The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, the most famous sled dog race, it was won Tuesday by Ryan Redington, the 40-year-old nephew of Joe Redington Sr., who helped organize the first edition in 1973. To win the Iditarod, a controversial race that has recently had to contend with problems and crises of various kinds, Redington arrived in Nome, a small Alaskan town overlooking the Bering Sea, eight days and 21 hours after starting from Willow, which is over 1,600 kilometers away.
Nome on March 14 (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News via AP)
With Redington finishing in Nome there were six dogs, one more than the minimum number by which it was required that i musher (the sled drivers, all starting with 12, 13 or 14 dogs) arrived in Nome. There are fewer dogs on arrival than on departure because, both for problems of various kinds and for strategy, i musher they can decide to leave them in special checkpoints and then find them on arrival, brought by the organization.
Joe Redington, died in 1999, it’s known still today as the “father of the Iditarod” because he was the person who most supported the idea, proposed by an external committee, to organize a dog sled race along the Iditarod Trail, a route that takes its name from a river, which in turn gave its name to a small “city of gold”. For Redington, the Iditarod was a way to preserve the relevance of sled dogs, which was fading after the arrival of snowmobiles and snowcats, and to reclaim the route to Nome, which in 1925 had been used to carry a dog sled relay the medicines to counter an epidemic of diphtheria.
Redington ran the Iditarod nineteen times, never winning; his son, the father of this year’s winner, ran it twelve times, but he never finished first either. Members of the Redington family participated a total of over seventy editions without ever being able to win.
Ryan Redington, who is 40 years old, he succeeded at the fifteenth attempt, after having won the Junior Iditarod in 1999 and 2000, the reduced version (but still about 250 kilometers long) of the Iditarod for musher between 14 and 17 years old. Upon arriving in Nome, Redington said winning the Iditarod was “a goal from childhood.”
(Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News via AP)
Redington, who is an Inupiat Eskimo, is the sixth Alaska Native to win the Iditarod. In second and third place of this edition, both more than an hour behind Redington, came another two musher Alaska natives. It had never happened before that three natives landed in the top three positions: it is a great reason to be proud for state papers, but also a sign that the Iditarod, which has never had so few attendees as this year, has likely lost prominence overseas while it continues to be prominent in Alaska, where it is described as a sort of Super Bowl.
This year’s edition, which took place at over -30 °C, in the first few days was conversely marked by temperatures much higher than average. However, the climate crisis is not the only one the Iditarod is dealing with.
