The original embodiments of what would come to be known as the “spirit of the Iditarod Trail,”  Gunnar Kaasen and Balto , circa 1925/Wikimedia Commons

What exactly is the “spirit of the Iditarod” in these times?

This is a question that has been begging to be asked since the Iditarod Trail Committee earlier this week announced that Norwegian billionaire Kjell Inge Røkke had convinced race organizers to create a new  “Expedition Musher” class of Iditarod competitors just for him.

Could the new spirit be “forgiveness?”

Is the Iditarod trying to make up to Røkke for the late Sen. Ted Stevens running the Norwegian out of the Bering Sea pollock trawling business in which he was once the biggest player?

Some skeptics, of course, are of the belief that all that this is about is Røkke “bribing” the Iditarod into making him the first-ever “Expedition Musher” to complete the “race,” but that’s probably only because he was convicted of that crime back home in Norway.

To be clear, he did not bribe Iditarod. There is no law against offering the Iditarod hundreds of thousands of dollars to let you stage your own adventure within the framework of the race. The Iditarod needs money, and this is one way to get it.

If forgiveness is the new Iditarod spirit, maybe Iditarod should reach out to banned mushers Hugh Neff and Brent Sass with a dollar figure on what it would cost them to buy their way back into the race. That would help with the race’s ongoing financial struggles.

Or maybe the new spirit involves trouble with the law.

In the words of Iditarod CEO Rob Urbach. “Mr. Røkke embodies the spirit of the trail.”

Pretty much everyone in Alaska would agree that the late Lance Mackey was infused with some of the spirit of the trail, and Lord knows, he had his problems with the law. 

That he overcame those problems, plus poverty and cancer,  on the way to winning four Iditarod titles is probably why most Alaskans would consider Mackey to have embodied the Iditarod spirit, but maybe the spirit was really in the willingness of Iditarod to overlook most of his bad-boy behavior.

Then again, it’s hard to know what Urbach, a newcomer to Alaska, might consider the “spirit of the trail.” The Iditarod was a whole different race when he arrived here in 2019 than it had been from its beginning in 1973 into the early years of this century.

Foreigner

Urbach wasn’t exactly steeped in the history of that Iditarod. It’s not even clear why he signed on at Iditarod, other than that he needed a job.

He suddenly quit his old job as the CEO of USA Triathlon in 2017 for reasons that have never been explained. At the time, Sports Business Journal reported that he “left his position after six years to ‘pursue other professional opportunities,’ effective immediately, USA Triathlon BOD President Barry Siff announced.”

When a high-paid executive leaves anything anywhere “effective immediately,” it almost always means something hit a fan somewhere. What hit that fan at USA Triathlon has never been revealed, but a little over two years after leaving there, Urbach popped up as the new CEO of Iditarod.

The Iditarod board embraced him for his reported business acumen and his great money-making ideas, like the IditaCoin cryptocurrency and Iditarod NFTs. You remember those right?

In announcing his latest money-making deal, Urbach unfortunately offered no explanation of his idea of the “spirit of the Iditarod,” but explained to Your Alaska Link, an Anchorage television station, that “we think this will draw a lot of people who may haven’t had Iditarod on their radar. Whether or not they tune in, they watch, whether they become Insider subscribers….We need to create new fans and this checks that box.”

Some stenographer at the Link just wrote it down, apparently never thinking to ask “why would anyone want to watch a little-known Norwegian billionaire take a tour on the Iditarod?”

If that’s your goal, wouldn’t a celebrity or maybe an online “influencer” better check the new viewer, new subscriber box?

It isn’t even clear if Røkke’s trip will be covered by the “Iditarod Insider,” the race’s pay-per-view, little-watched version of NLF.com. So there might be nothing to draw people to watch him if, indeed, they want to watch him.

Unclear, too, is how exactly Røkke, who Iditarod said will “bring his own…veterinarian and support personnel,” will be slotted into the race.

Iditarod’s official statement said “Mr. Røkke will participate in the race along with the entire field and while he will be allowed outside assistance, he will be required to complete the entire race on the sled in order to officially finish under the burled Arch in Nome and be one of few humans in the world that have earned the coveted finishers (belt) buckle.”

What any of that means is hard to decipher. Even a mediocre dog driver with a decent team of dogs and the kind of support staff Iditarod describes could keep a dog team in the Iditarod top-10 at least to the Bering Sea coast. But that might not sit well with the dozen or so teams actually competing to win the race.

