One last Iditarace
Alaska’s Iditaseason is winding to close with moose-war musher Jesse Holmes claiming a second, consecutive Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race victory in Nome; a lot of talk swirling around the Norwegian billionaire musher who got to Nome first; and a woman from St. Louis dueling with a Frenchman to win the 1,000-mile, human-powered race to the City of the Golden Beaches.
The biggest winner here would appear to be billionaire Kjell Røkke, the Norwegian now living in Switzerland and who is no stranger to Alaska. Røkke’s massive fortune traces its roots to the waters off the coast of the 49th state.
He showed up working the waters of the Bering Sea when the U.S. was in the process of forcing foreign trawlers out of the “Exclusive Economic Zone” created by extending U.S. authority over the waters 200 miles to sea from the U.S. coast. Røkke at that time took advantage of changing U.S. laws to move into those waters.
Røkke would later move on to found Aker BioMarine, a Norwegian company that has made a fortune trawling krill in the waters off Antarctica. Røkke’s success eventually made him so wealthy that in 2022, after Norway increased its “wealth tax,” he fled to Switzerland.
Røkke was reported to have had no comment on his departure from Norway. But he was then and is now a big target for the taxman. Bloomberg puts his net worth as of today at $7.69 billion and ranks him the 470th richest person in the world.
As a poor young man who showed up in the U.S. at the age of 17, he got rich because he is smart. He took advantage of changes in U.S. laws to make a lot of money in the fishing business.
And he took advantage of Iditarod organizers to set a record time for travel by dogsled along the 1,000 miles of historic trail from Willow to Nome.
Wheeling and dealing
Whether Alaskans like it or not, whether they pooh-pooh or embrace what Røkke has done, he is now the fastest ever to drive a dog team to Nome, thanks to new and special Iditarod rules for “expedition mushers” that he negotiated with the Iditarod Trail Committee at a cost reported to be around $300,000.
This is pretty much the same committee that brought Alaska the Iditacoin. A few stalwart Iditarod fans are sure to remember that 2022 dive into cryptocurrency that was supposed to provide the race a huge, new source of income.
The currency was dead and gone off to Dogtopia within two years, and it’s unclear if Iditarod ever made a penny off the scheme. All indications are that it might actually have lost money.
Exactly how much cash the latest Iditarod money-making scheme brought in is unclear. There has been no public accounting of the funds, but in revealing the new “Expedition Musher” class created specifically for Røkke, race organizers claimed that $170,000 of the $300,000 was earmarked for “community support for the 17 Alaska Native villages along the Northern and Southern Routes.”
That would leave Iditarod with $230,000 unless, of course, it was charging a management fee for handling the $179,000. That sounds like a lot of money, but only works out to about $10,000 per village for communities where gas prices start at $6.50 per gallon and head toward $10 per gallon.
And villages along the Iditarod’s Fairbanks-to-Nome route, a new addition to the Iditarod’s old North and Southern Routes, were apparently cut out of the deal even though Iditarod has used the Fairbanks-Nome route in three of the last 11 years, meaning the Fairbanks-Nome route has seen almost as much use as either of the normally alternating north and south routes.
This Røkke payment to the Iditarod was billed as “philanthropic support,” but it was much more than that. It was a negotiated deal that brought benefits for a hoped-for, eight-day run to Nome by:
- Freeing Røkke from the Iditarod requirement limiting a musher to only the 16 dogs in harness at the start of the race.
- Sanctioning professional Norwegian musher Thomas Wærner, the 2020 Iditarod winner, to act as Røkke’s sidekick along the trail as a second ‘expedition’ musher.
- Permitting the Norwegian duo to add a support team on multiple snowmachines to follow them north and tend to their needs.
- OK’ing assistance from that support team when feeding, watering, bootieing and otherwise tending to the dogs.
- Authorizing a private veterinarian to monitor the two expedition teams.
- And, most of all, allowing Røkke and Wærner to swap tired dogs for fresh dogs as if they were running in a relay race rather than an endurance competition.
Who knew what?
Whether Iditarod was aware that Røkke and Wærner planned to use these special and very liberal rules to get Røkke from Willow to Nome in eight days or less – a feat mushers have long talked about but which no one had ever before accomplished – is unknown.
It’s possible that Iditarod believed a 66-year-old race rookie with no qualifying races under his belt would never be able to do this no matter how liberal the race made the ‘expedition’ rules. Possibly, the Iditarod was counting on Røkke being the equivalent of Canadian Steve Curtis, the late-arriving third “expedition musher,” who bought his way into the Iditarod for a comparatively paltry $50,000 but failed to make it even halfway up the trail.
Curtis quit in McGrath, reportedly in a bit of a huff, after he and snowmachine-equipped guide Jeff King, a four-time Iditarod champ, fell far, far behind the rest of the mushers on the trail.
Røkke proved far more capable. He and Wærner took off racing so fast – despite the fact they were supposed to be on an “expedition” – that there were rumors of a Røkke-Wærner plan for eight days or less by the time they’d crossed the Alaska Range, the race’s first big hurdle.
By McGrath, there was no doubt the duo was racing rather than expeditioning. At that point, the Iditarod could have held them at the McGrath checkpoint until the race-leading teams went past. Unless, of course, Iditaord had a contract with Røkke that prohibited such an action.
It would seem hard to believe Iditarod would agree to such a contract, but this is Iditarod, and one never knows. Still it seems unlikely given that the race started with the times of Røkke and Wærner being regularly placed on the Iditarod leaderboard as if they were part of the “race.”
