The big, thickly furred dogs and old dogsleds the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race was supposed to help commemorate and preserve
Evolution is a necessary part of survival
With 10 percent of the teams in the 2024 Iditarod Sled Dog Race connected to the Seavey sled-dog dynasty for which 2024 champ Dallas Seavey is now the poster boy, plus a startling three dogs dead despite the Iditarod’s small 2024 field, it’s clear Alaska’s self-proclaimed Last Great Race needs a reboot.
Not just for the dogs, either, but for the competition in a sport that, like its top competitors, appears to have become too inbred and dominated by a handful of industrial-scale mushing operations.
Second-place finisher Matt Hall is a camp manager for Alaska Icefields Expeditions, which boasts that it keeps 300 sled dogs, and is good friends with Matt Hasyashida, a respected Iditarod veteran and Icefields general manager. The connections give Hall access to a large number of potential Iditarod dogs as well.
Third-place finisher Jessie Holmes is supported by his job acting in Life Below Zero and along with his own kennel has a relationship with four-time and retired Iditarod champ Jeff King, and his Husky Homestead Tours with its busy dog yard full of huskies on the edge of Denali National Park and Preserve.
Fourth-place finisher Jeff Deeter from Fairbanks and fifth-place finisher Paige Drobny from Cantwell are also in the sled dog tour business, but might be considered “the least well-armed” of the top Iditarod finishers this year.
Deeter’s Black Spruce Dog Sledding kennel appears to have fewer than 50 dogs at this time. Squid Acres, the kennel Drobny operates with husband Cody Strathe appears even smaller.
But no matter how you cut it, the Iditarod is now dominated by mushers connected to the sled-dog tour business, which raises several fundamental questions – one sporting, one economic and one foundational:
First: Are the Iditarods of the future forever destined to be dominated by teams tied to sled-dog tour businesses?
Second: If so, how many sled-dog tour businesses can Alaska support?
Third: What does the self-proclaimed Last Great Race want to be in the future – a race akin to the original, participant-driven, canine Boston Marathon that encouraged people of all sorts to start training some dogs to challenge America’s last great wilderness or a doggy Formula 1 dominated by a handful of powerful teams and almost-famous drivers?
This is now
The Seaveys, either Dallas or Mitch, have now won five of the last 10 Iditarods – 2024, 2021, 2017, 2016 and 2015 – and five of the nine they entered. Neither Seavey raced in 2023. Dallas was a very close second to Eureka’s Brent Sass in 2022. Mitch, despite his advanced age of 61, was second to Norwegian Thomas Waerner, another musher with access to a huge pool of dogs, in 2021.
Because of his age, Mitch can no longer match his son as a team manager. Once mushers get off the sled to feed, bootie and otherwise care for dogs in a checkpoint, Mitch is slower than Dallas, and this shows in the results at the end.
Of the last nine races in which Dallas has competed, he has finished first six times and second twice. Once Sass was disqualified from the 2024 race because of accusations of sexual assault – accusations which have not been proven – Dallas became the overwhelming favorite to win a record sixth Iditarod, which he did despite a two-hour penalty for breaking race rules after killing a moose that got into his team.
Dallas is a top-notch dog driver. Nobody argues that, but a key part of his victories is access to more and better dog power than anyone else. To stick to the Formula 1 analogy, he’s the driver for big-budget Red Bull with the competition behind him stacking up largely in line with financial assets.
If Iditarod truly wants a competitive field of mushers going forward, it needs to recognize and accept the similar problems in its power structure – as nearly all professional sports have done – and fix it.
Fortunately, in the Iditarod’s case, there is a solution simpler than Formula 1’s cost cap or the salary caps of the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Football League (NFL) cap, and other big-time sports.
The Iditarod can go the way of NASCAR and restrict horsepower or, in this case, dog power.
Simple changes
And Iditarod can do this in a way that not only increases and improves competition but also helps to strengthen the relationship between Iditarod mushers and the dogs in their race teams, which is likely to make both the training for Iditarod and the Iditarod itself safer for the dogs.
Here’s how you do it:
- Require mushers to enter the race on or before Aug. 1 each year.
- Require race entrants to at that time to provide a list of 20 chipped dogs from among which their team will be comprised on race day.
