As Jeff King moved toward the finish of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race race Monday, the only thing standing between the four-time champion and a record-tying fifth win was the brutality of Mother Nature.
He left the White Mountain checkpoint less than 100 miles from the end, confident of victory, and then disaster struck.
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The writer somehow manages not to state the obvious, that being that the rest of the teams, running on the same trail, somehow managed to keep going and win the race.
ReplyDeleteI think he would have us envision that the others were racing in totally different conditions.
I didn't see it mentioned, but were there other teams who left the last checkpoint at the same time he did?
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ReplyDeleteProbably not but they all had to get to the same finish line first on the same trail.
If I read it right one team was ahead of him and resting at the way stop when he walked/rode there and the other team was coming up from behind as that team left the way stop. I'm not saying he didn't have a rough go but that is the nature of that kind of event. I used to race sailboats. The whole fleet was on the same race course but while one team was getting a nice breeze another might be dead still in the water and yet another might be getting too much wind dead on the nose. So what? They still gave the trophy to the boat that crossed the finish line first. The story written up for the paper or whatever did not focus on the trials and travails of the boat that was disqualified or had a sail blown out.
Of course that was 30 years ago. Now when I turn on the race if Jeff Gordon is running 33rd the camera is on him and the discussion is about him. The same with golf, it's all about Tiger Woods no matter how he is playing or what others are doing.
I don't know why I expected it to be different in the Iditarod.
Back in my sailboat racing years there was a race in the north Atlantic for a bunch of offshore race boats from several countries. Just as the race started a bad storm blew up. All of the boats abandoned the race and battened down their hatches. All of them were swallowed up in the storm as it built in from behind them. All except the American fleet that is. They saw the wind as an opportunity. They rigged their sales for high wind and rode away on the front edge of the storm leading the others behind.
When the race was over the US boats were safe in port, drinking in a pub and celebrating while there was a recue effort going on for some of the others in the fleet.
The fact remains that the guy who is the subject of this story chickened out and quit.
Maybe for good reason and I might have done the same but I wouldn't want a story written about my courageous retreat.
He certainty has enough laurels anyway.
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