The Iditarod finish line in Nome/NPS photo

Can an ever smaller Iditarod survive?

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book titled “Graveyard of Dreams: Dashed Hopes and Shattered Aspirations Along Alaska’s Iditarod Trail” that the Iditarod refused to sell in its store. 

It seemed somebody, maybe a bunch of somebodies, didn’t like the title or the rendition of an intense-eyed husky on the cover, or maybe both.

I should have realized then that the Iditarod had lost sight of what it was selling. There were 71 mushers entered in the 2010 Iditarod, 22 of them rookies. The book focused solely on those who’d come to be known as the Iditarod’s BOP gang – BOP being an acronym for “back of the pack.”

The BOP crowd has now largely abandoned the Iditarod and, worse yet, the rookies. As of this writing, the Iditarod is near a third the size of what it was 15 years ago with 24 teams now entered in the 2026 race, plus 66-year-old Norwegian billionaire Kjell Inge Røkke who paid Iditarod $295,000 to be allowed to tag along with a gang of helpers as the race’s first-ever “Expedition Musher.” 

Only seven of the 23 real mushers – only one more than the rookie Iditarod field of 2010 – are rookies this year. Imagine how boring the National Football League, which every year stages a major draft to bring new blood into the sport, would become if it didn’t annually recruit a swarm of new talent.

One could say this is all about the Iditarod going pro. There are now more people in the race with a hope of winning it, and a chance of doing so, then there are BOP mushers – something that could never have been imagined back in the race’s heyday when the starting field was three or four times larger.

Ninety-six teams of sled dogs towed the line for the 2008 Iditarod, the biggest in race history, and fewer than 10 of them had any real hope of winning. The late Lance Mackey, the defending champ, won the race. Two former champs – Jeff King and Martin Buser – were in the top five. The never men – Ramy Smythe and Canadian Hans Gatt, a couple of mushers who were always expected to win an Iditarod but never did – finished third and sixth, respectively.

They were joined by Ken Anderson, a three-time top-five finisher who was never quite able to put it altogether, and Mitch Seavey, a past champ, to round out the top seven. Behind them were a lot of people racing solely for position in an Iditarod that boasted a $925,000 purse.

Aging, five-time champ Rick Swenson finished 13th and collected $31,500 – more than enough to cover his race expenses. His earnings in March of 2008 would translate into $47,177.27 in March 2025 dollars, according to the inflation calculator for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

The 13th-place finisher in this year’s Iditarod won $20,500 or well less than half of that. It would not have covered expenses. Things should be slightly better this year.

Thanks to a $100,000 infusion of Røkke funds, the Iditarod has a promised 2026 purse of $650,000 or about 46 percent of what the 2008 purse would amount to when corrected for inflation.

That’s still not much money. And with little money to attract new, serious competitors, and no interest in supporting the BOP crowd on the backs of which the Iditarod was built, what does the self-proclaimed “Last Great Race” have to sell going forward?

Business of sports

The Iditarod, it must be remembered here, is more than just a sporting event. It is a business as are all significant sporting events, and businesses have to sell themselves or they die.

Race walking, or what was called “pedestrianism,” was the biggest sport in this country in the late 1800s only to be bumped off the stage by bike racing as the U.S. entered the 20th century.

At the start of that century, Major Taylor, a man of whom most reading this will never have heard, was a record-breaking cyclist destined to eventually be described by the BBC as “The first Black American global sports superstar.”

He faded into history as the nation’s attention shifted to baseball, college football, boxing and then auto racing thanks to the moonshine-driven development of hotrods during Prohibition and better roads.

“….The bicycle craze led to the good roads revolution and encouraged it (in cooperation with farming and railroad interests) during the last decade of the 19th century,” a Federal Highway Administration history recounts. But it faded as “automobile interests took over the Good Roads Movement,” and those machines moved to the fore in racing.

Alaska today seems to be in some ways echoing that early history with the Iron Dog, billed as “The World’s Longest, Toughest Snowmobile Race,” on the rise and the Iditarod fading. The 71-rider field of the Iron Dog this year dwarfed that of the Iditarod, which started with but 33 teams.

Alaska Public Media blamed entry costs for the low Iditarod turnout, but people are lining up to pay a reported $40,000 to as much as $200,000 to climb Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain, even though it has been killing climbers with a vengeance.

Five died on the mountain’s slope this year, following the eight in 2024 and a record 18 in 2023. 

The Iditarod has never killed anyone, and it used to be competitively priced for those looking for a big, wild adventure.

Costs did rise after the race decided to require rookies to finish “two approved qualifying races totaling 500 miles or more in the 24 months prior to the race.” Gone are the days when a wannabe musher could spend a fall and winter training in Alaska, run the Copper Basin 300 or the Kenai’s Tustumena 200 in January and be good to go for the Iditarod in March.

The qualifier change was ostensibly created in the interest of reducing dog deaths, but there was never much evidence to indicate that dogs were in any more danger in the teams of rookies than in those of veterans. In 2015, two dogs died in the team of the late Lance Mackey, a four-time champ.

