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The Iditarod fades to its 1973 size

As diehard fans of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race celebrate the victory of an out-of-work reality TV star with a documented history of disrespect for Alaska wildlife and the last mushers on the trail march toward Nome, it is looking more and more like the big winners in this year’s race were animal rights extremists.

With two teams still on the trail behind Jessie Holmes, the 2025 Iditarod appears destined to end with the smallest group of finishers since the inaugural race of 1973 when taking a dog team 1,000 miles from Anchorage to Nome was a fantasy.

Twenty-two teams eventually made the city on the edge of the Bering Sea famous for its golden sands to that year prove that a 1,000-mile sled-dog journey across Alaska was possible. It would appear 22 will be the number again this year with Jenny Roddewig today joining the many rookies chopped.

She was set to leave White Mountain, the penultimate checkpoint when the Iditarod announced she had scratched. Roddewig had been at the tail end of the race for days, and the modern Iditarod does not like tailenders.

The Facebook page for her kennel suggested the so-called “blowhole” at the base of the Topkok Hills was a concern, but there was nothing in any forecasts to suggest team-stopping winds there today, and the anemometer at Johnson’s Camp near the blowhole was recording wind speeds of four to eight miles per hour. 

Given the wind direction was from the north-northwest, gusts as much as twice as high might be expected a few miles farther east on the trail, but there were no indications of any sort of team-stalling weather.

Raising fears about the trail ahead is, however, one technique Iditarod organizers have been known to use to encourage mushers, especially rookies, to scratch to get the race over with as fast as possible.

The large number of rookie dropouts this year that helped the race tie ’73 for the lowest number of finishers underlines the need-to-be-faced reality that the Iditarod dog race has become a shadow of itself. Only three years ago, more mushers finished in – 37 – than started this year – 33.

And the 2022 race was itself a shrunken version of what the Iditarod was in its heyday when Anchorage municipal officials struggled to figure out how to find room to park all the teams gathered downtown in Alaska’s largest city for the Iditarod’s ceremonial start.

Seventeen years ago, 96 teams towed the start line. Seventy-eight finished. Iditarod was then talking about the need to cap the field at 100 because the race was getting too big to manage.

Now the talk in some circles is about how much longer the self-proclaimed “Last Great Race” might last.

Quick decline

As late as a decade ago, 78 teams showed to start Iditarod with 66 of them finishing in Nome – more than twice as many as started this year in a field laden with first-timers.

A bare majority of that 2025 starting field was made up of returning mushers.

Forty-eight percent were rookies with no hopes of an Iditarod win, but looking for an Iditarod adventure. For half of them, largely thanks to Iditarod orders, the Iditarod became their graveyard of dreams. 

And after what happened this year, one has to wonder why any rookie musher would want to invest the time, the tens of thousands of dollars and the struggle necessary to earn the chance to run the race in 2026.

Half of the rookies, as of this writing, are out of the race either because they couldn’t keep up with the pace of today’s Iditarod and were talked into scratching, refused to scratch and were “withdrawn, or in the case of Daniel Klein from Wisconsin, required to quit because a dog in the team died. 

That dog, a four-year-old female, turned out to be pregnant, although the Iditarod has not disclosed how pregnant. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), an extremist animal rights group, predictably had a field day with the death.

“Forcing a pregnant dog to race hundreds of miles to her death is not exempt from prosecution under the law despite carveouts for the dog sledding industry,” it said in a media statement, “and running a pregnant dog is prohibited even by the Iditarod’s rules.”

At this time, however, it remains unclear if the dog was pregnant when the race began, or if its pregnancy had anything to do with its death. Strenuous exercise is no more a death sentence for a dog in the early days of pregnancy than it is for a human in a similar situation.

Marathoner Sally Kipyego finished second in the New York City marathon in 2016 and later, according to Runner’s World magazine, “was shocked to find out she was ‘a month or so’ pregnant during New York. She had been putting in 120-mile weeks in preparation for the marathon.”

PETA, which has been stalking Iditarod sponsors for years, could care less about these sorts of details. Details don’t matter to true believers clinging to that they hold holy.

PETA is now busy claiming credit for the Incredible Shrinking Iditarod, but the “Last Great Race” has problems bigger than PETA – problems that have their roots way back in the last century. 

Where it began

The Iditarod’s problems of today can be tracked back to 1986 when the late and destined-to-be-legendary Susan Butcher won her first race in a down-to-the-wire competition with Joe Garnie, an Alaska Native musher from the tiny village of Teller north of Nome.

Butcher’s victory was greatly aided by husband Dave Monson, a top-five Iditarod veteran, who flew along the trail that year to prepare just about every checkpoint for Butcher’s arrival and offer tactical advice that was technically in violation of Iditarod rules banning “outside assistance.”

