The Iditarod meme
Iditarod director leaving
While most of the sporting world was Friday chattering about the FIFA World Cup, the July Fourth start of the Tour de France, or the latest NFL star facing serious criminal charges, the buzz in the small world of Alaska sled dog racing was all about the departure of Shirtless Rob Urbach, the executive director of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
The Iditarod Official Finishers Club (IOFC), a group of a little more than 400 people who have officially made the journey from Anchorage to Nome behind a team of dogs, had back in March voted unanimously to ask for the resignation of both Urbach and Mike Mills, an Anchorage attorney who sits at the head of the board of directors of the Iditarod Trail Committee, the organization that runs the race.
Mills and Urbach were informed of that vote earlier this month and told that the IOFC board was to meet again on Thursday to discuss the vote and what to do about it.
Then, lo and behold, on Friday, the Iditarod issued a statement announcing that “Chief Executive Officer
Rob Urbach has made the decision to step down following seven years of leadership. Urbach will
remain in his role throughout a planned transition period and will assist the Board of Directors in the
search for the organization’s next CEO, ensuring a thoughtful and seamless leadership transition.”
No mention was made of the IOFC, the race’s short-lived and disastrous foray into crypto currency with the Iditacoin, or the creation this year of a special, “expedition musher” class of Iditaord entrants which allowed 66-year-old Norwegian billionaire Kjelle Røkke to steal some of the race winner’s thunder by becoming the first dog driver ever to make it from Anchorage to Nome in less than eight days.
Røkke arrived in Nome in time to get a good night’s sleep before the true winner of the race got there.
Starry-eyed Iditarod fans were quick to point out that Røkke was only able to travel so fast because he had support along the trail and was allowed to trade out tired dogs for fresh ones, which he did. But in the big picture, the reality was writ in the late President Ronald Reagan’s golden rule that “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
And then, of course, there was rich-guy, expedition musher number two – former Canadian Steve Curtis, aka Steve Curtis Holfeld – who Urbach let buy his way into the race. Curtis, who has been invovled in a significant number of Canadian lawsuits alleging his businesses failed to pay their bills, now runs a hedge fund in the Cayman Islands and hangs out in the Bahamas, where the Bahama Press reported that he was arrested earlier this year after Customs agents searching his Freeport home “discovered a clear glass jar containing suspected marijuana, multiple international ID cards, and divers licenses.”
Curtis Holfeld never made it to the Iditarod’s halfway point, but he left behind such a stink as he struggled to get to McGrath that Iditarod checkpoint volunteers have been threatened not to talk about what all happened. Whether he gave up and threw in the towel at McGrath, about 350 miles into the 1,000-mile race, or told his Alaska adventure was over has never been made clear.
Big, big fail
But whatever happened in McGrath is really nothing compared to the Iditacoin, which was rolled out with big promises and only to fail miserably.
The reality was that all Iditarod got out of the cryptocurrency was the expense of setting up the Iditacoin show. There was no funding generated for anyone or anything Iditacoin was dead within nine months and rolled into something called Dogatopia, which also died.
Dogatopia, in turn, appears to have been swallowed up by something called DOGZ.
The Iditarod press release on Friday did mention DOGZ. It said “Urbach will continue leading and developing DOGZ, a canine-focused platform company in which an affiliate of the Iditarod holds a majority interest. DOGZ was created to build an integrated ecosystem of canine events, content, products, and services designed to generate long-term value for the Iditarod.
“Current DOGZ platform assets include DockDogs, a national leader in canine sporting events
operating more than 100 competitions annually, and an ownership interest in Bark TV, a 24-hour
dog-focused television network. The platform is intended to benefit the Iditarod through increased
audience engagement, expanded content licensing opportunities, new revenue streams, and the
long-term objective of establishing an endowment to help secure the organization’s future.”
Yahoo! News in 2022 described dogs diving off docks as the “latest dog sport craze.” It is popular enough that there are now dueling organizations sponsoring competitions in which dogs charge up a range and jump off a dock to see how far out over a pool of water they can fly before landing.
It has nothing in common with the Iditarod other than that dogs are involved in both competitions. And it is hugely different from Iditarod in that no one needs to maintain an entire team of dogs, which are expensive to feed and time-consuming to care for, to compete.
More than 14,000 dogs are reported to be registered with North America Diving Dogs, the largest of three organizations promoting dock diving competitions.
“It’s About the Fun,” the organization says on its webpage. “We celebrate the dogs’ natural love for water and play, and aim to nurture a deep sense of fun in every event.”
