Anchorage Daily News

NOME -- Lance Mackey from Fairbanks might have made Alaska mushing history this year, but it was 2004 Iditarod champ Mitch Seavey who collected the big payola.

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The Sterling musher Friday night beat Jeff King from Denali Park into Nome by 10 minutes to claim $100,000 in the winner-take-all All Alaska Sweepstakes.

The prize for winning the historic, 408-mile race first staged during Alaska's gold rush days netted Seavey only about $4,000 less than what Mackey and his dogs collected for winning both the 1,100-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race.

Add in the $48,000 Seavey earned for finishing seventh in the Iditarod, plus the $20,000 prize he claimed for winning the Kuskokwim 300 Sled Dog Race in January, and he is clearly the leading money winner in Alaska's state sport for the year with the sled-dog racing season nearly over.

"I never thought anything could surpass winning the Iditarod,'' Seavey said, "but this a rare event and a pretty nice prize.''

Namesakes of the Super Bowl winning Chicago Bears led the way for Seavey. He had Payton, as in Walter, and Ditka, as in Mike, in front of the team for the finish.

"They're the best,'' he said -- two dogs good for 100,000 big ones.

"It's hard believe, isn't it?" Seavey said. "It's hard to believe. It's like any dog race, but I can't get my mind wrapped around the whole $100,000 thing.''

For King, a second, second-place finish only weeks after napping himself out of a chance to win his fifth Iditarod, was bittersweet. He had looked to have the Sweepstakes in his grasp at the halfway mark. Mackey, whose dogs have seemed simply invincible for the past two years, finally started to fade there.

It had to happen sometime.

The Fairbanks cancer survivor and his Alaska huskies had already accomplished the impossible by winning both the Quest and the Iditarod in 2007 -- an achievement totally without precedent or even a hint of one -- and then following that by doing it all over again this year.

Through the early stages of the Sweepstakes, too, Mackey looked to be dueling with King for yet another victory in the big-money re-enactment of a historic race through the hinterlands of the Seward Peninsula.

And then along came Seavey.

His team of tough, Kenai Peninsula dogs caught the 53-year-old King with less than 50 miles to go and then passed.

Seavey's Iditarod Racing Team finished with all 10 canines in harness and pulling strong here on Front Street and at 11:29 p.m. Friday. A late-night crowd was on hand to cheer the teams shattering of a 98-year-old mushing record held by the aptly named John "Iron Man" Johnson.

Seavey finished the race in roughly 61 hours, slashing more than half a day off Johnson's record time of 74 hours, 14 minutes and 37 seconds. The record had stood since the 1910 Sweepstakes.

Seavey's team had stalked King for much of the race and caught him approximately a mile before Safety, just before 9 p.m., Friday.

Seavey gained four minutes on King heading into Safety, then held the Denali Park musher at bay for the last 22 miles to keep him from the $100,000 paycheck from the Nome Kennel Club.

Though Seavey broke a record most thought was unbeatable, what wasn't clear Friday night was where Seavey and King's tight finish ranked in Sweepstakes history.

The 408-mile round-trip race from Nome to Candle has been raced 12 times, but the biggest and most important of those races happened so long ago that even race organizers or Nome historians didn't know the closest finish in race history.

"That's a good question," said Laura Samuelson, director of Nome's Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum.

With green northern lights dancing across the sky, Seavey departed Camp Haven on the edge of Death Valley at 2:40 a.m., Friday -- situated in a three-way logjam of former Iditarod champions. Seavey, the 2004 winner, was 43 minutes behind King and 18 minutes ahead of Mackey.

Seavey steadily trimmed 38 minutes off King's lead on their way into Solomon.

Seavey, 47, was riding on the heels of King as they left Solomon just five minutes apart, leaving Mackey in the dust with only 36 miles left in the 408-mile round-trip race from Nome to Candle.

Seavey's record-breaking time told something about the advancement of modern-day dog racing. The 1983 Sweepstakes champion and five-time Iditarod champion Rick Swenson from Two Rivers finished 10 hours behind the record time.

Seavey's victory also saved race organizers from what was shaping up as possible post-race controversy over just who won. Race officials led mushers to believe that despite a start that saw 16 dog teams leave Nome two minutes apart, the winner would be the driver of the first team back to Nome.

After mushers left, however, race marshal Al Crane said the winner would actually be decided by elapsed time as is done in sprint races.

"I don't want them (mushers) to know all the information," Crane said.

Had King finished first, that might have been a big problem, given that he left Nome four minutes in front of Seavey. If Seavey had finished less than four minutes behind King, the Sterling musher could have been the winner despite being second into Nome.

And despite the fact he was under the impression he'd absolutely have to get there first to win.

"The later bib numbers will be at a disadvantage," Seavey said before the race. "That's just the way it is."

As it turned out, though, Seavey's team, the 12th of the 16 to start, made that a non-issue by passing everyone in front to win.

Find Kevin Klott online at adn.com/contact/kklott. Craig Medred contributed to this story.

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