not changed.