- Retain the race rule that limits mushers to a maximum of 16 dogs and a minimum of 12 dogs on the start line.
These changes would prevent someone like Dallas from doing what he did this year, organizing a group of handlers to train a small army of dogs with the weak washing out and the strong rising to the top.
At the end of this, Dallas picked the best of the best for his 2024 Iditarod team. This is a now-established, Seavey-family style. Some mushers back in the day used to joke that Mitch didn’t even know the names of half the dogs in his Iditarod team because so many handlers had been involved in training so many dogs before the best were picked for Iditarod.
He is likely not the only musher in that situation. The Iditarod is now full of teams that contain a lot of dogs leased for the race as mushers with small kennels try to compete with those with larger kennels. These leases are apparently what kept Eddie Burke Jr. out of the race this year after he was disqualified due to charges of domestic violence and then reinstated when the woman he was accused of assaulting said she didn’t want to testify against him.
But, according to a variety of sources, what really happened is that once Burke was disqualified, kennels that had leased him dogs for Iditarod 2024 took their dogs back and, in some cases, made arrangements with other mushers to run those dogs, apparently the six individual mushers to whom Burke referred in his statement, just days before the Iditarod start.
These sorts of business dealings make a joke of Iditarod mushers talking about how much “I love my dogs.” How much can you love a dog you only met a few days before the race?
To love your dogs, you first need to know your dogs.
This love charade applies as much to the biggest kennels as to leased dogs. It is impossible to love 50 to 100 or more dogs. It’s hard enough to keep their names straight – if one can keep their names straight.
Mushers with huge kennels invariably come to love a few dogs. It’s almost impossible not to love a great lead dog because, as the late, legendary and iconic “Huslia Hustler,” George Attla, once observed, a musher is “lucky to have one truly great lead dog in a lifetime.”
Such dogs are special. Most team dogs in the Iditarod teams are not and many are – at least in racing terms – replaceable and expendable parts. They are trained to run long distances because that is their job, and they are hired out to do their job, and if their performance begins to fall off as they make their way north on the 1,000-mile trail to Nome they are dropped at an Iditarod checkpoint, which is the canine version of being fired.
How much attachment a musher does or doesn’t have to these dogs is largely determined by how much time they’ve spent together. How well a musher really “knows” these dogs is likewise determined by how much time they have spent together.
Spotting developing issues that might threaten a dog’s life can sometimes depend a lot on being familiar with the dog’s normal personality, attitude, gait and more – changes that can indicate if something is starting to go wrong before it goes badly wrong
Requiring mushers to arrive at the Iditarod starting line with a team made up of a relatively small number of dogs they’ve been training with all winter would be better for the dogs, and it would limit the competitive advantage of big kennels with huge numbers of dogs.
The biggest issue
This is, of course, if Iditarod truly wants to be, as it has come to claim, a competition that is “all about the dogs.”
If, on the other hand, it wants to keep on stay on the trail it has been on for years now, it’s time for the race to go all in and go pro:
- Limit the field to 10 or 15 teams.
- Establish qualifying standards for who gets to compete based on finishing positions in middle distances races such as the Kuskokwim 300 Sled Dog Race, the Copper Basin 300, the John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon, the Race to the Sky and other select events.
There are advantages to this scheme for Iditarod. A lot of the race’s overhead is due to the cost of supporting dog teams on the trail. The more food, straw and other gear flown to remote checkpoints, the higher the costs. The more time support staff need to be maintained in those checkpoints, the higher the cost. The more dropped dogs needing to be flown back to Anchorage from those checkpoints, the higher the cost.
Meanwhile, on the marketing front, defining the Iditarod as a “professional” race might enable Iditarod to begin promoting some of the race’s top mushers as the “stars” they want to be. This might create some star power for the race and that might be useful in today’s celebrity-driven world.
Maybe Iditarod could then entice Netflix to come in and cover the race from behind the scenes as it has Formula 1 and professional golf. The race already has the reality TV stars Dallas, Sass and Holmes to help kick-start this idea. They’re screen-ready and happy to act.
The downside to this approach is that the popularity of professional sled-dog racing might be so low in the Age of the Internet that so few are interested and Iditarod would find itself unable to support the race as a professional event.
