As the spectacle that is the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race unfolds in Anchorage once again, the subject on everyone's tongue is whether defending champ Lance Mackey can pull off a three-peat.
Largely, if not totally, overlooked is the guy who might hold the answer to that question: Larry.
Larry, of course, can't talk. He is, after all, a dog -- arguably the best lead dog Mackey will ever meet.
George Attla, the legendary Alaska musher of old, once observed that if a musher happens on one great lead dog in his lifetime he's blessed.
Well aware of this history, Mackey knows the value of Larry.
"Larry," he says, in the form of highest compliment, "needs no introduction."
Why would he? A Michael Jordan, a Steve Young, a Tiger Woods, or an Ichiro Suzuki come along only so often. Sled dog racing is no different from basketball, football, golf or baseball in that regard.
There are a lot of good players, but there are only a handful of great players.
Before Mackey got this point where he will be standing on Fourth Avenue for the Iditarod start and contemplating three in a row, the late Susan Butcher performed the first Idtiarod three-peat. Her key lead dogs for that 1980s accomplishment?
Granite, Granite, and -- oh yes -- Granite.
Montanan Doug Swingley repeated Butcher's three-peat feat from 1999 to 2001. His key lead dogs?
You guessed it -- Stormy, Stormy and Stormy.
And then there is Andy, the lead-dog five-time Iditarod champ Rick Swenson loved so much he gave his son the same name.
Andy led Swenson teams to victories in 1977, 1979, 1981 and 1982, and came within a nose of a victory in 1978. That was the year Dick Mackey, Lance's dad, outran Swenson in a sprint down Nome's Front Street that ended with the Iditarod's only photofinish.
Only in 1980 did Andy get soundly beaten. He arrived in Nome in front of a fourth-place team that year, but the fault was not his. Swenson made a tactical error, and let a pack of mushers led by Joe May take off like rabbits just north of the Alaska Range. All the heavyweights of the time -- Swenson, Butcher, past champ Emmitt Peters from Ruby, Roger Nordlum from Kotzebue, Joe Garnie from Teller -- thought the rabbits were going too fast and would run themselves out.
They didn't. The Swenson team, led by Andy, finished fourth at the front of the chase pack. Just behind him came Butcher.
The best woman to ever get on the runners behind a dog team saw a lot of the back of Swenson in those days. That didn't change until Andy retired, and then it changed dramatically.
In 1987, Swenson's team hung to the heals of Butcher's team for two days as the race moved north along the Bering Sea Coast toward the finish line in Nome.
Swenson was blunt about his strategy. He planned to dog Butcher's team until the pressure burned them all out, and then he was going to pass.
Only it didn't work out that way. Butcher by then had Granite; he was rock solid, and Swenson had no Andy.
At the Safety Roadhouse, with Butcher's team only minutes ahead, Swenson stopped to sign in and out at the last stop before Nome. His dogs, however, decided that was as far as they were going. Turbo, Andy's replacment, refused to lead them out. No matter how much Swenson petted and coaxed, nothing changed.
Finally, at 9:15 a.m., he let them rest, went into the Roadhouse and ordered a Coke with a shot of whiskey.
"That's embarrassing," Swenson said at the time. "I've never had that happen to me in my whole life."
A lot of people surmise it would have been different if Andy had been there. A couple key dogs, or even one key dog, can change a whole team, said four-time champ Martin Buser of Big Lake.
Great lead dogs are like great football or basketball players. Somehow, almost magically, they possess the ability to lift the level of performance of those around them.
Buser and fellow four-time champ Jeff King from Denali Park are the only Iditarod mushers who have been able to win with ever changing lead dogs over the years, but Buser and his family still have a soft spot in their hearts for D2. D2 convinced Buser that victory was possible with a second-place showing in 1991, and then led Buser teams to victory in 1992 and 1994.
D2 was leading the team down the same path in 1995, but pulled a muscle early in the race. He had to be shipped home. Without D2, Buser couldn't hold off Swingley's drive to become the first musher from Outside Alaska to win the lead. Swingley did it with a dog called Elmer in lead. Elmer was solid, but it was his son -- Stormy -- who would eventually shine.
Elmer won one close race. Stormy owned the Iditarod trail for a few years.
With Stormy at the front in 1999, 2000 and 2001, the Swingley team was dominate. Swingley teams were as powerful then as Mackey teams have been for the past two yeasr, but Iditarod dynasties are hard to sustain.
Swingley is officially retired now after a series of races where he seemed plagued from injuries and difficulties, but may have suffered most from not having Story there. Swenson, still on the search for another Andy, has faded back into the Iditarod pack the way Butcher was beginning to fade before her retirement in 1994.
