Dallas Seavey made history at 5:16 p.m. on Tuesday, running under the burled arch at Nome to claim his sixth championship in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
For Seavey it had been a year and a race full of challenges, including an encounter with a moose on the trail that he shot in defense of his dog team and himself.
“This one was supposed to be hard,” said Seavey, 37, after crossing the finish line. “It had to be special, it had to be more than just a normal Iditarod. And for me, it was.”
In 2012, at the age of 25, Seavey became the youngest musher to ever win the race.
His winnings this year were just over $55,000. That plus the prize money for championships in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2021, and other awards earned along the trail, have given him a grand total of $820,962.
As four-time Iditarod champion Martin Buser of Big Lake famously said, “it’s not what you do during the Iditarod. It’s what you do the other 50 weeks of the year.”
For Seavey the troubles mounted back on Nov. 24, 2023, when a team from his kennel in a training run on the Denali Highway collided with a snow machine. Two dogs died and seven others were injured. The musher driving the Seavey team suffered bruises and a cut but was not seriously injured.
Then on the relatively short run during the ceremonial start of the race in Anchorage, Seavey had to stop on the trail blocked by a moose.
Running beside his team up to the burled arch, Seavey looked to be bursting with energy. He praised his dogs as “super incredible individuals” with a lot of heart who worked as a team all the way down the trail.
Seavey is a third generation Iditarod musher. His grandfather, Dan Seavey of Seward, ran in the first Iditarod in 1973, a race he helped Joe Redington Sr. to organize. Dan Seavey ran his last Iditarod in 2012 at the age of 74, along with son Mitch Seavey, a three-time Iditarod champion, and grandson Dallas.
Asked when he might run again, he said “when I run out of grandchildren.”
Iditarod 2024 began with 38 mushers, but as of Tuesday seven had scratched, including three mushers who experienced the death of one of their team dogs during the race. Necropsies on all three dogs failed to determine cause of death, and further testing was to be conducted, according to the Iditarod Trail Committee. All dogs competing in the race undergo an extensive examination before being allowed to compete. Those deaths prompted People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which opposes the race as a cruelty to the dogs, to again call for an end to the Iditarod.
