Iditarod climax

Dallas Seavey grabs 6th win

A controversial, 2024 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race ended somewhat predictably today with Dallas Seavey from Talkeetna, the musher with access to the biggest pool of Alaska sled dogs, the winner and yet another dog dead on the trail.

The death of a three-year-old husky in the team of rookie musher Calvin Daugherty from Sterling brought the dead-dog count to three despite a race that started with only 38 teams and 608 dogs, the second smallest field in race history.

The death toll was unprecedented for the modern Iditarod, and the race is not yet over. It has been more than a decade since Iditarod has seen three dogs die on the trail, and the 2024 race was coming off a string of three years with no deaths.

The last time more dogs died on the trail was in 2009 when four perished, two of them in a storm that left several mushers fearing for their lives. Nearly 1,100 dogs started the race that year, however, and at the end the per capita death rate was 3.73 per thousand. The rate so far this year is up to 4.93 per thousand.

And it could easily be higher if Seavey hadn’t gotten lucky after a moose attacked his team and injured a dog early in the race. Seavey shot the moose, loaded the injured dog in his sled, and sped on down the trail.

He later credited the dog’s survival with sled dogs being tougher than other dogs. Shortly after he made that claim at the race’s halfway point, sled dogs started dropping dead along the trail like it was 1974 rather than 2024.

The 1970s were deadly for Iditarod dogs with mushers still experimenting with how to race 1,000 miles. At least 16 dogs died in the 1974 race, and the death toll remained significant, though poorly reported, into the early 1980s.

PR War

With so many dogs dead, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the latest animal rights group trying to defund the self-proclaimed Last Great Race, found itself shoveling the dirt in a public-relations goldmine.

Most Alaskans would prefer PETA go the way of a dead sled dog and so too the vast majority of the Iditarod’s small but rabid fan base. But the Lower 48-based group has settled in for the long haul.

The Iditarod, which now bills itself as “all about the dogs,” and PETA, an animal rights organization so extreme it wants fishing banned as cruel, are in a battle for the hearts and minds of Americans with no strong feelings for either sled dog racing or animal rights.

PETA and Iditarod ironically share one thing in common in this war. Both are driven by a need for money from sponsors and supporters to stay in business, and the money is tied to mainstream public opinion about sport and the treatment of animals.

PETA has made some gains in the PR battle in recent years with a variety of significant sponsors of Iditarod abandoning the race in fear of bad publicity. And the Iditarod this year lobbed PETA plenty of anti-Iditarod ammunition from before the race start until the end.

• 2023 Rookie of the Year Eddie Burke Jr. disqualified because he was facing criminal charges of domestic assault.
• 2022 Iditarod champion Brent Sass of Eureka disqualified with two, unnamed former handlers accusing him of sexual assault, a charge he has vehemently denied.
• Three dogs dead on the trail to date.
• And race winner Seavey’s cavalier handling of a badly injured dog, something he blamed on being in shock.

The Iditarod did slap Seavey on the fingers for the dog incident as he raced the 1,000 miles from Willow to Nome to claim an unprecedented sixth victory. But the penalty wasn’t really about the dog, which was critically injured, but about a moose that was dead.

Iditarod rules say that when a musher is forced to kill a moose to defend a team he or she is required to field dress it, which Seavey didn’t do.

The rules also say that if a musher arrives at a checkpoint with a dog in “critical condition or a life threatening condition, the musher may be held up to eight hours for investigation.”

Seavey was not held, although Iditarod did later conduct something of an investigation which found that Seavey hadn’t made much of an effort to deal with the carcass of the dead moose as required by the rules.

Following this, the race announced that “a three-person panel comprised of race officials” had decided the moose “was not sufficiently gutted by the musher.  By definition, gutting: taking out the intestines and other internal organs.”

For failing to abide by the rule, Seavey was assessed a two-hour time penalty. The dog in critical condition was not mentioned. Someone familiar with the judging said photographs of the moose carcass were taken and explained what happened this way:

“(Seavey) cut a small slit in the belly and a few intestines and a small section of stomach were hanging out. The musher did not do anywhere near the requisite job of properly gutting the animal. That is why he has been penalized for that infraction. The race cannot verify how bad the condition of his dog was in the immediate aftermath of the moose stomping, so that is why there has been no penalty assessed for him not immediately going to a checkpoint.

“If the musher had gone immediately to a checkpoint out of concern for his dog, it is unlikely he would have been penalized at all, but in this instance, he neither dealt with the moose properly, nor went straight to a checkpoint. He continued to run his competitive race schedule.”

Winning move

The competitive race schedule ended up working out well for Seavey no matter whether it was intended, attributable to Seavey being in shock, or the result of some rule bending.  As NASCAR great Richard Petty once observed, “If you ain’t trying to cheat a little, you ain’t likely to win much.” 

Seavey stuck to his race schedule to the village of McGrath north of the Alaska Range on the banks of the Kuskokwim River and then made a hard, 115-mile push to the site of the now non-existence community once called Cripple in the heart of Alaska now extinct “Inland Empire” to grab the Iditarod’s halfway prize worth $3,000.

He’d planned to take the race’s one, mandatory, 24-hour rest there and the two-hour time penalty, which was tacked onto the halfway stop, just gave his dogs a little more recovery time after the tough push to lead the field to Cripple.

Past Cripple, Jessie Holmes from Brushkana Creek, a reality TV actor like Seavey, along with Travis Beals from Seward and Matt Hall from Two Rivers near Fairbanks did their best to make this year’s Iditarod look like a race once it hit the Yukon River and turned west.

But Seavey had things well under control by the Bering Sea Coast. The first musher out of Unalkleet, he never looked back as he kept building out his lead on the way to the finish line in the City of the Golden Sands.

Sass, another reality TV actor, had been expected to be Seavey’s main competition this year, wasn’t around to give chase, and the other mushers behind Seavey just couldn’t hold his pace.

By the time his team crossed under the burled arch that marks the Nome finish line in a time of 9 days, 2 hours, 16 minutes and 8 seconds, Seavey’s closest competitor – Hall – was more than four hours back. Seavey finished with the slowest winning time in the last four years, and yet the race took the greatest toll on dogs since 2009 (not counting dogs Iditarod killed in transport or that died in Anchorage traffic collisions after escaping handlers in the state’s largest city).

The causes of the dog deaths have not yet been determined.