There are strong indications this is the case. ABC’s Wide World of Sports abandoned the Iditarod in 1993. Efforts to find another television network to cover the race failed. The Outdoor Channel and then The Sportsman Channel, two cable TV channels, picked the race up for a while in the new millennium but subsequently dropped it.
The Iditarod finally took over covering itself with the Iditarod Insider, a pay-to-view streaming service, but the Insider appears to have only a few hundred thousand customers, which makes it hard to pitch sponsors on the marketability of the race.
Race CEO Rob Urbach, who tried to boost the organization’s revenue with a short-lived crypto scheme named IditaCoin, has now told Wharton Magazine he believes the race’s revenue future lies in “a gaming space called Trifecta. It’s a betting game to predict the winner, their finishing time, and the number of dogs they finish with. It’s a pilot program that we’re launching this year and looking to extend.”
Plus “IditaHealth, which is essentially tapping the celebrity value of mushers and our cultural relevance to inspire and incentivize communities in Alaska to get healthier by addressing substance misuse, poor nutrition, inactivity, and other health issues. We’re creating a public good with these kinds of programs and also have one for reading, called IditaRead.”
And “a for-profit affiliate called Dogz. Think of Dogz as a platform company in the multi-billion dollar dog industry: Our business model consists of content (think the Netflix for all things dogs), 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.”
It’s hard to imagine any of these things producing the revenue necessary to boost the Iditarod to a professional level, but Wharton Business School-grad Urbach might know more about finance than a bunch of backwoods fans of Alaska sled dog racing.
Real or reality TV?
Whatever the case, Iditarod is clearly at a point where it needs to make a choice as to whether it wants to sell what is or what was, which will require changes in the way the race operates.
It can’t go on selling itself as the struggle of people and dogs against the wilderness that led it to be labeled “The Last Great Race” with the struggle largely gone and the race taking place on a track prepped for a speed run to Nome.
Selling what no longer exists makes the race look more like reality TV than a real competition, plus there is the downside of contenders so focused on winning that they cease to be “all about the dogs,” as Dallas demonstrated this year.
A certain segment of the Iditarod’s small fan base is composed of little old ladies who sit home on the couch cuddling with Fifi, and they’re likely to revolt if they ever figure out the Iditarod isn’t all-fun, all-the-time for sled dogs.
Sometimes it’s hard work for both mushers and dogs, although it’s not as hard as it used to be.
Why did he say do not touch me? Because the Iditarod, which was once a challenge of mushers and dogs against the wilderness, has a rule against mushers accepting “outside assistance.”
Unfortunately, the Iditarod has done little in modern times to prevent outside assistance from becoming an integral part of the race.
Snowmachines with bright lights parked on the trail you’ve just lost make the trail easy to find. Instead of being Swenson out there wandering around at the front of his team with only the narrow beam of his headlamp to help find snowmachine skeg scratches on ice or old, snowmachine compacted snow to show him where the trail was, Sass had bright lights to guide him.
The Iditarod has largely created conditions like this. The mushers at the back sometimes still deal with the wilderness; they can still sometimes be found teaming up like a doggy peloton to take turns breaking trail for each other when the trail blows in with snow.
The front runners, however, have help in the former of trail-breaking snowmachines that stay not far ahead. For them, the Iditarod itself has helped to take much of the challenge out of the race.
Iditarod could change this or at least try to. It could order its trail-breaking crew to stay 24 or even 36 hours ahead of the lead musher at all times. It could ban mushers from bringing along their own film crews, which have sometimes turned into trail breakers or trail disrupted to help those they are filming. It could order them to stop texting advisers and coaches in Anchorage and Fairbanks.
Iditarod could strap a couple of GoPros to the sled of someone like Sass heading into a storm in the Topkoks instead of sending a film crew on snowmachines to accompany him. It could solicit the help of media, sponsors and friends of mushers on the trail on snowmachines to avoid allowing their machinery to provide advantages or disadvantages for at least the top-10 mushers.
It could liberalize its now costly qualifying hurdles to enter the race to encourage more mushers to get involved, possibly setting the stage for new blood to enter the ranks of the contenders. It could, in any number of other ways, shift the race back to the participatory, everyman/woman event race founder Joe Redington wanted when the Iditarod began in the belief that everyone should experience traveling across Alaska in the winter behind a dog team.
