A musher who thought he didn't have a chance won the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race on Tuesday in Fairbanks in record time with a team behind almost nipping at his heels and the rest of the field in disarray.
New champ Sebastian Schnuelle from Whitehorse, Yukon territory, had a squall on Eagle Summit to thank for victory, though he was helped significantly by a boneheaded move by second-placer musher Hugh Neff from Skagway and a gutsy -- and sure to be controversial -- call by race marshal Doug Grilliot.
All of that came Sunday on the way into the Central checkpoint when Neff's team veered onto a road near the trail. Instead of steering the dogs back onto the trail as the rules require, Neff let them continue on down the road -- for more than five miles. Grilliot decided the move was way out of line, and slapped Neff with a two-hour penalty.
Neff ended up losing the 1,000-mile race -- the Quest's closest ever -- by four minutes.
"In all honesty, I think that Hugh won this race,'' a gracious Schnuelle told reporters in Fairbanks. "He would have been two hours ahead of me. He clearly had the better team. He knows that and I know that.''
The times over the last 45 miles of trail after a mandatory, 8-hour rest stop at Two Rivers told the tale. Neff left Two Rivers 35 minutes behind Schnuelle and made up 31 minutes of the gap. His team averaged better than 8.5 mph on the stretch run, while Schnuelle's tiring dogs couldn't quite make 8 mph.
Still, in the end, it didn't matter. The German musher who left his homeland and his training as an industrial mechanic for Mercedes-Benz to embrace the wilds of the Yukon Territory and the life of a dog mushing guide was the happy, albeit surprised new champion of the Quest.
"By Central, I had kind of given up,'' Schnuelle confessed to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. "I was like, 'They are way too far ahead.' ''
At that point, William Kleedehn, a 49-year-old Austrian who immigrated to the Yukon and became a Canadian citizen, looked to have the race under control. The leader into the halfway point at Dawson City, Kleedehn had pulled well ahead of Jon Little from Kasilof, the second musher into Dawson, on the long run down the Yukon River to where the race turns west across the White Mountains.
And though Neff had by then caught Kleedehn on the trail, the two-hour penalty he was assessed at Central put him well back too.
Then came the ill-fated crossing of 3,685-foot Eagle Summit. These mountain passes have haunted Kleedehn before. He is a musher with only one good leg. He lost the lower half of one in a motorcycle accident years ago and wears a prosthetic. On smooth trail, he says, it is not a problem. But on rough trail, he sometimes struggles to maintain his balance. In 2004, he slipped and fell so hard in the mountains he broke the good part of his bad leg and had to drop out of the race at the Mile 101 checkpoint along the Steese Highway.
This year, on the way to Mile 101 again, he mushed into a blizzard in the pass, made camp to wait for a break in the weather, and then saw his dog team go crazy over a female in heat.
Behind him, Little and Neff were running into their own weather problems. They had to camp and wait for light to be able to see to find their way over the windblown top, but they were without the dog problems.
Despite that, it took them a lot of time -- 13 hours -- to make the next checkpoint at Mile 101. Behind them, Schnuelle caught a break in the weather and sped through from Central in about five hours. Kleedehn, meanwhile, needed 16 hours and the help of Fairbanks musher Brent Sass to finally get over the summit.
Sass at one point grabbed the front of Kleedehn's team and made like a lead dog to show them the way.
By the time things finally got sorted out at Mile 101, Neff was only an hour in front of Schnuelle with that two-hour penalty still waiting to be served at Two Rivers.
"I wasn't even in race mode anymore,'' Schnuelle said about his departure from Central. "Then things changed coming up to (Eagle) Summit and there they are. All of a sudden they were close, from eight hours ahead of me to right there, so that was too tempting.''
Little's team had a 25-minute gap, but was fading. Schnuelle quickly passed them and left them about an hour behind on the 80-mile run to Two Rivers.
Neff was first to Two Rivers by an hour and 25 minutes. But the man who moved from Evanston, Ill., to Alaska to become a musher back in the mid-'90s still had that two-hour penalty to serve. It left him 35 minutes behind Schnuelle when the mushers left the checkpoint Tuesday morning. Neff knew catching Schnuelle was a long shot, but he gave it a good go.
"People would tell me 15 minutes and 13 minutes and then I heard five minutes, but I never saw him," Neff told the News-Miner. "He was always around the next corner."
Up ahead, the wild-haired 38-year-old German was on his sled listening to cranked-up heavy-metal music from AC-DC on his headphones, trying not to look over his shoulder too often.
"I could tell he was getting closer on the (Chena) river,'' Schnuelle said. "So every corner I looked around (to) see if he's there."
Running at a record pace, Schnuelle was not to be caught. He eventually crossed the finish line in 9 days, 23 hours and 20 minutes, slashing more than three hours off the record set in 2007 by two-time and defending Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race champ Lance Mackey.
A four-time Quest winner, Mackey sat out this race to concentrate on his try at a third Iditarod crown. That race, which starts March 7 in downtown Anchorage and goes to Nome, has a purse about four times that of the Quest, which awarded Schnuelle and his team $30,000 for their first-place performance.
Neff and Schnuelle, who live not far apart along the U.S.-Canada border along the historic Chilkoot Trail, congratulated each other at the finish.
"I'm happy for Sebastian," Neff said. " Hopefully, one of these days I can get a chance to win a race as well.
"I don't really worry about the time penalty. That's history."
The runner-up showing was Neff's best place to date in the Quest. He won $22,000.
Behind Neff came Little and Sass. Four-time Iditarod champ Martin Buser from Big Lake, a Quest rookie who surged from way back to pass a bunch of teams over the last two days, looked to have a lock on fifth. Kleedehn was battling to try to hang onto sixth.
Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.
By CRAIG MEDRED
cmedred@adn.com