Iditarod faces its future

With the departure of the ‘thought leader’ who promised to boost the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race by leveraging media like Michael Jordan and others did to become “big global brands,” the Iditarod Official Finishers Club is polling its members on what they’d like to see from a new executive director.

The organization’s 12-question survey hits some good points, too. But it misses the key question confronting the organization that long ago proclaimed itself “The Last Great Race.”

And that question is simple: What does the Iditarod want to be?

Does it want to be a race within a participant-driven event in the style of the Boston Marathon? Or does it want to be a spectator event limited to a select few racers in the style of the Indianapolis 500?

Or does it see some other, better model out there somewhere that it can copy to survive going forward?

This question really needs to be asked, answered and resolved before the Iditarod hires anyone.

A little history

For the first couple of decades of its existence, Iditraod was a participant-driven event with glory more the object than prize money, although there was money to be made. The late Emmitt Peters – The Yukon Fox – collected $15,000 for winning a transformative Iditarod in 1975.

That doesn’t sound like a lot of money now, but $15,000 in 1975 works out to a value just shy of $94,000 in March 2026, according to the inflation calculator of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This is more than the $81,000 Jesse Holmes won for winning the race this year after billionaire “expedition musher” Kjell Inge Røkke bought his way into Iditarod by ‘donating’ an extra $100,000 to the race purse.

Still, back in the day, the race was never really about money. As five-time champ Rick Swenson observed when the Iditarod was dueling with the animal right’s activists of the Humane Society of the United States in the early 1990s, there would be mushers in Alaska running Iditarod if the only prize was a bag of dog food at the finish line.

Along those lines, it is interesting to note that the competitors in the most popular event now staged on the trail – the Iditarod Trail Invitational – compete for no prizes at all other than the distinction of having traveled the trail on a fat bike, foot, skis or snowshoes.

Invitational winners don’t even get much glory outside the small world of ultra-endurance sport, and yet the race now attracts more than three times as many competitors as the dog race, and it would attract far more were it not for the fact that the size of the field is capped.

The Invitational today is sort of where the Iditarod was after it grew from the 34 participants in the inaugural, is-this-even-possible race of 1973 to a record 96 entrants in 2008. Iditarod organizers were then talking about capping the number of mushers because the race was getting too big to manage.

All of that changed in the years that followed as the Iditarod tried to go pro with rules that made it both harder – not to mention a lot more costly – for rookies to enter and put less competitive mushers in a position to be more easily removed from the race if their teams weren’t moving fast enough.

Last of ‘Last Great’?

All of this served to take some of the ‘great’ out of The Last Great Race, so labeled by Tom Clarke, a sports editor at England’s Daily Mail in the 1970s.

“I reckoned this was the Last Great Race on Earth,” he observed, because it “was almost in the footsteps in the snow of one of (late reporter Ian Wooldridge’s) heroes, Jack London.”

Wooldridge was subsequently dispatched to Alaska to boost the race onto the world stage, and he did. By 1980, the race had made its way onto the BBC’s “World About Us” TV series with Susan Butcher, who was to become famous among Alaska sled-dog drivers, being asked “what’s the daughter of a rich industrialist” doing here?

The question was then pertinent in an event that was as much a survival competition as it was a race.

“There is among mushers a strong camaraderie born of dangerous trail,” said Wooldridge, who narrated the BBC film. Later in it, he talked about the risk of becoming “hopelessly lost.”

“There’s not a musher unaware of the story of Norman Vaughan,” Wooldridge said. “Vaughan served his apprenticeship with sled dogs on Admiral Byrd’s 1928 expedition to Antarctica. Three years ago, age 72, he took part in the Iditarod. About here, in blinding snow, he took a wrong turn. A search party found him just in time five days later. His starving dogs had eaten their harness. Vaughan was in the late stages of hypothermia.”

In most places, at that time, the trail was poorly marked, and sometimes little more than a lone snowmachine track through a vast, snowy wilderness.

As Wooldridge summarized the situation at the end of the 1979 race, the historic gold rush trail “is no longer about gold or even winning; it’s about surviving and reaching the end of the loneliest road. It was nine days later when the very last man came in from the cold.”

These days, no one gets lost and the last man, or woman, comes in from the cold three days behind the winner,  because the Iditarod of today has become all about a fast race on a fast track. And with that change, a good bit of the adventure has been lost.

ABC’s Wide World of Sports followed the BBC onto the trail in the 1980s to highlight the adventure, but it was gone by early 1990s as the Iditarod transformed into an ever racier event and animal rights activists began to question how the dogs were being treated.

Money was supposed to save this new, faster race. Money is a global language. Money makes people pay attention. A big pile of money awaiting the Iditarod winner in Nome would, many in Iditarod believed, focus more national and international attention on the race.

“The goal of the (Iditarod) Board is to get the Iditarod Trail Committee healthy so we can achieve a $1 million purse, and make it a sustainable event that can continue to go on forever,” then-Board President Andy Baker said in 2017.

The race has never come close to that goal. The purse this year was $650,000 thanks to Røkke’s $100,000 boost, but corrected for inflation, that translates into only about $480,000 in 2017 dollars. To reach the $1 million mark of 2017, Iditarod would this year have needed a purse closer to $1.4 million, according to the BLS inflation calculator.

And even that might look like chump change in the financially out-of-control world of professional sports these days.

“In 2026, the 25-event Korn Ferry Tour schedule features $27 million in total prize money, with each of the four Korn Ferry Tour Finals events featuring a $1.5 million purse,” according to the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA). The Korn Ferry is an event for golfers trying to earn their playing card to enter top-tier professional golf, where individual tournaments offered purses up to $40 million this year. 

