|
Iditarod web sites
See related pages:
http://www.adn.com/pf/mushing
http://www.iditarod.com/
http://www.adn.com/iditarod/
WHITE MOUNTAIN - After nine days on the trail in the cold and the wind, Doug Swingley sat down at a table here 75 miles from Nome on Tuesday afternoon to contemplate a second victory in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. The oldest man to win this 1,100-mile marathon sipped coffee and chewed jerky strips. His closest competitor was still miles back on the trail. Before dawn, the richest payday in Iditarod history, about $107,000, would be his. Big Lake's Martin Buser, his closest competition, wouldn't arrive to begin his mandatory eight-hour rest stop until 30 minutes before Swingley was cleared to leave. "I figure the race is over," Swingley said. "I'm just headed for the locker room." Ahead of him, the trail was reported to be hard and fast all the way to Nome. Behind him, Buser was 71/2 hours off the winner's pace. "I'd like to catch Martin," said Rick Swenson, who was running third. "I don't know if that's reasonable, but he seems to be going quite a bit slower." A thousand miles of often-bad trail was taking a toll on most of the front runners, but Swingley had missed much of that. Seeming to be graced with a halo of good weather, the Montana musher just missed storms that left teams behind him slogging through deep snow or fighting brutal headwinds and extreme cold. Yukon River headwinds brought the team of Willow's DeeDee Jonrowe to a halt on the Yukon River. She went from running fourth to her first scratch in 17 Iditarods. The same winds stalled the teams of Swenson, the race's only five-time winner, and defending Iditarod champ Jeff King from Denali Park. They had to pull into a sheltered slough to wait for the wind to settle before they could go on. Swingley's luck in missing the worst of the blow had mushers wondering whether divine intervention was at work in this victory. "You just got to live right, I guess," Swingley said. He praised his team of mostly young dogs and credited his win, in part, to long training runs near his home in Lincoln, Mont. Frequently, he said, he'd driven his team to a spot 130 miles from his house, then run them home. "I think their resilience came from pushing them so hard," he said. That stamina showed when Swingley jumped to the lead at Iditarod, the race's halfway point. He took the race's required 24-hour rest about 100 miles farther down the trail than most of the other early leaders. From then on, Swingley held the lead, collecting the halfway prize of $3,000 in gold nuggets as well as the First to the Yukon ($3,500) and the First to the Coast ($2,500) prizes. In addition a first-place check expected to total $60,000, Swingley will win a Dodge truck worth $38,000 - bringing his total earnings to about $107,000. After Iditarod, he hardly ever saw anyone but Buser, his closest competitor. Down from 16 starters to 10 dogs by the time he reached Nikolai, about 300 miles from the start, Buser worried openly whether he would be able to finish. He carried bags of dog food in his sled from checkpoint to checkpoint in case his team shut down. "Outwardly, I was confident," Buser said. "But inwardly, I was really worried whether I was even going to be able to finish." He speculated that six of his dogs pooped out early because he overtrained them. No team could match Swingley's speed. He consistently posted the fastest times from checkpoint to checkpoint. By the coast, Swingley's lead was so large that he was able to ease back and let the team relax on the final stretch. "We'll never know how fast this team could have gone," he said. Swingley said the team, comprised mostly of young dogs, didn't have the depth of the 1995 team with which he won his first Iditarod and set the still-standing race record of 9 days, three hours. Still, he said, a few dogs were standouts. Cola, a 2-year-old female, led the team up the coast, he said. And Elmer, the only dog from his 1995 team, proved invaluable in leading the team into Yukon River headwinds; this might, however, have been the 8-year-old husky's last race. Swingley said the old leader may soon retire. "I'm going to have to consider that," he said. Swingley had to drop four of his 16 dogs along the trail because of injuries or fatigue, but that still left him with more dogs leaving White Mountain than Buser had arriving here. Still, there were problems for the Montana musher. A mile out of Wasilla, he crashed his sled and bruised or cracked his ribs. He struggled with that all the way to the finish line. Worse trouble came on the way into the ghost town of Iditarod, when Swingley cracked a runner on his sled coming down an embankment. With the sled damaged beyond repair, he had to get the approval of race officials to bring up a sled he had dropped earlier in the race. That battered sled was flown into Iditarod while Swingley served his 24-hour rest. Though crudely patched, it held together the wrest of the way. In White Mountain, Swingley admired his handiwork in reinforcing a cracked stanchion with duct tape, hose clamps and a willow branch. He planned to save the willow. "I'm going to put that right up by my trophy," he said. On his last layover, Swingley appeared relaxed. He grabbed a quick nap, then worked to discard extra weight before the last stretch to the finish line. About a half-hour before he left, Buser pulled in looking tired and weary. Swingley, who had been resting on his sled, walked over to greet the three-time Iditarod champ. "They're doing good," Swingley told Buser. A little while later, Buser called out to Swingley, then handed him a thin box. "This is for you," he said. Inside was a cigar. "I was supposed to smoke it," Buser said. "It's a damn victory cigar." * Reporter S.J. Komarnitsky can be reached at skomarnitsky@adn.com
|