But first Iditarod needs to decide what it wants to be.
You can’t claim the race is “all about the dogs” when the face of your race is willing to forego any effort to get speedy treatment for a badly injured dog because it will interfere with his race schedule.
You can’t continue to pitch the event as “The Last Great Race on Earth,” so named because of the struggle of mushers and dogs against the elements, while using the technology of the Space and Internet Ages to minimize the struggle at every turn.
Successful sporting events recognize this. The Tour de France has allowed a lot of new technology to infiltrate its event, but the bikes used in the race today still look much like the bikes of 100 years ago and the roads, though better paved, are not all that different.
If only the same could be said of Iditarod dogsleds, Iditarod sled dogs and the trail itself, or even one of these three elements. None of them look like what they did when the race started.
The Iditarod still isn’t easy – contenders in the race continue to struggle with sleep deprivation – but the race is orders of magnitude easier than it once was. It is no longer “The Last Great Race;” it is now more a “Doggy NASCAR” or a “Doggy Formula 1.”
Categories: Commentary, Outdoors
If the Iditarod is a sport (as I believe it is), then it’s always easy to pile on the dominant team. The Yankees have all the money and used to win. (Sadly, not lately.) If you compete in equestrian sports, the best horses cost $$$ and a mediocre rider can win plenty of events. Big budgets and big operations yield success. It’s the way it goes in sports. And if you look too deep into any sport (see equestrian above), you’ll see the dark underbelly. Competition is not without ruthlessness.
As far as how many dog tour companies can survive in Alaska, that’s up to the individual owner/operators. If they’re not making money, they can do something else for a living. No mandate needed.
If you don’t like the Iditarod — just as I don’t care for NASCAR — look away. Not everybody has to complete or have an interest in everything.
Oh Molly, the things you overlooked….
1.) MLB, the sport you cite, recognized the money problem and instituted what it calls a “Competitive Balance Tax” to control the money teams can spend on their rosters.
2.) How many dog tour teams can survive in Alaska isn’t about the people who run them; it is about whether the Iditarod can maintain a competitive field. Few want to watch a competitive event where the underdogs have no chance.
3.) Most importantly, the Iditar0d, like all sports, is a business that depends on eyeballs. If even more people follow your advice and “look away,” it dies. The fan base is already tiny.
Craig, do you know why it is taking so long for Necropsy Results to be released? It seems longer than in the past… I guess the longer it takes, the less notice it will attract, as the event is over…?
Iditarod has for years now been slow and incomplete with necropsy reports. And, yes, I would expect a good part of the delay is so they can release what little they release after the media has gone away. Not that the legacy media now covering the race these days would take a serious look at those necropsy reports or understand them. The coverage is largely provided by a scientifically illiterate group of fanboys and fangirls.
If nothing showed up on the necropsy it would be dependent on histopathology for diagnosis. It takes time to cut in the slides and read them. If it is a cardiac conduction problem that can require hundreds of slides on the heart alone.
It would not be helpful to release incomplete results as there would be a lot of debate and second guessing by armchair pathologists
Be kind. The pathologists are veterinarians too. They are under a lot of pressure from the race, the public, and the media. Don’t add to it. They are doing their job, and it takes time.
There is going to be a lot of debate and second guessing by armchair pathologists and, no doubt, some real ones no matter when the results are released, Caro. Debate is what science is about. And as someone whose comments makes it clear you have some knowledge in this year area should know, causes of death can sometime be extremely hard to identify and often not clearcut.
“…….Many folks would like to see the iditarod continue, dog farming is not the path to iditarod longevity. Is that really debatable?…….”
It most certainly is. This coming from a guy who could as easily see it going away as growing into a NASCAR style corporation. I truly don’t care, but I’m not so naive to believe that it can stay without a process to breed, train, cull, and perfect teams jus5 like any other sport does from MLB, NFL, NBA, NASCAR, aquatics, etc.
More, the Gaia religion isn’t going away. It’s growing, and it will continue to grow as long as it’s bred in our universities and in the general public by means of mass media propaganda, so opposition to sled dog racing is going to grow with it.