Race officials saw what was going on and ignored it. And Butcher ended up with the breakthrough win that set the stage for her Iditarod dominance in the years to follow.

Butcher has rightly gone down in history as one of Alaska’s dog-driving greats, but her entry into the pantheon of Iditarod greats was a struggle She put together some powerful dog teams in the early 1980s, but couldn’t crack the winner’s circle until that ’86 race.

Many expected her to win in 1984, but her frenemy Rick Swenson, already a four-time winner, screwed that up. Instead of stopping in the Rohn checkpoint on the north side of the Alaska Range, a checkpoint that had become the standard spot for taking the Iditarod’s one required 24-hour stop, Swenson stayed for hours and then took off without completing that rest.

Butcher waited even longer. When she left hours behind Swenson, having also not taken her mandatory 24, fellow competitor Dean Osmar observed that “she just lost the race.”

Osmar stayed for his 24. He passed both Swenson and Butcher on down the trail and was hours in the lead by the time the race reached halfway. Butcher spent the rest of the race trying to catch him but finished an hour and a half back.

Given the speed and power Butcher’s team had shown in ’84, everyone had her as the favorite to win in 1985, but to save weight in her sled, she left her handgun at home in a year with deep snow pushing moose into a ditch of a trail.

Thus there was nothing she could do upon encountering a moose that stomped through her team as moose are prone to do, thinking the dogs were wolves, and by the time fellow musher Duane “Dewey” Halverson arrived on the scene to kill the moose, two dogs were dead and nearly a dozen others were injured.

Butcher was forced to drop out of the race. Libby Riddles subsequently became the first woman to win the Iditarod. That September, Butcher and Monson married, solidifying a partnership that had begun four years earlier.

In the years to follow, Monson would be constantly at Butcher’s side as she established herself as the Iditarod’s dominant force. And a lot of other mushers would grow increasingly angry about the way in which Butcher and Monson cultivated a network of villagers along the trail.

Friendly help

To be fair to the Butcher-Monson duo, this wasn’t something particularly new. By the start of the ’80s, Swenson – the winner in 1982 – and Butcher – the runner-up that year – were already talking about the advantages of training their teams along the Bering Sea coast prior to the race.

But they weren’t just training their teams there. They were also working on developing friendships with people in the villages along the trail who could provide accommodations and sometimes maybe a little extra help – a wake-up call here, some tools to fix a sled there, maybe even some hot water so the musher didn’t have to cook to feed the dogs.

Mushers who couldn’t afford to do what Swenson and Butcher were doing were envious, sometimes even a little angry. As a result, they put pressure on the Iditarod that led to a couple of key rule changes.

One was what came to be known as the “Monson Rule” which made it clear that someone coaching a musher during the race was providing a form of outside assistance. In the big scheme of things, this rule would prove minor compared to the other rule change.

This was the so-called corralling rule (formally called the accommodations rule) that put an end to mushers staying at the homes of friends or wannabe friends in Iditarod villages.

The new rule stipulated that “mushers may only use officially authorized accommodations. Accommodations and or hospitality outside checkpoints must be a) open to all race participants and b) locations made notice of at the mushers’ meeting prior to the start of the race.”

The rule ended the days of villages organizing to house mushers with people often competing for the honor of hosting the top teams.

Over time, the implications of this rule would become huge. Villagers would become less and less a part of the race, and the race more and more something imposed upon them, a problem only compounded by the big egos of some self-important Iditarod competitors.

As the race became less of a village activity, fewer villagers would be interested in volunteering to help with the race, leading Iditarod to bring in more volunteers from Outside.

Eventually, in some villages, the Iditarod would be seen as an entity that arrived to occupy the local school or community center for days to host mushers and then leave.

Villagers would continue to profess to be fans of The Last Great Race, because that is the politically correct thing to do in Alaska, but in the village consciousness, the race would come second to high-school basketball and the Iron Dog snowmachine race as a village event.

This in turn would put pressure on the Iditarod – both in terms of the costs to support the volunteers flown into villages and resentments brought about by the occupation of schools or community centers – to get the race over as fast as possible and clear out.

Bye-bye love

So-called back-of-the-pack (BOP) mushers who once made the adventure for which the race became famous, and arguably sometimes the dogs,  would be the ones to pay the price for the desired to speed things up.

One veteran of many, many Iditarods contends that some dog injuries and deaths appear to have “something to do with inexperienced rookies trying to keep up.” The data on dog deaths doesn’t, however, fully support that conclusion.

Many of the race’s top competitors have had dogs die. Butcher lost four dogs along the trail – two stomped to death by the moose, another dead of a reported heart attack and the fourth a victim of a ruptured liver. Swenson lost one that got tangled in harness and drowned in overflow water while he was trying to get the team back onto solid ground.

