Lance Mackey soars to the top of the 2007 Iditarod
NOME, Alaska — Eight-year-old Lance Mackey stood in the finish chute to see his father win the 1978 Iditarod by a nose over Rick Swenson. The memory burned in his heart as he grew. It ate at him.
Today, the younger Mackey finally lived out the culmination of his unlikely dream to follow in his father’s sled tracks. The 2007 champion, and the only back-to-back Yukon Quest and Iditarod champion in the history of distance sled dog racing, was led up the chute by a strong team of nine dogs, his hands pointing at lucky bib 13 as he jogged up and bear-hugged his brother, Jason.
“It’s unreal,” were the first audible words that the cheering crowd heard. Mackey took extra time shaking hands with people he knew circling the finish chute.
Wearing the same bib number – 13 – as his father and brother when they won this race, Mackey crossed the finish line at 8:08 p.m. March 13 with a time of nine days, five hours and eight minutes, one of the top 10 fastest Iditarods in the race’s 35-year history.
The plastic runners on his sled were shredded by persistent gravel over the last 77 miles of the race. As exuberant as ever, Mackey said Jeff King and Martin Buser, the race leaders at Unalakleet, told him privately that this was his race to lose at that point. He took that as a major compliment.
“I feel this is one of the steadiest, most willing-to-please teams. They’ll do anything for me,” he told a crowd at Nome’s mini convention center. “That’s exactly the reason why I’m here in the position I am. It took a little something extra to beat the people I did.”
Mackey’s arrival caps a fairy tale run that he audaciously set out to achieve as an adult trying to rebuild a broken life. In his late 20s, Mackey abandoned a crab-fishing career, moved from Wasilla to the Kenai Peninsula and began a racing program, which he coined Mackey’s Comeback Kennel.
Mackey was fixated by circumstances surrounding his father’s 1978 win and his brother Rick’s win in 1983. Both wore bib number 13 and won the race on the sixth try. Mackey engineered a plan to match those numbers. When he first started racing, he told his wife, Tonya, he was going to try to win by his sixth attempt and would give it up if he couldn’t compete. Mackey poured his heart, soul and all his meager earnings into it.
The wildly optimistic goal hit a brutal setback about three years ago when Mackey underwent major cancer surgery in his neck. He emerged from the near-death experience even more determined, more focused and more willing to do what it takes. He kept improving with every race.
By the spring of 2006, he was the reigning two-time champion of the Yukon Quest and had fine-tuned his racing style and his dogs to the point that he just knew he was capable of winning. Getting past obstacles such as four-time champions Jeff King, Doug Swingley and Martin Buser is never easy. But Mackey believed, he just knew he had it, even if few others did.
He told me in May that he had three goals: Move to a dream house, buy a Harley Davidson motorcycle and win the Iditarod. He promptly achieved the first two, moving from a rented trailer house in Kasilof, Alaska, to a hilltop cabin in Fox, near Fairbanks, and buying a Sportster motorcycle.
The third goal was a mountain. He would train up his main dogs to compete in the Iditarod, piloting a younger team in the Yukon Quest.
Even Mackey’s plans changed, however, when the Yukon Quest announced a higher purse this year. First place would be $40,000 instead of $30,000. Mackey scrapped plans to run his 2-year-old dogs in the Quest and his main team in the Iditarod. Instead, he split his main string of dogs in two, and entered the Quest with a powerful team.
As luck, fate or chance would have it, Mackey blew the competition away by the time the Quest was halfway done. And that one factor set him up for his victory in the Iditarod. Instead of asking the most out of his dogs on the second half of the Quest, he eased off and turned it into a very long training run. His dogs were made stronger by the experience.
He poured that team into his Iditarod starting lineup, and the rest is history.
Give Mackey immense credit for being able to adjust his plans and respond to ever-changing situations. He could have doggedly stuck to his original plan, but the result probably would have fallen short of the dream.
It took a mixture of smarts and some luck, or, as the 2006 champion Jeff King noted late in this year’s race, “It’s not chance, it’s Lance.” Even King began rooting for his wildly enthusiastic competitor by the time the race hit the coast.
Mackey’s Iditarod timeline
Before the Iditarod began, Mackey said while packing his sled for the ceremonial start in Anchorage that he would win by catching the front-runners from behind. And that is precisely what he did.
Mackey started the 2007 Iditarod at a blistering pace, camping minimally on the way to Finger Lake, where he finally took a five-hour break. The high-energy musher didn’t sleep, though; he was too excited. From there, he launched up and over the Alaska Range in one shot, parking the team once more at Rohn for six and a half hours. He cruised over the bumpy Farewell Burn without stopping, arriving first to Nikolai. Finally, Mackey got a three-hour nap; his dogs slept more than seven hours.
Mackey then drove through McGrath and took a five-hour stop at Takotna before blowing through Ophir on the way to his 24-hour layover at Iditarod. He camped on the trail on the way to Iditarod for five or six hours.
His choice of 24-hour layover didn’t win Mackey the race, but it sure didn’t hurt. The trail was brutally tough and demoralizing for the dogs on the way to Iditarod. His rested team could unwind on much better trail down to Shageluk and over to Anvik, where he parked for his mandatory eight-hour break on the Yukon. He then chased Martin Buser and Jeff King through Grayling and up to Eagle Island.
There, he chastised the race leaders – King and Buser – for cutting rest on the Yukon to build a lead despite strong head winds and temperatures well below zero. It would tire out their leaders, he predicted. Whatever the cause, their leaders did slow down. Mackey’s did not; Paul Gebhardt, too, maintained a freight train of a team through the second half of the race.
They caught up to King and Buser at Unalakleet, which is where Mackey shot forward with consistently faster run times, and a happy, bubbly dog team that impressed everyone who saw them bark, lunge, wag their tails and wriggle in the snow as Mackey pulled up. It was classic Mackey. He has had the same type of performance from his dogs for the past three years, but in 2007, he and his dedicated athletes took it to the highest possible level.
They won the biggest race in distance dog mushing, the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.