Katherine Keith, the training partner of Iditarod champ John Baker, had one dog die in her team as a rookie in 2017, and returned to the race as a veteran in 2018 only to have another dog die. 

Those deeply familiar with the Iditarod contend the 500-mile rule was mainly intended to reduce the size of the Iditarod field to lower the costs of staging the race and please some top-name Alaska mushers who didn’t like the attention devoted to some of the back-of-the-pack participants.

The Iditarod also added a competitiveness rule that allowed officials to remove from the race any team the race marshal decided was “out of the competition and…not in a position to make a valid effort to compete.”

That change produced significant cost savings by helping to shorten an event that once took two weeks or more to one that could be wrapped up in 10 to 12 days. Some have also blamed it for increasing risks for the dogs by forcing the last of the largely unwanted BOP mushers to push their teams just a little too hard to try to keep to avoid being ruled uncompetitive and tossed out of the race.

The only dog to die this year was in one such team. The musher behind that team, rookie Daniel Klein from Wisconsin, was eventually disqualified after the dog was found “to be in a later stage of pregnancy.”

Iditarod rules bar pregnant dogs. Whether Klein, who was being mentored by 2023 Iditarod champ Ryan Redington and running a dog leased from former Iditarod top-10 finisher Wade Marrs, knew the dog was pregnant remains an unknown. He has not responded to phone calls or text messages, and the Iditarod is clearly not of enough interest to inspire any Midwest reporter to go knock on his door and ask him what he knew or didn’t.

So different

What caused me to reflect on all of this in middle of a very pleasant Anchorage summer was the death at age 70 of former Iditarod Trail boss Jack Niggemyer and a backyard conversation that followed with a reporter who’d covered the crazy, storm-stalled Iditarod of 1985 that ended with Libby Riddles beating an old boyfriend – Duane “Dewey” Halverson – to the finish line by two and half hours to become the first woman to win the race.

Halverson would never win, though he’d always be in the hunt from the mid- to late-1980s despite his very, low-budget operation. A friend invited to dinner with Halverson and his then girlfriend in those days said after the meal that he was sure the kennel was operating on such a shoestring that dogs were eating better than the people.

This was the Iditarod then. It was full of struggling mushers and characters of which Niggemyer was one – a bearded, oversized mountain man from out of a classic Western novel who was sometimes gruff, always honest and had a knack for saying a lot in a few words.

When 27-year-old musher Mike Madden in 1989 found himself on the edge of death deep in the wasteland of what used to be the Inland Empire of central Alaska and Iditarod was trying to organize a rescue, Niggemyer described Madden as stuck “halfway between the end of the world and nowhere.”

It was as apt a description as can be found for the nothingness between the Kuskokwim and Yukon now so deserted and uninhabited that it’s almost spooky. And it was even more so in 1989 when the trail was a lot less of a trail than it is nowadays.

The Iditarod was then still part wilderness challenge and part dog race. It has increasingly become more and more a dog race, which led a reporter who covered it in the 1980s to describe it with one word, “boring.”

Others might use the word “predictable.”

Thanks to trail-breaking snowmachines at the front of the race, mushers today are never slowed or stopped by snow, and it now takes one whale of a storm to affect the race on the coast.

When Brent Sass’s team did get blown off the trail there on the way to victory in 2022, Iditarod Insider videographers on snowmachines with bright lights appeared to assist in his regaining the trail.

The blowing snow conditions at the time, which Sass paused to film (who does that if they actually believe themselves in physical danger), were without a doubt hostile, which makes it especially nice to have others around to help, even if they’re only providing the emotional support inherent in pointing out exactly where the trail is to be found.

This is the new Iditarod that avoids tough sledding and makes rescues increasinlgy rare. This is the race that three times in the last 10 years has moved its restart to Fairbanks after deeming the traditional route up and over the Alaska Range from Knik, Wasilla or Willow to McGrath too rough for mushers to handle.

In the decades before the restart was first moved to Fairbanks in 2023, this never once happened because the trail was bare. I too well remember banging across my miles and miles of snow-short trail on a snowmachine while covering the race in some of those years.

A lot has changed from the Iditarod of the 20th Century, and how much is well reflected by going back to what Mitch Albom, a columnist for the Detroit Free Press, wrote about covering the 1991 race:

“Dog mushing wasn’t invented in Indianapolis, you know. It is a proud tradition of the Alaskan Indians, the Eskimos, the people who settled this unforgiving land long before ABC Sports. Few of the 75 mushers entered this year have such roots. One who does is Tony (Wildman) Shoogukwruk. His nickname comes from his huge mop of hair and the unkempt black beard that frames his face.

“‘I’ve been trying to get into the Iditarod for years,’ he told me. ‘This is the first time I could raise enough money. The Native businesses in Alaska, they talk a lot about helping our people, but they don’t put their money where their mouth is. They would rather back a white person. They think the white man is a better musher.’

“He talked about his grandfather and great grandfather — hunters, trappers, men who used dogsleds for more practical purposes than racing.