The late Lance Mackey, the four-time champ haunted by tragedies and illness prior to his death, lost two in the 2015 race. Four-time champ Doug Swingley had a dropped dog later die of an intestinal obstruction of the type sometimes caused by blunt force trauma, something that could come from a dog banging into a tree along the trail or being hit by the sled.

Still, the evidence does lend some weight to the argument there are injuries and deaths in lesser teams caused by trying to keep up with the fast-moving racers leading the Iditarod to avoid being tossed out of the event.

Once there was talk of devising ways to slow the race down, but no one came up with a perfect solution. And some possible “cures” were dismissed as doing little more than creating new problems – most notably the idea of turning the Iditarod into a “stage race” requiring stops of a defined number of hours in each checkpoint.

Such an arrangement encourages competitors to run sprints between checkpoints, and it is well documented in endurance sports that running multiple sprints is physiologically more demanding than running a more steady pace over distance.

And a stage-style race would likely add days to the Iditarod finishing time and require Iditarod provide more support in checkpoints, which drives up race costs and lengthens the Iditarod invasion in villages.

Iditarod has largely stopped talking about any of these ideas since the departure of race CEO Stan Hooley seven years ago. 

Change of leadership

Hooley left after the Iditarod’s first public disclosure of dog doping and after his suggestion that it might be time for the race to focus more on its wilderness-adventure roots than on becoming the ever-faster race being chased by the Iditarod’s top contenders.

By then, too, Hooley had spent more than 25 years at the helm of the Iditarod, and the Idita-world was ready for a change. Spend that long leading any organization and the focus tends to become more on what you got wrong than what you got right.

Even the legendary Bill Belichick, the greatest football coach in the history of the National Football League, got fired after 24 years at the helm of the New England Patriots because the team was faltering.

The same could be said of the Iditarod as the start of the 2020s approached. Iditarod.com’s pay-for-view video coverage wasn’t generating the revenue the Iditarod board had hoped it would. Some sponsors had already left due to pressure from animal rights groups. And costs for staging the race were going up due to inflation.

Much of this was beyond Hooley’s control, but he was the easiest target to blame, especially after Iditarod fans split over the revelation that young and rising champ Dallas Seavey had been caught with doped dogs in Nome.

Seavey insisted he had been sabotaged. Some believed. Some didn’t. The Iditarod failed to put together a thorough investigation to find out where exactly the drugs found in his dogs came from. And the whole episode turned into one giant, public mess.

Enter Hooley-replacement Rob Urbach, a former head of USA Triathlon. A citified, Wharton School of Business educated administrator,  Urbach describes himself as “one of the most accomplished executives in the sports industry,”  which may or may not be true.

What is undeniably true, however, is that in rural Alaska – where the Iditarod takes place – Urbach stood out like a black man at a Klu Klux clan rally and not in a particularly good way.

Urbach was not the guy to convince rural Alaska that the Iditarod was still its big sporting event, and Iditarod needed – and needs – rural Alaska more than rural Alaska needs Iditarod because the less rural Alaska is involved in the race, the higher the costs of staging the event.

In fairness to Urbach, it must be noted that he joined Iditarod with plenty of ideas for generating more revenue, starting with an Iditacoin cryptocurrency and commemorative, Iditarod non-fungible tokens (NFTs)

Digital tokens of ownership or NFTs as they are better known were all the rage at the start of the decade. CBS in March 2021 reported that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had sold a digital version of his first tweet for more than $2.9 million.

“In 2022, the famous pop star Justin Bieber bought Bored Ape NFT (a digital photo of a bored ape) for $1.3 million,” the CEO North American website reported this year. “Recent reports suggest that the same NFT is now worth less than $60,000, marking a decline of over 95 percent.”

Iditarod got into the NFT business and crypto market late with its wave of success breaking and ended up washed away under that wave. The Iditacoin never took off and promptly died.

Somewhere there must still be found an Iditarod5000 NFT for sale, but good luck finding it. Surely, however, someone must have bought at least one in March 2022 after Iditarod announced that the “Iditarod5000 NFT collection, allows purchasers to own a completely unique and collectible symbol of this historic and spirited event. NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, are rare digital objects created using blockchain technology to ‘mint’ exclusive versions for purchase.”

There are, however, none available in the Iditarod store which is today focused on more traditional merchandise – jackets, t-shirts, patches and old-fashioned photographs rather than new-fangled NFTs.

An autographed photo of 2024 Iditarod champ Seavey with his lead dogs in Nome is now on sale there for $2, marked down from $10.

The 80-percent-off purchase price would appear to indicate the Iditarod has a large surplus of Seavey photos, and that another revenue generating idea isn’t doing so well.

It will be interesting to see what money-making scheme one of the most accomplished executives in the sports industry comes up with next to help save “The Last Great Race” from becoming the last Iditarod.