Works for me. Frankly, just the reduction in moose deaths and reduction in user group conflict makes me wish the industry would disappear. I dislike coming upon dog sledders on the trail almost as much as moose do. I’m required to evacuate the trail (created by snowmobiles), then wrestle to get my stuck machine out of the deep snow while the arrogant sledder and cacophony of canines run on as if they own the wilderness. There are infinite number of reasons why the Bush abandoned dog sleds when snowmobiles became efficient and reliable, just like why we don’t ride horses anymore (my Daddy used to ride a horse to school every day with his siblings in the 1930’s, and while in school learning the 3 R’s the horse grazed in the school yard with the others……..no lawn mower immigrants needed………dogs don’t graze………..)
Good point on all the additional moose deaths. That is something I usually forget to include in the Iditarod madness paradigm. I have heard of many dog drivers shooting a moose in late winter / spring when snow is deep, and the moose cannot easily get off trail with fast approaching dog team. Craig had a good article about Jessie Holmes aka “Moose Slayer” from 2022.
https://craigmedred.news/2022/05/02/moose-slayer/
Dog farming is not debatable. But you can love and care for a smaller group of canine family members. I think the idea that you have to sign up by August 1st and present 20 chipped dogs that your team will come from is an excellent idea. NO one will go for this, of course. Because they want to wait until winter training has been going on for months to pick the “cream of the crop” out of their top 50 from their 300 available racing dogs. And then, of course, fill in with leased dogs.
But this would be a way to see how well drivers can nurture a smaller group of canine atheletes into race season and through race season and onto the bigger races. This would require an entire new level of dog care, an entire new (ok – not new – the old timers had to do this out of necessity) level of training. Training to last in the long run. Not just speed for one event. It would be a site to behold. Each dog’s life is precious and this would force racers to adopt that idea. At least after the August 1st deadline. Up until then they might still have 300 to go through but it would force them to concentrate attention and care on those 20 for over 5 months.
Dreaming is fun, isn’t it? I used to respect the sled dog racers that cared about their dogs. Are there any left?
Nancy: Thanks. It’s nice to see somebody gets it.
The fundamental question facing Iditarod at tihs point seems to be the same one that faced motorsport: Do we want racing determined by who has the best drivers and the best team management, or do we want racing determined almost soley by who can afford to buy the best equipment.?
Raise the number of the dogs you can select your race team from to 30, and this would make sense. A pool of twenty leaves too narrow marginal, taken into account that – no matter how good dog care – when the time comes to pick the final race team there will be certain % of dogs that have a problem or another (bug, sore, etc.) why they should not enter a race at that particular moment. A pool too small will easily lead into a situation in which dogs not in condition sufficient enough will be attempted to sneak into the race. Also: Ban dogs younger than 2 full years old from serious racing. This does not mean that you could not enter race events with yearlings in your team in training purpose, but the requirements for compulsory rest for such teams should be different from the teams actually racing. One key factor of avoiding heart originated sudden deaths of sleddogs is not-training them too hard when they are “teenagers”, goes especially with intensive anaerobic training.
Fully agree on two year olds. Thirty is too many. Takes the oneous off the driver to show judgment in training, but I could live with the 24 Schandelmeier suggested to Iditarod back when it was last talking about trying to improve dog care. I admit that was actually my first thought by a very experienced old Iditarod hand made convincing arguments for 20.
The young dog problem is real. They dont’ have any judgment. I’ve been witnessed this problem personally. They need better supervision.
If a musher is employing “intensive anaerobic training”, then they are quite possibly wasting their time. Responses to conditioning are stimulus specific, and an endurance sled dog spends almost no time at all doing heavily anaerobic work. A well trained sled dog spends the vast majority of its time at 50% VO2max or lower.
And if there is data to suggest a link between intensive anaerobic training in young dogs and subsequent cardiac pathology, I’m not aware of it. For that matter, it can’t even be said with certainty that a single sled dog has ever died of cardiac-origin sudden death. When that has been listed as the presumptive cause, it has been because they couldn’t identify anything else so assumed that it must have been cardiac origin (if it is an electrical disturbance, there is very little evidence left behind). But not finding anything else is a function of the quality and quickness of the necropsy, and the circumstances of Iditarod (remote location resulting in necropsies that are delayed, sometimes by days) most definitely work against that.
