With final surge, Steer nails down 3rd place
Published: March 14, 2007
Last Modified: March 14, 2007 at 06:23 PM
Hard-charging Zach Steer passed four-time champion Martin Buser just outside of Safety, the final checkpoint 22 miles from Nome, and cruised to the finish line before dawn Wednesday to finish third in the 35th Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Steer, the 33-year-old owner of Sheep Mountain Lodge, crossed the finish line on Front Street at 3:46 a.m., completing a run of 9 days, 12 hours and 46 minutes. Buser finished 26 minutes later in fourth place. Those 19 minutes were worth $7,000 to Steer, who will take home $57,000 for third place. Buser earns $50,000 for fourth. Defending champion Jeff King of Denali Park finished fifth at 6:05 this morning. His time of 9 days, 15 hours and 5 minutes was just off his winning time of 9 days, 11 hours and 12 minutes last year. Late Tuesday night, Paul Gebhardt arrived in Nome at 10:28 p.m. to finish second, two hours and 19 minutes behind champion Lance Mackey of Fairbanks, who made history by becoming the first musher to win both the Iditarod and the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race the same year. A sled repair that Gebhardt had to make in Shaktoolik, 170 miles from Nome, may have cost him the race. The repair took more than three hours, and the 50-year-old could never close the gap on Mackey. Both he and Mackey had similar run times down the Bering Sea Coast after the pair surged ahead of the fading teams of early leaders Buser and King. Steer is a new name in the Iditarod top 10. His previous best Iditarod finish was 14th in 2000. He began mushing in 1997 and has completed both the Iditarod and the Yukon Quest, where he finished second in 2004. Mackey, meanwhile, was celebrating his accomplishment in Nome -- while admitting he may not try to win both races in the same year again.
"Yeah, I'd love to come back and repeat that performance, but I'm really realistic here. Once in a lifetime is probably a rare opportunity," he said while one of his dogs licked frost off his goatee.
He acknowledged that his dogs were a one-of-a-kind team -- and that next year they will be older.
"I owe it to them. I think I'm smart enough to know when enough is enough, to back off a little bit. They're in their prime, they proved that. So I think it's time for a little R&R," he said.
But Tuesday night, the down-to-earth musher planned a little whiskey for his own rest and relaxation and to celebrate the feat with his family. Both his father, Dick, and half brother, Rick, are past Iditarod champions.
"This is a damn dream that I've been living, you know, dreaming about since I was a little, little boy when my Dad won this race," said Lance Mackey, 36.
Gebhardt, 50, was third last year.
"He is a very driven dog driver," Gebhardt said of Mackey. "You got to admit, he's like the Dale Earnhardt of dog racing."
About a thousand fans braved subzero temperature to cheer Mackey to the finish. He lived the moment, slapping high-fives with fans as his dogs led him down the last block, sometimes jumping off the sled and running with them until his family mobbed him at the end.
"Dreams do come true, Mama, they do," Mackey said, fighting back tears.
"This is my passion," he said, adding he was proud to follow in his father's footsteps and joked about being thankful his father was a musher and not a lawyer.
"It's our lifestyle, it's something we breathe, eat and sleep," he said of the Mackey family's love of mushing. "This is what we do."
On Feb. 20, Mackey won his third consecutive Yukon Quest, starting in Whitehorse, Yukon and finishing in Fairbanks.
With only 10 days rest, Mackey took most of his 16 dogs from the Yukon Quest to Willow for the start of the Iditarod. In the two races, the dog team covered a distance equivalent to mushing from Boston to Salt Lake City.
Mackey's father, Dick, and brother, Rick, both won the race wearing bib No. 13, and each did so in the sixth time they ran the Iditarod. Lance Mackey camped out for days at the Iditarod headquarters last June to be the first person to sign up for this year's race, enabling him to select the No. 13 bib.
"I didn't know exactly what this bib was going to do for me, but what an honor," said Mackey. "This is the most cherished piece of memorabilia I'll ever own."
Many mushers have long believed it would not be possible to win both races in the same year with the same dogs because the animals would need more time to recover from one grueling race before starting another. But Mackey said he wasn't pushed much in the Yukon Quest, and it served as a good mental and physical training run for the dogs.
"I kept saying I want to be the one to prove that wrong. For those who don't believe it can be done, I thrive on underestimation. Don't ever doubt that I can't do something. I lived through cancer," he said. Mackey was diagnosed with neck cancer in 2001 and underwent surgery and radiation. He had the cancerous tumor removed from his neck and is now considered cancer free.
Canadian Hans Gatt, 49, a three-time Quest winner who was also runner-up to Mackey twice in that race, said Mackey's team was the best-looking on the Iditarod trail this year. Instead of tiring, his team recovered faster than any of the others, and maintained their speed.
"I can't run my dogs like that," Gatt said Tuesday, almost 100 miles back on the trail. "He obviously has figured out something we have not figured out yet."
Sled dog racing is a sport where mushers perform more for glory than big-time payouts, having to rely heavily on sponsorships to continue feeding their dogs.
For winning the world's longest sled-dog race, Mackey will pocket $69,000 and be handed the keys to a $41,000 pickup.
Mackey had been thinking about that truck along the trail and for good reason. One year, when he was trying to get to the start of the Quest, he was fined $500 for missing a meeting for mushers. The reason he was late was that the two trucks he was driving broke down. One lost an engine and the transmission went out in the other.
Just before this year's race, he splurged on a used, 14-year-old pickup.
Thrusting both arms high in the air, he yelled out an elongated, "Yeah! Oh, the truck!"
More
Ekran is Iditarod rookie of the year
Brooks disqualified from Iditarod
Iditarod dog death under investigation
Mackey makes history with Iditarod win
‹ With final surge, Steer nails down 3rd place
‹ Gebhardt chases Mackey to Nome; four rest in White Mountain