“‘The situation with our native people is very bad now,’ he said. ‘We feel cheated. Our children are confused. The elders in our towns, they like the old ways. The kids always feel like they’re disappointing them. They become hopeless. They drink. Maybe they kill themselves.

“‘I want to race to show our kids that suicide is not the answer.’

“I looked at his team. It was scrawny compared to the rest and his equipment was used and shopworn. Some say this is the shame of the Iditarod. Others disagree.

“‘I lived in the bush for a long time,’ said Libby Riddles, the 1985 winner. ‘A lot of the kids up there, they’ve been cleaning dogs and carrying their straw for years. They’re sick of it. They don’t want anything to do with dogs. There are plenty of opportunities for Native mushers. But the kids in those villages would rather have snowmachines and video games. It’s sad, but it’s true.”

Shoogukwruk was one and done with the Iditarod. Meanwhile, the snowmachines kept coming to the villages and getting better and better. Soon village dog teams were a rarity.

Then video games gave way to the internet, and kids in the villages found their entertainment there just like the kids in America’s inner cities.

If anyone is still interested in old books, I found a box of these and would be happy to sell them at $20 each plus postage.

Sad but true

By the time I wrote Graveyard of Dreams in 2010, the number of foreign mushers entered in Iditarod outnumbered Alaska Native mushers, and the total of mushers from other countries and from Outside, as Alaskans refer to the lower 48, outnumbered Alaska Native mushers about four to one.

With but a few exceptions – race runner-up Hans Gatt from Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada being one – the foreigners and Outsiders were dreamers. Most of them lived and breathed a 1,000-mile fantasy of crossing the vast wilderness between the Anchorage metro area, the population center home to more than half the 49th state’s population, and Nome, an outpost community of 3,600 people on the edge of the Bering Sea with no roads in and no roads out.

Some of them, to be honest, didn’t belong on the trail. I most remember Pat Moon, a very nice 33-year-old man suffering from ulcerative colitis and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. ABC7 Eyewitness News in Chicago would report that Moon, who grew up in upscale Edison Park, had taken off for Alaska on “a celebration of the northern life as a test of the human spirit.”

The test would end with his spirit crushed.

Three days into the race, the Anchorage Daily News reported his early departure from Iditarod after “a tree in the notoriously steep and twisty Dalzell Gorge knocked Moon unconscious — and out of the race that had become the passion of his life.”

But that wasn’t what happened at all.

I was not far behind Moon on a snowmachine in that race and followed him across the Happy River valley on a day when the wind was blowing a lot of snow into the trench that was the Iditarod Trail.

Blown-in trail makes for tough sledding even for an experienced musher. Moon, who’d trained for Iditarod on the snowmobile trails of Michigan, appeared to have little experience with these kinds of conditions. The trail from the upper Happy River across the broad, nearly treeless flat on the way to the climb to Rainy Pass was pockmarked with the holes where he’d flipped his sled and floundered.

I remember thinking, “This isn’t going to end well,” and it didn’t. Moon made it over the Pass and down the gut through the alder-filled Pass Fork valley to that stream’s confluence with the Dalzell in what a trail guide written by the late-Don Bowers described as “wooded…for a couple of miles of fairly easy running.”

It wasn’t easy for Moon. It was here his rockety-rock sled riding ended when his head met a tree as the trail made a gentle curve around it on near level ground. When I got there, Belgian musher Sam Deltour, a doctor in training, was providing first aid.

Not too long after that, Moon was aboard a single-engine aircraft headed for Anchorage, and there was a heartbreaking Iditarod story to be told. More would follow.

That was 15 years ago, and the BOP mushers were still making of the race what it had been in the early years for everyone. British journalist Ian Wooldridge didn’t tag it as “The Last Great Race on Earth” back in 1977 because it was easy.

Wooldridge described the Iditarod as a “trail that winds out west from Anchorage, crosses the broken molars of the Alaska Range, swoops down to the Yukon, turns up the Norton Sound and ends in Nome, a wild town that stares straight up the wrong end of Siberia.

“An equivalent distance is London to Naples but the analogy is a bad one. It implies warmth and civilisation, both of which are conspicuous by their absence through the Eskimo and Indian territories of Jack London’s old Alaska.”

London would have recognized the ’77 Iditarod and those into the ’80s. The Iditarod of today, run on a snowmachine-packed race track with GPS global tracking and dog drivers like Sass texting friends in the warm confines of their Anchorage homes for advice on the trail ahead?

Old Jack would probably be saying WTF.

And the way this is going, it might be enough to kill the Iditarod in the not-too-distant future,  sled-dog racing being the niche sport that it is.

How many people around the world really want to watch the same handful of rather boring mushers – nobody is about to say anything controversial because it could cost them a sponsor which they need more than race prize money – run dogs along 1,000 miles of groomed trail every year?

The Iditarod has sort of made itself into an event that now leaves even long-time fans  thinking, “Please Mother Nature, brew up a big, old storm or at least crank the thermostat down to minus-50 degrees because this thing is getting boring as hell.”