An Iditarod to remember

Congratulations to Lance Mackey for his fourth straight Iditarod victory.

And, it seems, he won it without using marijuana. So much for the advantage some claimed he had in the past when he admitted smoking medical marijuana on the trail for health reasons.

Apparently his dogs were drug-free as well.

But there’s more to this year’s race that stands out.

No dogs died. That’s welcome news, especially after last year’s aberration of six deaths.

It’s always been a given that when dozens of mushers go out into the wilderness with a thousand dogs, the math says some won’t make it to Nome. Over a two-week period, one or two dogs out of a thousand are likely to die no matter what they are doing.

So this year’s race was remarkable.

Mushers have learned they can’t win if they treat their animals badly. Perhaps this is a start of trend. But tragedy will occur in such a demanding test of human and animal.

This year’s mushers enjoyed a race free of storms, but they and their dogs had to work through minus-40 degrees temperatures in some places.

As noted in the Frontiersman Sunday feature headlined “Peek at the Past,” Rick Swenson won the Iditarod in 1979 in 15 days, 9 hours, 37 minutes and 47 seconds. On Saturday, Celeste Davis, broken nose and all, won the Red Lantern — the Iditarod’s honor for last place — in 13 days, 5 hours, 6 minutes and 40 seconds. That is the fastest Red Lantern finisher in race history. That’s two full days ahead of Swenson’s winning time 39 years ago

Of course there have been many improvements over the last four decades to make this race better and safer and faster.

We can probably expect more records to fall as mushers and dogs continue to rise above race difficulties. It wasn’t long ago that breaking the 10-day barrier was heralded. Now it normally takes nine days for the winner to finish.

Can we someday see the race won in less than a week?

There was a time when people believed an athlete couldn’t run a mile in less than four minutes, that is until Roger Bannister proved them wrong in 1954.

With this year’s race in the books, we should also think back to the Iditarod’s beginnings — the serum run to Nome. Nobody groomed trails. There was no Iditarod Air Force or food drops. The men and their dogs were racing, but not against each other. They were racing against time so people might live.

We talk about the sacrifice of today’s mushers, but they pale in comparison to those true heroes who inspired this race.