Mackey to be inducted into ‘Mushers’ Hall of Fame’

WASILLA — This afternoon, four-time Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and Yukon Quest champion Lance Mackey will finally be inducted into the Mushers’ Hall of Fame.

The ceremony will take place during the Wasilla-Knik Historical Society and Museum’s annual potluck picnic from 1 to 5 p.m., today.

Pastor Robbin Robert, also acting president of the historical society, said he and the eight-person committee selects mushers for the hall of fame every year based on personal character, as well as achievements directly and indirectly related to the sport.

“With Lance, he’s such an Alaskan, tough spirit,” he said. “He’s had adversities and overcame them, ... and he’s popular, too.”

Former Anchorage Daily News reporter Helen Hegener, who met Mackey in 2008 and has been an avid sled dog racing enthusiast for many years, said his coming induction is “long past due.”

“I think Lance is quite deserving of this honor because he basically changed the face of long-distance sled dog racing,” Hegener said. “He set so many precedents and firsts in the field of mushing that he just changed the history of the sport.”

Labeled “the world’s toughest athlete” by Outside magazine last year, Mackey has accomplished feats no other musher has yet repeated. He was the first to win the Quest four times, and the only person to claim four consecutive wins. He was also the first person to win the Quest and Iditarod in the same year, which he did in 2007 and 2008.

And over 15 years and 13 Iditarod races, he’s won almost $370,000 in prize money.

This isn’t the first time Mackey has entered a hall of fame, either. He is one of 27 honored in the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame, and was one of 23 in the Anchorage Daily News’ reader-nominated Iditarod Hall of Fame, begun in 1997.

But this tally doesn’t sum up the man who has inspired thousands, if not millions of mushers and “regular folks” worldwide.

“Lance has faced some incredibly hard challenges and risen above them every time,” Hegener said. “Not just as a musher but as a person he has my highest respect.”

After having overcome drug addiction and, more recently, throat cancer, Mackey has proven himself a determined individual, to say the least.

“My whole reason for being here is I wanted to live and I wanted to raise dogs,” Mackey said. “I wasn’t trying to do anything special, I just wanted to live. I wasn’t ready to go yet.”

The story of Mackey’s life — as a musher and beyond — is “pretty intriguing to a lot of people,” he said, and has been documented in the 2008 film “Appetite and Attitude: A Conversation with Lance Mackey” (co-produced by Hegener) and more recently “The Great Alone,” which won the grand prize at the Seattle International Film Festival this year. The latter, Mackey said, was hard to watch.

“I lived this life and I lived this story and when I saw it, I cried,” he said. “I cried because there was a lot in it, a lot of things I’m not proud of, but there was also a lot that I turned around in my life and that I’m extremely proud of.”

The “real story” of The Great Alone, Mackey said, was the destruction and reconstruction of his relationship with his parents — an ordeal caused by “the person I was in my young life,” he said.

“It was difficult to watch myself on screen and be reminded of the person I don’t wanna remember, but it’s good,” Mackey said. “It keeps you humble.”

And Mackey has apparently taken his own advice to heart.

“All these kind of awards and recognitions to me are all bonuses. That wasn’t what I set out to try to achieve,” he said, referring to his coming induction, as well as his other honors. “I just wanted to succeed in the sport that I love more than life itself.”

But being part of a family legacy — after his father Dick co-founded the Iditarod and won it in 1978, and his half-brother Rick won the 1983 race — is kind of a big deal to the middle Mackey son.

“To be in the hall of fame with my dad, that’s pretty special,” Mackey said.

Racing next season?

Despite a rough Iditarod run this year — Mackey’s poor circulation, due to Raynaud’s syndrome, stymied his 2015 race, to the point where his younger brother Jason elected to escort him to the finish — Mackey plans to take another crack at it in 2016.

“I got caught in kind of a down time last year and I questioned (whether I would race again) myself. But I’ve had some time to stop and think about it and now my thought is, like it’s always been, ‘this is who I am and what I do,’” he said.

Mackey said his Comeback Kennel will remain active this season, though he personally won’t be “on the back of the sled for every race.” His training will be what it will be.

“I don’t necessarily have to go win the Iditarod ever again,” he said. “I would like to think I have that in myself still, but…”

…but maybe it’s time for Jason to have his day. Mackey said he, his father, and his older brother each won on their sixth attempt, and next year, it’s Jason’s turn.

“We’re not cocky, we’re not conceited but we’re convinced that we got the ability, and on the sixth (year) it’s his turn,” Mackey said.

“He chose to hang out with me last year in the back of the pack … (but) he had a team that was nice enough to compete,” he added.

Moving forward

Whatever happens in the upcoming sled dog racing season, Lance Mackey has a saying that quickly articulates his life philosophy: “Don’t dwell on it — excel on it.”

“There’s a lot of (expletive) people deal with on a daily basis … (but) there’s life after setbacks,” Mackey said. “All my success came after nearly dying of cancer.”

And even though it may seem to some that he deserves all the notoriety he now has after what he’s been through, Mackey still floored, on occasion, by how far he’s come.

“This is just so crazy to me,” he said.

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.