In a world like this, you have to wonder just how big a purse Iditarod would need to create to attract serious global media attention. And when you consider the race is now struggling to cover expenses and support the comparatively modest purse now offered…..

Well, it all sort of makes nonsense of departing Iditarod director Rob Urbach’s spinning hopes of an Iditarod brand “that’s very similar in the likes of how the Michael Jordans of the world became big global brands.”

Urbach joined Iditarod promising to show Alaskans how to build this brand “and how to leverage media and how to build in sponsors as well and how to, you know, give value back to all of our partners. Imagine if we could fly a drone over every team, and you as an (Iditarod Insider) viewer could decide which team you want to follow…”

Yeah, imagine that, and never mind the cost of launching and managing all those drones. Or worse yet, the potential downside of live coverage of every team. Iditarod had live video running at the Nulato checkpoint in 2024 when a dog collapsed there and later died.

The video sparked an animal rights hellstorm. One can only guess how much bigger the hellstorm would have been that same year if a drone had been following race leader Dallas Seavey earlier in the race when he shot and killed a moose after it seriously injured one of his dogs. 

And then think about how Seavey stopped to rest his teams as part of his race strategy rather than rushing the injured dog to veterinarians at the next checkpoint. Think of how it would have looked to have a drone circling over Seavey for three hours while he and his team rested with a seriously injured, possibly dying, dog in his sled.

Then again, maybe that would have provided some good footage of a musher shooting down a drone.

The fumbler

Urbach has some ideas, all right, but overall, his seven-year reign at Iditarod does not reflect well on the 1991 graduate of The Wharton School of  business. He might have been able to convince some classmates that he was building what Wharton Magazine called a “dog brand empire,” but his tenure at Iditarod was marked more by ratcheting down than leveraging up.

Under Urbach’s leadership from 2019 to 2026, the size of the race field shrank from 57 teams in 2020 to a record low of 33 in 2025 – one less than in the wholly experimental Iditaord of 1973.

Clearly, the man didn’t know what he was selling or how to sell it. His failure might best be captured in one word: IditaCoin.

Urbach rolled out the IditaCoin cryptocurrency in 2022 in the apparent belief that there was, in the great cloud of the internet, an untapped pool of Iditarod fans, a vast silent majority, waiting to embrace anything associated with the race.

“IditaCoin (DGZ) is a Solana-based crypto utility token which will be used to access Iditarod programming, events and merchandise,” his pitch proclaimed, “and that’s just the beginning.  Now is your chance to be on the right side of history – buy DGZ today and let’s win together!”

And while he was telling Iditarod fans this, he was promising the Iditarod Trail Committee – led by board chair Michael Mills, whose daughter just happened to be working on the IditaCoin project – that the cryptocurrency would “generate funding not only for staging the historic race, but for animal welfare grants and financial support for the rural communities that share the heritage and tradition of this great race.”

There is no sign IditaCoin ever generated any funding for anyone or anything. All indications are that it did the opposite.

A legally certified charity, the Iditarod in 2023 filed with the Internal Revenue Service a Form 990 for 2022 showing the organization lost more than $660,000 that year.

The Iditarod losing money is not unusual, but this was the biggest loss in Iditarod history and followed on a 2021 loss of nearly $267,000. Iditarod appears to have started gearing up IditaCoin that year, and it would appear the project cost the trail committee dearly only a year after it ended up $20,570 in the black.

Needless to say, the Iditacoin quickly died a quiet death. Nine months after its big rollout, the only place it could still be found was in a press release posted on the Iditarod webpage. 

And that is the only place it can be found today, with Urbach proclaiming that “while many charitable organizations focus on campaigns asking for crypto donations, at the Iditarod, we have been creating a new way to use cryptocurrency as a self-sustaining resource.

“Our mission is to create the most exciting, useful canine coin in the market, and we want to launch this exciting new venture by offering it first to Alaskans and the Iditarod Nation.”

Urbach probably does deserve some credit for at least trying something new. And maybe the truly charitable can dismiss the IditaCoin debacle as just bad timing, although crypto was already looking like a bad gamble when it launched.

Only months after the IditaCoin appeared, ABC News was headlining “The year crypto broke: How customers, investors lost millions and what’s being done.”

“At the start of 2022, the Super Bowl featured celebrities like Tom Brady, Larry David and Matt Damon in commercials for crypto companies,” reported the story below. “Logos for crypto companies like FTX could be seen plastered on multiple sports arenas and a new wave of crypto influencers emerged, garnering hundreds of thousands of followers. Cryptocurrency was everywhere.

“But the major crash of the crypto market last year has brought headaches, fear and anger among the millions of people around the world who invested their savings and are left wondering whether they’ll ever see their money again.

“Curt Dell, a father of three from California, told ABC News’ Rebecca Jarvis that he’s lost over $200,000 in Bitcoin after the digital crypto lending company Celsius went bankrupt last year.”

The good news here might be that there were no reports of anyone losing large mounts of money on IditaCoin crypto, but it’s possible some huge Iditarod fan did and just doesn’t want to go public.

And, in fairness, Urbach did do better for Iditarod when he copied a page from the playbook of the Kuskokwim 300 Sled Dog Race based in Bethel – a small, regional hub in Southwest Alaska – and got The Last Great Race deep into the gaming business.

If you’re on the Iditarod mailing list, you’ll get a pitch for a new lotto or “cash prize giveaway” almost every day. And with gambling a big business in the country today, gaming is clearly a better bet than cryptocurrency.

Maybe the future of The Last Great Race is as The Last Great Lotto.