Only King and Buser, among today's contenders, have been able to soldier on solidly through the decades behind teams led by new leaders, while others dream about stumbling into that one dog that can change everything.
Two-time Iditarod runnerup Paul Gebhardt from Kasilof, a former neighbor of Mackey's on the Kenai Peninsula, once had a chance to buy Larry back when Mackey needed money. Gebhardt thought the $2,500 asking price too steep. Now, it seems cheap.
"I wish I had bought him," Gebhardt said, but he had a standout leader, Red Dog. Gebhardt's wife, Evie, describes that dog as simply "our beloved leader, Red Dog."
Red Dog was voted the Iditarod Golden Harness Award winner in 2000 when he led Gehardt's team on a march that nearly reeled in the Swingley juggernaut on the stretch run to Nome. Gebhardt was left to wonder what might of been if he'd asked the team to go just a little harder.
Though Swingley is now out of the picture, Gebhardt is back this year and claims he has a leader "probably better than" Red Dog. If true, it could make him a musher to watch. The dog is Lieutenant, a son of Red Dog, who Gebhardt plans to put up front despite his young age.
"He's going to be leading me to Nome this year as a two-year-old," the musher said.
Leading to Nome is a lot of pressure to put on a two-year-old. Most great lead dogs don't reach their prime until later. Cim Smyth of Big Lake won the Tustemena 200 in early February led by a 7-year-old and still improving lead dog named Shire.
Smyth is quite likely to join Gebhardt in the hunt for an Iditarod victory this year. Smyth was 12th last year; Gebhardt, eighth.
When it comes to lead dogs to watch, though, the one that might warrant the most attention is Mitch Seavey's Payton. Running in single-lead, Payton pulled the Seavey gang into Nome seventh in the last year's Iditarod, and only a couple weeks later went out to win the $100,000 jackpot in the All-Alaska Sweepstakes by beating the teams of Iditarod champ Mackey and 2008 Iditarod runnerup King.
The 2004 Iditarod champ, Seavey in January of this year beat both Buser and King in the Kuskokwim 300 Sled Dog Race from Bethel to Aniak and back, but it was close, and the 300-mile Kusko -- a mid distance race -- isn't always a good barometer for forecasting outcomes in the longer, more demanding Iditarod.
As Seavey noted after winning in Bethel, he won the Kusko with a strategy of dropping any dog that wasn't performing to its absolute best on the way around the up-and-back race course. He had only seven of his 14 starters still in harness at the finish.
"If I didn't like the way they looked, I just sent them home," he said. "It's not quite like the Iditarod where they have their good days and their bad days, and you might want to just look at how they are tomorrow."
A musher down to seven dogs 300 miles into the Iditarod might still be able to finish in the top-10, but he or she isn't going to win. Buser said he was happy to finish the Kusko just behind Seavey with a full team, showing they could for a long ways at near top speed.
Buser, fifth in the Iditarod last year, is another musher sure to be in Iditarod contention this year, along with King. Both know how to win. Both remain competitive although getting long in the tooth. Either could join Swenson as the winningest Iditarod musher ever with a fifth-victory.
And then there are a whole bunch of mushers who, having shown they have good teams, might put it altogether by stumbling just on the right dog or two to lead:
-- Hans Gatt from Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, the three-time winner of the 1,000 Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race who always found some way for things to go wrong in Iditarod. He changed that last year, finishing sixth in a time of 9 days, 20 hours.
-- Ken Anderson from Fairbanks, Mackey's neighbor. He hasn't show all that much in limited racing this year, but he was forth in last year's Iditarod and, as noted above, pre-Iditarod races aren't always good predictors of Idiatrod success. Mackey's victory in the Copper Basin 300 this year, and his runner-up showing in the Tustumena 200 behind Smyth, could mean he still has a super dog team. It could also mean some of the other mushers in those races were there mainly to try out some dogs that had never raced before, but might be on the verge of stepping up to the race team.
-- DeeDee Jonrowe or Linwood Fiedler from Willow and Ed Iten from Kotzebue -- experienced, veteran, top-10 finishers capable of making one last run at victory.
-- Aaron Burmeister from Nenana, Jessie Royer from Fairbanks, and Ray Redington Jr. from Wasilla, and most of all, Norwegian Bjornar Andersen -- the next generation threatening the 35- to 55-year-old mushers rule the Iditarod roost. Royer is a top-10 finisher once thought to have the potential to become another Butcher. Andersen is backed by the power of Team Norway, which twice helped Robert Sorlie reach the Iditarod winner's circle. A musher since age 13, Andersen has already proven himself along the trail in Alaska; he was fourth as a rookie 2005, sixth in 2006.
By CRAIG MEDRED
cmedred@adn.com