The truly grueling Iditarod ends in a four-way tie/Facebook
The long, cold ride ends at last
Two days after the self-proclaimed “Last Great Race” came to an end in Nome, a Brazilian cyclist now living in Boulder, Colo., led the People’s Iditarod into the famous, old, gold-mining community on the shores of the Bering Sea.
In this race, there was no billionaire, rookie, non-competitor arriving first to the finish with an Iditarod speed record in hand to steal the race spotlight. This was in large part because the spotlight had died out by the time the cyclists arrived.
The Iditafans had left with the dogs, and Nome was back to its winter quiet when 36-year-old Mayella Krause paced the Iditarod Trail Invitational pack under the ceremonial burled arch that marks the finish line.
With her came 51-year-old FrenchmanErick Basset, 47-year-old Ryan Wanless from South Dakota and St. Louis’s Kendall Park, 36. All were destined to go in the record book as the winners of a grueling 2026 Invitational.
For powering themselves across 1,000 miles of Alaska wilderness in bitter winds and cold that dipped to 50 degrees below zero, they would receive no special reward. No crowd appeared to welcome them, no prize money waited to be collected.
There weren’t even any race sponsors on hand to share the victory with the finishers because only one rider had a backer approaching real sponsor status. The rest?
Well, Krause described her sponsor as “credit cards, many credit cards,” and notably not of the consumer-credit sort that advertise on the jerseys of the Cofidis Cycling Team in the Tour de France.
For winning the dog race that brands itself as the “Last Great Race,” former reality TV star Jessie Holmes collected $80,000. As Krause’s reward for hanging on to finish the frigid, weather-beaten, sometimes trailless Invitational of 2026, there will be credit card debt instead.
Wanless, meanwhile, would heading back to Sioux Falls to join his sponsor, wife Theo. So, too Basset, who cited “family” as his backer. Only Park could boast a connection to a business with some money to spend. She has a relationship with Boston-based Lumos, one of the smaller companies engaged in the sale of bicycle helmets and bike lights.
Capital A Amateurs
Luckily for all of them, the human-powered Invitational requires a lot less cash than the Iditarod dog race, though it isn’t exactly cheap. For someone starting from scratch, the outlay is $10,000 or more for a fat bike, the gear needed, the ITI entry fee, food drops to be sent out along the trail, and to pay for accommodations in a few places.
Someone with hopes of running the doggie Iditarod will, however, spend more money than that on a year’s feed for a dog team. Talkeetna’s Anja Radano told Alaska Public Media she spent more than $15,000 to feed her 23 dogs in 2022.
Nobody knows how much Norwegian musher Kjell Røkke spent in order to this year to set a record time for the Willow to Nome run. But he paid the Iditarod more than $300,000 to grant him special treatment as an “expedition musher”allowed to swap fresh dogs into his team as needed and skip mandatory Iditarod rest stops.
He also paid a former Iditarod champ and fellow Norwegian to be his sidekick and guide, financed a swarm of snow machines and helpers – plus a veterinarian – to accompany him along the trial, leased something on the order of 50 dogs, and invested a significant amount of time in learning how to handle a dog sled.
The latter isn’t as easy as it looks. Another expedition musher in the race, Canadian Steve Curtis, a man who made it to the top of Mount Everest, got only as far as McGrath before he and guide Jeff King, a four-time Iditarod champ, quit the race.
On the Iditarod website, they blamed bad trail for Curtis’s problems, but there were all sorts of rumors swirling in regard to the Canadian’s behavior. They were impossible to confirm given that the Iditarod requires people to sign nondisclosure agreements to prevent them from expressing any view of the race that might be regarded as negative.
King’s response when queried about Curtis was profanity and an argument that questions were only being asked about Curtis in an effort to create negative news for Iditarod.
Whatever happened, it was clear Røkke was much better prepped for his adventure. Not to mention much better financed. Some have speculated the Norwegian could have run up race-related expenses of $400,000 or more in order to become the first man in history to travel the 1,000 miles from Willow to Nome on a dogsled in less than eight days.
It’s unlikely the entire field for the Invitational – which started with 116 cyclists, skiers and foot travelers – spent half that much money for their adventures.
But then again, none of them were chasing glory. Witness the decision by four people who’d been through hell to finish as a group, rather than end the race with all of them sprinting for a victory that could only go to one.
Days on the trail in the most punishing of Alaska cold and win only to have the race stall at McGrath on the banks of the Kuskokwim River, can change people’s minds as to how they think about “racing.”
The Great Escape
With the trail petering out north of McGrath, the majority of the 25 ITI competitors who’d planned to push on for another 650 miles to Nome decided to go home rather than challenge more than 100 miles of white nothingness in the Innoko River country, or hang around in McGrath for days waiting for the trailbreaking snowmachines that pack a trail for the Iditarod dogs and sleds.
Most everyone agreed then that the only sensible option was to sit and wait in McGrath for days until the Iditarod trail breakers arrived. Most didn’t want to wait and abandoned the race, although a few did try pushing on, notably Irish walker Gavan Hennigan, long-time ITI veteran Jay Petervary from Wyoming, and finally Basset.
Petervary pedaled the 25 miles to Takotna and then three miles beyond, where he reported the trail simply disappeared. He turned around, pedaled back to McGrath and caught a plane home. Basset later also pedaled to Takotna – a community of fewer than 60 – before accepting the fact there was no trail.
So he, too, turned around and pedaled back to McGrath to wait with the others for the trailbreakers. That 50-mile excursion did earn him the distinction of pedaling the longest ITI of any of the finishers.
Wanless would eventually push on from McGrath to Takotna and then up over the 800-foot hill that stands between there and Ophir before deciding the sensible thing to do was join Hennigan in camp.
By then, Hennigan, the man on foot who led the Invitational into the gone-back-to-nature wilds of the old Empire, would be falling quickly behind the five Invitational competitors on bikes, and the stubborn six left in the ITI would fall to five when the race hit the coastal village of Unalakleet.
Ailing Australian Troy Szczurkowski decided to call it quits there, and as so often has happened in the Invitational, the remaining four cyclists decided to bunch up for the final push to Nome.
As for Hennigan, as this was written, he was still about 150 miles from Nome with the global-positioning-satellite (GPS) tracker on the sled he is pulling showing him moving toward the village of Elim at 3 mph. He will, unfortunately, not reach Nome before the 30-day cutoff that must be met to qualify as an “official finisher” in this year’s Invitational.
