Iditarod Facebook
Race leaders go from 1st to last
Billionaire, Norwegian “expedition musher” Kjell Røkke and his guide, former Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race champ Thomas Wærner, led the “Last Great Race” into the halfway checkpoint on Thursday only to be “relegated,” as they say in professional cycling.
Relegation involves moving a rider from first to last on a stage after race officials decide he or she behaved improperly. It happens most often in sprint finishes when a rider veers wide to the right or left in an effort to block a competitor coming up fast from behind.
Why Røkke and Wærner were suddenly relegated to the back of the pack is, however, unclear. Iditarod doesn’t explain much of anything it does.
Iditarod might have a set of written rules, Michalski said, but it isn’t legally required to follow them.
The Iditaord let that go to its head in the years that followed, deciding that not only did it not need to follow its rules, it didn’t have to answer questions from the media or explain anything it did.
Thus Wærner and Røkke, who led the race into the halfway point in Cripple at 4:31 a.m. and 4:32 a.m., respectively, were moved to the bottom of the standings, and reality TV star Jessie Helms, the defending champ, became the new race leader.
Holmes was then hours behind Wærner and Røkke on the 75 miles of trail from Ophir to Cripple. And Waerner and Røkke were long gone before Holmes reached that checkpoint.
The pair stayed for only 20 minutes in the cold, temporary outpost that serves as the Iditarod stop in the heart of Alaska’s long depopulated “Inland Empire” before taking off for the comforts of Ruby, a village on the banks of the Yukon River.
When they departed just before 5 a.m. Holmes was far behind on the trail. And as of noon today, Iditarod still hadn’t reported his arrival in Cripple.
The added expedition musher
How Waerner, now the defacto race leader, came to be an “expedition musher” is among the other things unclear in this year’s Iditarod.
It then went on to explain that “Mr. Røkke will participate in the race along with the entire field,” but “Mr. Røkke will bring his own dog team, veterinarian and support personnel.”
Waerner would later be identified as a key part of the “support personnel,’ and then he became another “expedition musher.”
It was also stated there that the expedition mushers “are not included in the official race standings,” but once the race began, the expeditions mushers were in the official race standings with Røkke, Wærner and their entourage quickly grabbing the race lead as the Iditarod approached the Alaska Range mountains.
Grumblings promptly began from within the Iditarod ranks as the two Norwegians embarrassed Alaska’s best long-distance sled dog racers by beating them into checkpoint after checkpoint.
Traveling the Iditarod Trail with your own vet, dog handlers, extra dogs, and who knows what else – chef, maid and butler service maybe? – does make things a whole lot easier and thus faster, but this was surely missed by the bulk of Iditarod fans who know about as much about long-distance sled dog racing as they do quantum physics.
And now, it doesn’t matter, because the race-leading duo is officially among the Iditarod back-of-the-packers, the so-called BOP mushers, even if they are at the front of the race.
Expedition straggler
They thus join Canadian Curtis, a late entry who got in for a reported sixth of the $300,000 Røkke offered Iditarod. Curtis is a dog driver who has since earned his BOP status.
The Curtis cruise, guided by four-time Iditarod champ Jeff King from Denali Park, has not gone anywhere near as smoothly as the Røkke romp, even though Curtis’s guide is enjoying the run from the comparative comfort of a seat atop a snowmachine.
No one has reported what happened to that pair between the Rainy Pass checkpoint at Puntilla Lake, just south of the portal through the Alaska Range, and the Rohn checkpoint just north of the Pass, but it took them more than 24 hours to cover the 35 miles of trail between the two checkpoints.
The slowest team in front of them – that of Iditarod rookie Sam Martin from Massachusetts – took only 10 hours and 12 minutes.
And as this was written, Curtis was falling even farther behind the rest of the Iditarod.
He was still on the trail from Rohn to Nikola, a village that the last competitive musher in the Iditarod field, Richie Beattie, left before 11 p.m. Wednesday. Officially an Iditarod rookie, Beattie is a 52-year-old former Alaskan now living in Michigan.
At that point, Beattie’s official finish was expunged from the record books. He is now back, looking to officially finish.
He said in 2019 that he saw no sign of illness in the dog that died, and veterinarians in White Mountain, the penultimate Iditarod checkpoint where the teams are held for a mandatory, eight-hour rest during which they are physically examined, had reported nothing wrong with the dog there.
Still, Beattie was the one who paid the price. Iditarod followed a rule that automatically disqualified a musher with a dead dog. Whether the rule would have been followed had a dog in the team of a high-profile musher died well after the race finish was the subject of some discussion among the Iditarod veterans after the race.
Welcome to the Iditarod.
