A Thrilling Sprint to the Finish in the Iditarod

I don’t mean to brag (much), but last year, while snowbound in the fifty-person village of Takotna, Alaska, I predicted that Mitch Seavey would win the 2013 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race—as he did, some five days and six hundred miles later, becoming the oldest winner in the history of “the last great race on earth” (which is younger than the Super Bowl, but, whatever). I trust that Grantland’s Brian Phillips and Alaska Dispatch’s Suzanna Caldwell can vouch for this claim, because I said it to them, while standing outside a cabin where we all ate too many slices of pie. Phillips wrote a wonderful piece about his Iditarod experience, and I will forever be jealous of his spotting a polar bear from the cockpit of a Super Cub, when I didn’t so much as see a moose. Caldwell continues to cover the race daily, and she was an invaluable lifeline for this nostalgic mushing fan marooned on the East Coast during the 2014 edition, which ended, this morning, in stunning fashion.

My own piece, alas, was as much about Mitch’s son Dallas as about the race itself. Dallas, then twenty-six, was the reigning champion, and the youngest person ever to win the Iditarod. I’d spent some time with Dallas and Mitch (and Grandpa Dan, a.k.a. Boppa, one of the race’s founders) before the race began, so I had not only a rooting interest in the team but also a good sense of their methodical approach to racing. The Seaveys were living embodiments of the coaching mantra familiar to all sports: play your own game, and don’t worry about anybody else. Last year’s race was jolted by some rabbits who pushed the pace to unprecedented levels, and who invariably attracted most of the trailside coverage and speculation. I picked Mitch because even Dallas, a musher not known for his humility, seemed in awe of his dad’s team. Dallas had dropped a couple of injured dogs early in the race; he finished fourth. The rabbits barely cracked the top twenty.

At home in his yurt, before the start of the race, Dallas Seavey showed me his “race bibles,” a makeshift compilation of Iditarod stats that I like to think of as the Bill James Abstracts of competitive dog mushing. Their central insight, it seemed to me, having not yet been out on the trail, was that the race was less a linear progression, a thousand-mile-long slog, than a collection of shorter run-and-rest cycles compressed into nine days. You weren’t racing the other dog teams so much as racing the schedule you set for yourself—a delicate balance of prudence and ambition.

A lot can happen in nine days. This year, a thirty-five-mile stretch of the trail on the north side of the Alaska Range turned out to have virtually no snow at all—a result of a warm winter beyond the reach of the polar vortex. The sleds bumped and dragged along frozen dirt berms, punishing the competitors to the tune of concussions, sprained ankles, busted knees, bruised hips, and dislocated fingers. For anyone tempted to minimize the physical achievement of holding onto a sled in such conditions, I strongly recommend this video. It was filmed with a GoPro affixed to the helmet of the four-time champion Jeff King, who has a bit of a MacGyverish reputation in mushing circles for his technological innovations. (The innovation in this case was not a camera but a helmet.) King is fifty-eight, and led the race comfortably as of last night, when I went to bed, with only seventy-seven miles to go. He appeared ready to shatter the course record of eight days, eighteen hours, and forty-six minutes, and to best Mitch Seavey’s oldest-champion claim by five years. A column on Alaska Dispatch raised the worthy question of whether, come morning, King would qualify as the greatest musher of all time, the Michael Jordan of the tundra.

Then came the wind, a late burst of extreme weather in a notably temperate week. I woke up and checked the official G.P.S. tracker, expecting to see that King had already been crowned. Instead, I learned that he’d been blown into a pile of driftwood and had summoned help. Not only had he failed to break the record; he hadn’t even finished. Aliy Zirkle, the two-time reigning runner-up and a fan favorite, was now in the lead in spite of a pulled hamstring, and she was poised to become the first woman champion since Susan Butcher, in 1990. But Zirkle took shelter from the wind at the race’s final checkpoint—aptly named Safety—and, while Zirkle and her dogs recuperated, Dallas Seavey blasted through. Three different leaders in a span of three hours, with roughly twenty miles to go!

Prudence and ambition give way to sheer desperation in a sprint, which is what we got in the end, or so it seemed. Just two minutes and twenty-two seconds separated Seavey, the winner, and Zirkle at the finish, which was reached six hours faster than the previous record. Anyone who tuned in as recently as yesterday will be shocked by the result. In fact, Dallas Seavey himself was not expecting it. Among his first words after crossing under the burled arch in Nome were “Where’s Jeff and Aliy?” He thought he’d come in third, and that the headlamp of the musher haunting him down the homestretch belonged to his father, Mitch. Congratulations, Dallas. Now get some sleep.

Above: Dallas Seavey holds one of his dogs, after winning the 2014 Iditarod; Nome, Alaska, March 11, 2014. Photograph: Bob Hallinen/The Anchorage Daily News/AP. See more photographs of the Iditarod.