Sports

Schnuelle wins Yukon Quest

A German who left his homeland and his training as an industrial mechanic at Mercedes-Benz to embrace the wilds of Canada's Yukon territory has become the new champion of the grueling Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race.

Wild-haired, 39-year-old Sebastian Schnuelle, who now calls Whitehorse home, came from behind in the 1,000-mile sled dog marathon to edge out Hugh Neff of Skagway by 4 minutes at the finish line in Fairbanks this morning.

Jon Little of Kasilof finished third, 68 minutes back.

Schnuelle and Neff are both immigrants to the northland who have been working toward mushing success for years.

Neff arrived in the historic gold-mining town of Skagway from Evanston, Ill., in 1995, just a couple years before Schnuelle settled near the other end of the historic Chilkoot Trail in Canada. They both got into dogs not long after and have steadily been building competitive kennels.

Schnuelle cracked the top 10 in the highly competitive Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race for the first time last year. Neff's best Iditarod finish was 19th in 2007. He has regularly been among the early leaders in the March chase from Anchorage to Nome, but he has shown a tendency to ask too much of his team early on and then to watch the dogs fade as they near the Bering Sea coast.

His experiences in the Quest have been similar. He led the Whitehorse-to-Fairbanks race to the halfway point in Dawson City in 2005 only to falter and drop to third.

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Neff ran a more conservative race this year and might have won but for a two-hour penalty assessed as the competition neared the Central checkpoint north of Fairbanks. Neff's team strayed onto a road there, and instead of directing the dogs immediately back onto the nearby trail, Neff let them run down the road for about five miles.

Quest officials, who have a bit of a reputation for being sticklers about the rules, told him in Central that he would be penalized two hours for that violation. Neff protested, arguing that he should be fined instead, but to no avail.

He was at the time within minutes of race leader William Kleedehn, the unluckiest musher in Quest history. Kleedehn, who races on an artificial leg, fell and broke the good part of his bad leg on the way into the Mile 101 checkpoint in 2004. This year, he was leading the race toward the same checkpoint when his dog team stalled in storming winds and then got totally distracted by a female in heat.

Kleedehn eventually needed the help of musher Brent Sass of Fairbanks to walk the dogs over Eagle Summit and into the checkpoint.

By the time he got there, he'd fallen from first to fifth. Ahead of him were Neff, Little and the fast-closing Schnuelle, who'd been miles back until the storm that stopped Kleedehn stalled Neff and Little as well.

The puff of gusty mountain weather allowed him to close a gap of hours and move into position for ultimate victory.

Little, who lost the halfway prize of gold at Dawson after his dogs faltered just outside that community, saw his team fade for a second time as the race neared a mandatory 8-hour rest at the Two Rivers checkpoint. Neff arrived there first but left second after sitting out that two-hour penalty.

Schnuelle left Two Rivers with a 35-minute advantage, a nearly impossible gap to close over the last 45 miles of trail, but Neff came amazingly close.

By CRAIG MEDRED

Craig Medred

Craig Medred is a former writer for the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Dispatch and Alaska Dispatch News. He left the ADN in 2015.

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