The Iditarod is more about competition, and whether a possible future endowment at DOGZ would provide it any funds is unclear. Urbach in 2024 suggested to Wharton Magazine that Dock Dogs, DOGZ’s main event, was more about creating “a liquidity event for investors.” He also claimed 40,000 dogs were competing events, though the organization does not keep track of the number of competitors.
It does, however, maintain worldwide rankings for active competitors, and more than 250 dogs and handlers are ranked.
As regards Iditarod, Urbach’s greatest fund-raising success came in creating various forms of lotteries that generated cash.
“This year, we’re launching a gaming space called Trifecta,” he told the magazine of his alma mater. “It’s a betting game to predict the winner, their finishing time, and the number of dogs they finish with. It’s a pilot program that we’re launching this year and looking to extend.
“We’re also launching IditaHealth, which is essentially tapping the celebrity value of mushers and our cultural relevance to inspire and incentivize communities in Alaska to get healthier by addressing substance misuse, poor nutrition, inactivity, and other health issues. We’re creating a public good with these kinds of programs and also have one for reading, called IditaRead.”
The Iditarod Trifecta is still up and running. Nothing called Iditahealth can be found anywhere on the internet. The Iditarod did launch the IditaRead Challenge in 2019, but it was the work of then director of Iditarod Education Diane Johnson, who started work with the Iditarod in 2005 and initiated the Teacher on the Trail program.
She parted ways with Iditarod shortly after Urbach arrived. The reason or reasons why were never explained, but associates of hers have said she was not an Urbach fan.
Follow the money
The only ones to get any coin out of the Iditacoin-Dogatopia adventure in Alaska appear to have been Sparrow Rogers, the co-founder of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Run in Maryland in 2013, and Josephine “JoJo” Mills, the daughter of Iditaord board chair Mike Mills. They got paid to execute Urbach’s great crypto plan.
Dogatopia described Rogers as a “serial entrepreneur…recognized as a leader in healthcare innovation, endurance event management and start-up fundraising….She was retained by the Iditarod to oversee the development of a 50th anniversary NFT catalog and to help design a broader blockchain strategy for their community.”
She was connected to Urbach through triathlon. She and business partner Peter Paris sold the Across the Bay 10K Chesapeake Bay Bridge Run to the World Triathlon Corporation, which runs the Ironman. Urbach had been affiliated with World Triathlon while employed at USA Triathlon.
Before moving south from Alaska to San Diego to “help restore coral reefs to secure a vital food source and part of our ocean’s fundamental health,” Rogers posted on Facebook that she’d been in Alaska for “several months…working as the Project Lead with team Iditarod – a favorite Alaskan charitable organization – to create their own crypto token, the IditaCoin (DGZ). The Iditarod is celebrating its 50th anniversary so this was a wonderful opportunity to bring old school and new school ops initiatives together.”
Joswephine “JoJo” Mills, the third member of the Dogatopia team, appeared to be employed as a “research analyst” for the project until she decided to “commence studies at Notre Dame Law School this” with a focus on “blockchain and cryptocurrency law.” She is now dealing with patent issues surrounding crypto, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence in the Seattle office of the Davis, Wright Tremaine law firm.
Urbach, for his part, appears to now be leaving his latest job the way he left the one before.
When he departed his $362,000 per year job as CEO at USA Triathlon in 2017, the reasons were not explained. But Triathlete magazine subsequently reported he had been asked to resign. The board of USA Triathlon apparently believed there was a conflict of interest in Urbach hiring his wife to decorate the USA Triathlon offices.
Two years after leaving Triathlon, Urbach was hired by Iditarod and brought north with big promises of reinvigorating the race. In an interview with Anchorage’s KTVA News, he suggested he could “leverage” the Iditarod to the sports status of Michael Jordan because, as he said, “dogs are hot.”
The plan clearly didn’t work. The Iditarod has in recent years shrunk to a fraction of the size of its former self.
It was not a good look.
It amazes me that he was hired in the first place! He had no knowledge of Iditarod, dogs in Alaska nor even the Alaskan way of life since he was from out of state! So he earned a 6 figure salary for 8 years and has done nothing for this event or the sport! It has gone downhill ever since he took over. I hope Iditarod has some forethought to hire someone that is more knowledgeable and in tune with Alaska and the sport of competition dog events!!!
If the state of AK would stop propping up this dead horse, we would no longer see dogs run to their death every March.