Then Røkke and Wærner blew through McGrath, and some started talking about the expedition mushers “winning” the race. And by the time they reached the halfway point at Cripple, it was obvious they were racing rather than expeditioning.
It was then that Iditarod removed them from the leaderboard and shifted the “expedition class” times to the very bottom of the Iditarod standings. Out on the trail, however, nothing changed.
At Unalkleet on the Bering Sea coast, Wærner bailed out – but not before reportedly swapping the best dogs in his team for the worst dogs in Røkke’s team – and the 66-year-old Røkke took off alone – or as alone as a musher can get when accompanied by a gang of helpers on snowmachines – to cover the last 260 miles of trail to Nome.
The Iditarod could have held Røkke in Unalakleet, as well, to let the official ‘racers’ pass. But, again, it didn’t.
Its response instead was to send a missive to “Iditarod Media Partners” explaining that “one of the Expedition Class mushers was expected to arrive in Nome ahead of the competitive field.” The race then offered “talking points” (attached below) as to “how this finish should be described and reported.”
Journalists were advised to report that “here they come – our inaugural Expedition Musher, Kjell Inge Røkke crosses the ceremonial finish line! This is a historic feat for the Expedition Class. While they are completing the trail, the competitive race continues, and official standings will be determined among the competitive mushers.”
The journos also were cautioned not to “compare expedition musher times directly to competitive mushers.”
One wouldn’t want to do that because it would make the racers look like laggards. Røkke eventually ended up reaching Nome way, way, way ahead of the competitive field. It took him approximately 7 days, 22 hours and 40 minutes. The Iditarod, noting the storm brewing over an old man from Norway besting all the racers, did not post his official finishing time.
The first official time posted was that of Holmes, a reality TV star, who finished the race in a time of 9 days, 7 hours, 32 minutes and 51 seconds and was declared the race winner. It was the slowest northern route time since 2020, when it took Wærner 9 days, 10 hours, 37 minutes and 47 seconds to reach Nome.
The slower speed was in part a reflection of the decline in Iditarod competition in recent years. The 2020 race started with 57 teams, at least ten of which were thought to be serious contenders. Holmes finished ninth that year.
A then 65-year-old Mitch Seavey from Sterling, the winner of three previous Iditarods, was second behind Waerner. Seavey has since retired.
As this was written on Wednesday afternoon, the last-place, ‘red lantern’ team of Adam Lindenmuth from Willow was in the Bering Sea village of Koyuk with the leader in the human-powered Iditarod Trail Invitational not far behind.
Rollin’, rollin’, rollin
Park, a former pro in the Women’s Football Alliance and a graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Medicine now working as a graduate research assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was not, however, running away with the Invitational race field in the way that Røkke and then Holmes ran away from everyone in their races.
The GPS tracker on the bike of 51-year-old Erick Basset, who has chased Park all the way up the coast, had him only a mile behind her. Basset is trying to become the first Frenchman, and one of only three people, to have hiked/snowshoed, skied and fat-biked the 1,000-mile trail from Knik to Nome in the Invitational.
About 10 miles behind that pair was fat-tired cyclist Mayella Krause, a 36-year-old Brazilian, with South Dakotan Ryan Wanless, 47, another 20 miles back. Australian Troy Szczurkowski, one of the Stubborn Six who hung on in the ITI 1000 after the Iditarod Trail disappeared into snowy nothingness north of Takotna, had bailed out in Unalakleet after getting sick in McGrath and never really getting healthy again.
And 44-year-old hiker Gavin Hennigan from Ireland, who two weeks ago bravely pushed on to the old mining camp of Ophir and beyond despite a lack of trail to lead the Inviational into Alaska’s long-abandoned “Inland Empire,” had been left far behind.
Everything changed for Hennigan after the snowmachines that set the trail for the Iditarod dogs went past Ophir. With an often rideable trail, the cyclists started quickly closing on him.
And once everyone reached the Yukon River with the predictably good, snowmachine trail linking the villages immediately north and south of the regional hub of Galena, an old lend-lease airbase used by U.S. pilots ferrying planes to the Soviet Union (now Russia) during World War II, Hennigan didn’t stand a chance of keeping up on foot.
The cyclists basically rode off into the sunset. And Park is now in position to possibly earn the distinction of being the first woman to claim an outright win in the ITI 1000.
Michigan’s Jill Martindale became the first woman to win an ITI 1000 in 2019, but she was a co-winner who finished with two men. No woman has ever finished alone at the front of this race, and there’s a good chance Park won’t, given a long history of group finishes in the Invitational.
Seven riders tied for the win last year.
After weeks in the cold and desolation of northwest Alaska, it’s not uncommon for even introverts to come to appreciate company on the trail. And it is especially welcoming to be traveling with others when the riding stalls and the bike pushing, of which there is always much in the Invitational, starts to become tedious.
Given the historic number of Invitationals finishes involving more than one rider over the past decade, the statistics would indicate that there’s only a 60 percent chance of Park or anyone else finishing alone in Nome, and the weather would appear to be leaning toward a group finish.
The forecast is for sunshine along the Bering Sea coast, but with winds blowing at 10 to 15 mph from the north or northwest to push the nighttime, wind-chill factor down to around 45 degrees below zero. The cold, and most especially a serious headwind, can prove badly demoralizing, and in such conditions, it’s often nice to share the misery with a traveling companion or companions.
Expedition Musher – Finish Talking Points – Media