None of which means I am in favor of imposing the intensity of training needed to run 1000 miles on a youngster – it is a bad idea for a variety of reasons that ARE proven. I’ve always been in favor of a “mini-Iditarod” that would be mandatory for rookies, both canine and human. Participate in the ceremonial start, and run as far as McGrath (paved runway that facilitates flying everything back to Anchorage). The benefit to the rookie humans is that you get all the fanfare and hoopla and a pretty intense introduction to some challenging trail, and while waiting for their ride out of McGrath, they get to ponder the idea that if this was the REAL race, you would only be about a third of the way through.
I like your mini-rod idea. It would be the ideal test for rookies and put the least stress on the management system. Flying dogs out of McGrath is fairly cheap, and the only communities to be overwhelmed between Willow and McGrath are Skwentna, which welcomes the invasion, and Nikolai, which doesn’t mind it because it is over fairly quickly.
As to the rest, I think we’re in general agreement. As someone personally familiar with the pitfall of over-training syndrome, I’m painfully aware of the dangers of overdoing intense training. And over-training syndrome is a common problem among elite young athletes though, thankfully, it seldom kills them.
Most humans, like Siberian huskies, seem to have the sense to quit before they exercise themselves to death, but then, of course, there was poor Tom Simpson in the Tour who did exercise himself to death which the Daily Mail later blamed on drugs leaving him so “he did not know he had reached the limit of his endurance.”
Do dogs need drugs to get to that point? I’m not sure they do. I’ve never witnessed a human running until he or she just dropped. I have seen that with dogs.
I’d also beg to differ with you a small bit on one thing here, and that regards dogs going anaerobic. My experience with dog teams is that, especially in training, you have a mix of dogs working at different capacities. Some are barely keeping the tug tight. Others are pulling like little beasts. The whole idea of training a mass of dogs and selecting among them to get an Iditarod team is to put togeter an outfit of little beasts.
And I would expect that if we put HR monitors on all the dogs in some of these teams in training we might find some of the little beasts going anaerobic in a team that is generally at the top end of its aerobic capacity. As an old dog now, I can tell you it gets much harder to go anaerobic with age.
In fact, I now find it impossible to hit my anaerobic threshold unless I am well rested. My past overtraining issues were, on the other hand, linked to the ability to do an overload of anaerobic workouts. I was at the time not much smarter than a lot of dogs. In fact, it wasn’t until I got that figured out that I started running sub-3 hour marathons, and that didn’t happen until after I turned 40.
To translate this into Iditarod terms, I wouldn’t at that point pace have been a “top” Iditarod dog, but likely one good enough to be a decent team dog given the ability to hold a much faster half-marathon pace to Cripple or Iditarod before petering out. And I did get pretty good at pushing to that point. My last couple marathons ended up with me puking all over the place and, in the very last, slowing down in the last half mile to avoid puking all over the place. I didn’t want to put on that display again.
It did, however, give some empathy for Iditarod dogs dead of aspiration pneumonia. I could see how that could happen.
Wow. That’s a lot to process and I agree in spirit. But I also agree with Stephan up there. If a sport or event needs to lie or cover the truth to survive it’s lost already. But the dogs love to run, yes because they are chained the rest of the time. The Iditarod went full commercial a long time ago, we are just seeing its worst version now and yes can only get worse. I mean you have a lot of great ideas for reform how about you start and end with your dogs all of them? That takes out so much artificiality out of it. This is why I liked the YUkon Quest it was more real or as reals as one of these get.
I seem to be unable to put a reply on Michael Davis or Craig’s comments above. However, I did find an article dating back to 1997 that would seem to show that at least back then, it was proven that heart issues (conduction defect like in human athletes) had been the cause of death for some sled dogs.
The conduction system in sudden death in Alaskan sled dogs during the Iditarod race and/or during training
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9080492/
Definitely acquainted with that article – that, plus a handful of other articles form the basis of the pre-race ECG screening that was initiated by the Iditarod Trail Committee a couple of decades ago. While the report is compelling, for reasons that too technical the comment section of an internet blog, it is my opinion that the study falls short of PROVING that the dogs examined for that study died of cardiac arrhythmias (although I will certainly concede that others could come to a different conclusion, so my previous statement suggesting that it has never been shown could be viewed by some as incorrect). But importantly, with that study in hand, I don’t know of any instance in which similar microscopic findings were reported in subsequent sled dog necropsies (pathologists were certainly clued-in to look closely for those lesions), suggesting that the study conclusions might fall short of the “repeatability” standard that is part of the foundation for assessing reliability of scientific publications. That is not to suggest that the study’s data are wrong nor that the conclusions are flawed – just that the data might be interpreted differently in the light of 30 more years of subsequent studies and publications.
