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Expedition musher about to trounce ‘racers’

While an Alaska mainstream media long spoon-fed the news by the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race remains focused on whether reality TV star Jessie Holmes is going to win a second consecutive race, a 66-year-old, rookie dog driver from Norway may be about to accomplish the unthinkable.

For days now, the chatter from within the Alaska sled dog community has been that billionaire “Expedition Musher” Kjelle Røkke and sidekick cum guide Thomas Wærner,  the 2020 Iditarod champ, were planning to run the 1,000 miles from Willow to Nome in fewer than eight days – something that has never been done.

A time that fast would take him out of the Iditarod class and put his run in a class with the time of the relay of mushers and teams that carried life-saving diphtheria serum to Nome in 1925. The 20 mushers and dog teams involved in that race to save lives moved north at an average speed of about 120 miles per day. 

An eight-day Iditarod requires about 125 miles per day.

Close already

As this was written, Røkke was almost in sight of the Safety Roadhouse, the penultimate Iditarod checkpiont. He’d left White Mountain just before 3 a.m.

It is a seven- to 10-hour run from there to Nome, depending on the weather and what shape a dog team is in on the last stretch of trail. The weather looked to be cooperating with Røkke’s eight-day plan.

The National Weather Service reported partly sunny skies with the temperature climbing toward 10 degrees. There was no hint of the gale-force winds that have disrupted past Iditarods on the coast.

A seven-hour run would have put Røkke in Nome at 10 a.m. A 10-hour run would push that back to 1 p.m.

The Iditarod’s satellite tracking showed him about three miles short of Safety at 9:45 a.m. having held an average speed of 7.4 mph since White Mountain. It is 22 miles from Safety to Nome via the Iditarod route.

If Røkke’s team holds that 7.4 mph average, he would reach Nome around 12:45 p.m.

The Norwegian is clearly aware of the time element.

Upon reaching the Bering Sea community of Unalakleet on Saturday, Røkke – without any prompting – told an Alaska News Source videographer that “tomorrow (Sunday) at 2 o’clock, it is seven days” since the Iditarod start.

Two o’clock today would be the end of eight days since the start.

Røkke, the race’s first so-called “expedition musher,” isn’t supposed to be racing, but it’s been pretty obvious since the start of this Iditraod that he was racing. He and Wærner held a commanding race lead by Cripple, the halfway point in the race, and never looked back after that.

Wærner dropped out when the race hit the coast at Unalkleet. The story told then by an Iditaord leadership that at times appears to have brought Joseph Goebbels back from the grave to do its media was that Wærner had “chosen to conclude his Iditarod Expedition at the Unalakleet checkpoint after several dogs on the team showed symptoms of kennel cough.

“After consulting with their veterinarians, Wærner and the team are prioritizing the well-being of his dog team as the guiding factor in his decision.”

What any official Iditarod veterinarian actually had to say about the condition of the dogs was strangely missing from the statement. So, too, any description of exactly what dogs were in Wærner’s team, an important point given that the special rules under which Wærner and Røkke were expeditioning allowed them to swap dogs between their two teams.

How many dogs were swapped between the teams is an unknown, but it seems likely that Wærner gave Røkke his best and scratched with the weakest dogs to help speed Røkke north.

Money talks

It clearly pays to be a man worth $5.5 billion.

In a deal pitched as a philanthropic undertaking, Røkke last yar promised more than $300,000 of that stash to Iditarod and various Iditarod-supported entities if race organizers would let him become that first-ever Iditarod “Expedition Musher.”

In return for ponying up all that cash, Røkke – who has now hung onto the handlebar of a dogsled long enough to prove that he would have been perfectly capable of running Iditarod just like anyone else – was given special, “expedition” treatment.

He was allowed to bring support staff to help with the dogs on the trail. He was permitted his own private veterinarian. He and Wærner were allowed to swap, drop and add dogs at will as needed. And Iditarod requirements for mandatory, 8-hour rest stops and a single 24-hour stop were waived.

These are big advantages, and old Mitch Seavey had none of them when he set the official Iditarod race record time of 8 days, 3 hours, 40 minutes and 13 seconds in 2017 on a course that came with a footnote. 

The 2017 Iditarod started in Fairbanks and ran down the Nenana and Yukon rivers to Kaltag where it picked up the Iditaord Trail to Nome. Mushers all agree that this river course is easier than the classic Iditarod course up and over the Alaska Range and through the rolling hills in the heart of the 49th state.

But Seavey was limited to the 16 dogs with which he started in Fairbanks. He had no support crew or personal vet. And, of course, he had to make those mandatory stops.

The same was true when his son, Dallas, set the fastest time on the Iditarod’s northern route, the route being run this year.  The younger Seavey went from Willow to Nome in 8 days, 11 hours, 20 minutes, and 16 seconds in 2016. 

Unless Røkke blows up his dog team, something which appears unlikely to happen, he is sure to blow up the younger Seavey’s record even if his hoped-for finish of less than eight days slips out of his grasp at the end.

Whether the Iditarod can be run in under eight days has been the subject of a lot of discussion among mushers over the years, and it’s doubtful that Røkke, whose spent his lifetime immersed in the commercial fishing business, came up with this idea on his own.

Credit there likely goes to Wærner, who has a relationship with Røkke that goes back years. The owner of the Beserker kennels hooked up with Norway’s Aker Biomarine in the late 2010s. Røkke was then the chairman of Aker, which in the early 2020s tried to leverage sled dog racing to promote sales of its QRILL Pet dog food and canine supplements.

At one point, the company actually tried to take over long-distance sled dog racing with the creation of the “Qrill Paw’s Arctic World Series (PAWS), where they have gathered four major dog sled races in the US, Russia and Norway in one World Cup to be covered and communicated to an international audience,” an Adobe-owned “showcase” from early in this decade records.

“The first race, Beargrease in Minnesota, starts on Sunday. Closely followed by Femunden in Norway, VolgaQuest in Russia, (and) where this year’s season ends…(is) with famous dog race Iditarod in Alaska.”

The doggy world series didn’t last long, the global interest in sled-dog racing being small.

But clearly Røkke’s interest in dogs stuck. The Norwegian, who decamped for Switzerland in 2022 to avoid Norway’s high taxes, was reported to have spent a significant amount of this winter training to run dogs in order to undertake a shot at an eight-day Iditarod.

He suggested to the NewsSource videographer in Unalklkeet that the training was barely enough.

“It’s slightly rougher and tougher than I thought,” he said of his rookie Iditarod run before complaining about bad trail threatening his attempt at a record.

“The trail has been really slow,” he said. “I mean, shitty slow. I mean the dogs have to work like crazy to get the speed.

“(But) tomorrow, we can see the end, and we can see Nome.”

And, from the looks of things now, he should have at least a day to relax and recover there before strolling down to Nome’s Front Street to welcome whoever arrives as the “official” winner of this year’s Iditarod.