That spirit thing

Older Alaskans probably remember the original spirit of the Iditarod as a tribute to the brave men and tough dogs who rushed life-saving diphtheria serum to Nome in 1925, though even that was a latter-day spin on the original spirit of the Iditarod.

The late Joe Redington Sr., the driving force behind the race in its early years, had only two purposes in mind when the race began 1973: 1.) Get the Iditarod Trail recognized as a national historic trail, and 2.) promote the Alaska sled dog to keep the breed alive, especially in rural Alaska where “iron dogs,” ie. snowmachines were rapidly replacing sled dogs.

Redington’s first goal was achieved in 1978 when Congress created the Iditarod National Historic Trail. The second goal was never reached. Snowmachines, or snowmobiles as they are called in most of the rest of the country, have now almost wholly replaced sled dogs in rural Alaska, and where “sled dogs” are to be found both in and out of state, they look nothing like the muscular, working dogs Redington hoped to save.

The dogs are now much “houndier” thanks to cross-breeding for both faster speeds and thinner coats so as to help overcome the problem that slows all mammalian distance runners – the buildup of body heat. Dogs are no different from humans in this regard. 

The Iditarod has clung to the idea that the race is a tribute to the serum run, but dogs that look nothing like the dogs that hauled the serum to Nome competing to run as fast as possible on a trail that looks nothing like that of serum-run days sort of makes a mockery of a tribute.

Compared to the Iditarod trail of old, the Iditarod trail of today is an expressway, which is a big part of the reason the race to Nome has grown ever faster over the years, though the dogs themselves are no doubt faster as well.

And the gear carried by the mushers, and thus pulled by the teams, is much lighter, as technology has invaded the Iditarod as it has invaded everything else. Iditarod mushers now even carry satellite communication devices so they can summon help if they get in trouble along the way.

So much for the bravery required to run the race. About the only thing that hasn’t changed is the winter temperature in Interior Alaska, which can sometimes still get brutally cold, and the winds that can sometimes howl along the Bering Sea Coast.

But if these things become too problematic, or mushers somehow stumble their way into trouble, the Iditarod now has its own iron dogs ready to come to the rescue.

When it comes to the true spirit of the Iditarod of old, more of it might be found these days in the fat bikers, hikers and skiers of the Iditarod Trail Invitational competing to make it to Nome under their own power than mushers riding on Iditarod sit sleds.

And now comes Røkke.

Does Iditarod really want the spirit of the race to be defined from here on out by a man once convicted of bribery and one of Norway’s richest individuals up until 2022 when, according to Norwegian news sources, he made a decision to move to Switzerland to avoid his native nation’s wealth tax?

That said, the special treatment the Iditarod is giving Røkke must come as sweet revenge for him after being run out of Alaska and sent packing back to Norway due to the political maneuverings of Stevens.

“The individual who has been hardest hit by the new fishing law of 1998, ‘The American Fisheries Act of 1998,’ is Norwegian fisherman Kjell Inge Røkke,” Norway’s Aftenposten would later report in describing Røkke’s Alaska history. “The entire foundation for Røkke’s fortune was laid by exploiting a loophole in the old (U.S.) law, which stipulated that only boats built on American keel could participate in American fishing. What Røkke then did was tow hulls from the United States to Norway, where the boats were (re)built with the help of subsidies.

“Røkke eventually became the dominant player in the Alaskan fishery for the American whitefish pollock. It led to both accusations of overfishing and demands for American ownership of the fishing fleet. Alaska Senator Ted Stevens went so far as to call Røkke’s American Seafoods ‘the Microsoft of Norway’. As a result, Stevens introduced a bill to ban foreign-owned ships and factory trawlers from fishing in Alaska.”

The Seattle-based pollock fleet Røkke helped create does, however, remain a force in the Bering Sea with many along the Yukon River in the heart of Alaska today blaming those same pollock trawlers for the collapse of king salmon runs there.

And to think that next March they will get to welcome to their villages one of the men who helped lay the groundwork for a factory trawl fleet that to this day catches and processes at sea about 3 billion pounds of pollock to haul back to Seattle where it is worth something in the neighborhood of $500 million, according to NOAA.

But maybe the $100,000 that Iditarod says Røkke has directed to be distributed among villages along the trail will make up for the past.