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Iditarod web sites
See related pages:
http://www.adn.com/pf/mushing
http://www.iditarod.com/
http://www.adn.com/iditarod/
What is with all this jingoistic Alaska whining about Iditarod musher Doug Swingley being allowed to put a battered, old dog sled back into use? By now, most race fans must have heard or read the quibbling about how race officials allowed Swingley to fly the patched-up sled to Iditarod from Takotna, after he broke the new sled he had picked up hours earlier. "I'm sitting here, and I'm looking at this Swingley running away with this race," Tom Newby told me Monday. "(And) rule four says... once a sled has been left behind, it can't be transported along the trail." That is, indeed, what rule four says. But it's not all of what rule four says. The rule also says "(a sled) cannot be used again unless approved by the race marshall as a replacement for a broken sled." Inherent in that statement is the notion that the race marshall can allow the sled to be flown anywhere. After all, you can't expect a musher with no sled to go back to pick up the replacement sled, any more than you can expect that musher to go forward to pick up the replacement sled. The whole problem of having no sled is that you can't go anywhere. That's the reason for allowing a replacement sled in the first place. This, however, hasn't stopped people from complaining. "It ain't fair," they whine. "It ain't fair. It ain't fair." Where were these people when other top contenders were flying new sleds to almost every checkpoint? It was sled overkill that led the Iditarod to limit sled numbers in the first place. If race officials hadn't - given the way things were going - top mushers were only a few years away from flying new, completely outfitted sleds to every checkpoint. Why bother with unpacking and packing gear every time you hit a village? Why trouble with changing the plastic on sled runners because it's torn up and starting to drag? Just hook the dogs to a whole new outfit, shove the old sled and related paraphenalia on the litter heap (later, to be "salvaged" by your support team, of course), and head on down the trail. This is exactly the direction the Iditarod was going, until some people started to complain. Martin Buser, then a low-budget musher, was one of the leaders of the pack. He wanted the race rules restructured to remove some of the bennies available to the wealthiest, most-famous mushers. Thus came changes like corraling, which makes all the mushers care for their dogs in the same place and with the same equipment. Before that rule, the biggest names got the nicest places to stay in each village, had their meals cooked for them, saw hot water ready for cooking their dog food and more. The least known mushers, well, they got to go camp down by the river, fix their own meals and waste time heating water for their dogs. The Iditarod had a lot of these little biases favoring the wealthy or the famous. Mutliple sleds were among them. At $1,000 or so a sled, not many mushers could afford to send large numbers of sleds out on the trail, but some mushers could, and they did, and it was unfair to everyone else. From this arose rule four. It was intended to level the playing field. It was not intended to punish anybody, which is why it contained the provision allowing the race marshall to permit a "replacement sled." Now, there are people advocating the rule should have been used to punish the Montana musher on his way to winning the race. Scratch the surface of their arguments, and you find out what they're really wanting to say is this: "We don't want some doggone Outsider winnin' the Iditarod." Maybe, I joked to Newby, the Iditarod should simply require that Outsiders start the race with fewer dogs. Outsiders get a 10-dog limit, say, while certified Alaskans still get to start with 16. "Maybe," he countered, "we shouldn't let them (Outsiders) start at all." At least, he was man enough to admit his view on rule four was driven by nothing but prejudice against Outsiders. Newby wouldn't be upset, he confessed, if Charlie Boulding from Manley had been given the OK to ship one of his old sleds on along the trail as a replacement. Which is pretty funny, given that Boulding hasn't lived here all that long. He might look Alaskan, but Susan Butcher got here from Massachusetts, Buser from Switzerland, Rick Swenson from Minnesota and Jeff King from California long before Boulding showed up on the scene. Alaska-born mushers are, in reality, rare in the Iditarod. So maybe there's an easy solution to this problem of an Outsider winning. Maybe the Legislature should just give Swingley, the Unimusher, a permanent-fund dividend and declare him an honorary Alaskan. Who in their right mind wants to be associated with Montana anyway? Craig Medred is the Daily News outdoors editor and an opinion columnist.
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