Michael: My personal experiences, anecdotal though they might be, would tend to agree with your opinions here in that all the dogs that have collapsed on me over the years have recovered and lived on for years and years. Dogs with healthy hearts appear to be similar to people with healthy hearts: Pushed to the exertional limit, they collapse well before they die.
That said, there are few human deaths that have been linked to unexplained cardiomyopathies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3445091/#:~:text=In%20the%20London%20Marathon%2C42,attributable%20to%20coronary%20artery%20disease.
The ECG testing of Iditarod dogs was a great idea badly flawed by the decision to pull the dogs with abnormal ECGs. It would have been nice to let them race for at least a few years to determine whether the testing was justified.
Great analysis.
The original race, and by design, has turned into a commercial event. Unfortunately, all good things evolve into this. Your suggestions can help keep this commercial event going……….maybe………, but it will continue to garner the hatred of the Gaia class until they either die off themselves (unlikely), or they kill the event (much more likely, especially since greed will help that likelihood).
Imagine the sled dog tourism industry evolving into an Iditarod Serum Run Adventure run similar to guided fishing tours. The original race path from Nenana to Nome by dog sled. The villages gearing up to serve the travelers with lodging, food, and supplies. Easier on the dogs. Focus on the tour instead of the speed. Spread the money through the villages.
Of course, the Gaia class will continue to oppose it………
No Craig…the race doesn’t need a “re-boot” it needs to END.
This is the twenty first century and most Americans who loves animals are sick of seeing dogs on short chains throughout Alaska…let’s talk about the real issue which is the need for constant “tethering” aka “chaining” of these creatures to allow 50-200 dogs to live on one property without constant fights breaking out. Of course Jeff King is still involved in the dog farming business as well…this is what a lot of the anti Brent Sass propaganda was about….it’s ALL about money and competition. These “top ten” breeders don’t want anyone moving up and taking their spots. New guys or gals with money are welcome to rent teams from the Seaveys, Kings & Redingtons but anyone with a homestead and breeding program is the real competition. Which brings us back to the main issue…DOG FARMING and the chaining of these creatures through 40 below temps year after year. Ever live next to one of the dog farms? I have…it sucks. Dogs dragging their chains all night in cold weather trying to stay warm…crying and howling in the middle of the night through 30 -40 below temps and waking up neighbors within a mile radius. Look at the picture you posted…I count 6 large dogs on the center team. This is nothing like the circus we see today with mushers like Dallas training over 30 dogs at once with 3 mushers. Let’s admit the situation is out of control and only getting worse each year. This was one of the worst Iditarods that I can remember and there was only 38 starting teams. It goes to show that dog care has only gotten worse even though the propaganda arm of ADN has grown larger. You can only hide a stench for so long until the smell gets out and everyone knows…well, it’s out. Folks know that these long distance races breed dog lot competitors. Peta will organize boycotts until no more yuppies from America come to Alaska buying tickets to ride on sled with mushers….when the funding dries up, it’s over. Please don’t support continuing this insanity…let mushing get back to it’s roots which is smaller dog teams running shorter distances each day.
The Seavey’s are to the Iditarod as the Kenyan’s/Ethiopian’s are to the Boston Marathon. If you want to beat them, get better.
Kenyan’s on drugs, that take subways (break rules) during races….sure.
You are presenting the same argument folks made about/defending Lance Armstrong….
No way he had a competitive advantage…he was just that good.
Interesting
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That said, I do think Dallas puts more time into his own physical fitness than many mushers present and past. He should do the iditasport sometime…he’d probably finish.
Are you suggesting Kenya, like East Germany did, like Dallas, runs a breeding farm for athletes and discards the slow athletes?
And this is a good model for dog racing, that will attract sponsors?
Sometimes there is more to “winning” a race than simply finishing first.
Many folks would like to see the iditarod continue, dog farming is not the path to iditarod longevity. Is that really debatable?