We Americans sure love our sports. Three weeks back, 123 million of us gathered to watch Taylor Swift’s boyfriend’s team play Football before and after the Usher concert and in between the Olympics of advertising. This Friday, we will be putting money on which colleges will play the YMCA-invented game the best. And I, alongside 575 others, are getting our Fantasy Mushing picks ready for the Iditarod.

Yes, I was as shocked as you are to learn that this is a real thing. I first learned of this a year ago when a friend posted on Facebook that he was going to open his yearly fantasy mushing pack again and I promptly joined in (after looking up what mushing is). When I got the text that the pack was open for the 2024 Iditarod, I immediately opened the website and got to picking my mushers.

What is mushing?

For those who don’t know, mushing is the competitive sport of dogsled racing. Similar to horse riding and archery, it used to be a primarily utilitarian activity. Dogsleds were used to travel and hunt in the brutal Arctic conditions. The earliest example of dogsleds comes from an archaeological site on Zhokhov Island. Zhokhov is a miniscule island (30 square miles in area) in the East Siberian Sea that, aside from an appearance in Dr. Strangelove, is only notable for containing the remnants of an ancient sled and a few dog bones. Dating back to 7000 BCE, this dog is an ancient ancestor of the modern arctic dogs and has allowed us to track human migration from Siberia to the American Arctic!

I cannot find reliable evidence for when or how European settlers started using sled dogs, but it seems that the practice was adopted by French explorers and agents of resource extraction during the Fur Trade to traverse quickly across the Canadian Shield. Whether this knowledge was learned peaceably or was stolen and appropriated from the indigenous populations, the sources I have found do not say. Regardless, it is from the French that we get the etymology for the word “mushing.” In order to command the teams to start moving, the French would say, “Marche!” This was bastardized into “Mush” by the English settlers and is now the name of the sport. Interestingly, mushers now use a variety of terms to command their teams to start.

Erasure of indigenous mushing practices

Before I continue about the Iditarod, I want to make explicit that mushing is a practice developed by the indigenous populations of the Arctic and an important facet of their lives and culture. Like many indigenous traditions, there was an attempt to stomp it out by the colonizers. In 1955, the Canadian government compelled the Inuit from Northern Quebec to move to Cornwallis Island to secure Canada’s claim to the island. When they arrived in the town of Resolute, promises were once again broken. 

“They were promised so much and when they got here, they were living in canvas tents over the winter. Then, the RCMP killed all of the sled dogs. It’s a very dark history how Resolute became. But in the last about ten years maybe they’ve had like a revival of the sled dogs.”

Mavis Manik, “Sled Dogs: The Most Extreme Distance Athletes on Earth” PBS Footprint

The Mounties did this so that the Inuit were forced to remain in the town. With this ancient partnership severed, the culture and prosperity of the relocated Inuit eroded. The Inuit Sled Dog returned to the island in the early 2010s and Inuit hunters began to use them again. One hunter, Devon Malik, learned how to mush in part by watching YouTube videos of mushers in Greenland.

The Iditarod: The Great Mushing Race

While the airplane eliminated much of the need for sled dogs for transporting mail and freight, they still were used for short and medium-distance freight transportation. They remained important for hunting and traveling for both the indigenous populations and the colonists of Northern Canada and the Alaskan Territory long after the airplane’s cold-weather reliability increased.

Throughout the Arctic, this importance remained up until the 1960s, when the snowmobile replaced the sled dog for most of their remaining uses. The sled dog may have died out if not for the work of Dorothy Page and Joe Redington, Sr, who saw the centennial celebration of the Alaskan Purchase in 1967 as an opportunity. They organized a 56-mile race near Anchorage in 1967, but interest quickly died out. After all, the main attraction was that it celebrated the centennial.

Still, Redington and Page did not lose interest in preserving the sled dog. Redington was deeply interested in preserving the historic Iditarod Trail. During the Alaskan Gold Rush, it was this trail that prospectors took to get from Anchorage to Nome. After the gold dried up, it became an important mail route. And, in 1925, it was the site of an amazing feat of human collaboration.

The 1925 Serum Run

The problem was simple: there was an outbreak of diphtheria in Nome, Alaska. While this would not have been a problem if the local hospital had antitoxin, Nome’s supply had expired and the requested shipment was unable to arrive before the town’s port froze over. In a perfect world, everything would have been fine, but this is not a perfect world. Cases started manifesting in the population and the town sent a Hail Mary via telegram. If 1 million doses were not delivered soon, the population surrounding Nome would face a 100% mortality rate from the epidemic.

The new airplane would have been the saving grace of Nome, but it was novel technology, and test flights in Alaska were only able to cover half the distance required to travel from Nenana, the site of the nearest railroad to Nome. Still, a dogsled relay was not a surety either. Normally, it would take mushers roughly 30 days to travel from Nenana to Nome, and this was no normal winter either, with temperatures at 20-year lows. As if that wasn’t enough, Nome’s only doctor estimated that the serum would only last about 6 days under the trail’s conditions.

Both options were risky and there was no guarantee it would work. Alaska’s only planes were water-cooled biplanes from the Great War and the trail was treacherous without the record-low temperatures Alaska was currently experiencing. Still, the Alaskan Territorial Board of Health voted unanimously for the relay and preparations were underway.

The Mushing Relay

1.1 million vials were procured from Seattle by the US Public Health Service and would take about a week to arrive in Nenana. Soon thereafter, 300,000 units were discovered in Anchorage by the end of January 1925. These vials were immediately wrapped and secured to prevent freezing and were shipped via rail to Nenana on the orders of Governor Scott Bone. At about 11 PM on January 27, 1925, “Wild Bill” Shannon received the serum from the conductor and immediately set out on the trail to Nome.

The rest of the original relay was fraught with danger and extraordinary bravery. 20 mushers and their teams of dogs braved conditions that I can hardly fathom. Temperatures were as low as -70 F and the mushers risked their lives and the lives of their dogs for what, by all means, should have been impossible. Many of these mushers were indigenous Alaskan Athabascans and, without their contributions, this relay would not have been successful.

I highly recommend reading the article linked above, which goes into far more detail about the mushers and their struggles than I can devote here. Each of the 20 mushers has a story, some better documented than others, that highlights the indefatigable human spirit.

Arrival in Nome

At 5:30 AM on February 1, 1925, after 53 miles of mushing, Gunnar Kaasen arrived in Nome, blinded by the snow and utterly exhausted. This was the moment of truth for the people of Nome. The trail to Nome was rough and cold, but, because of the care of the mushers and their dogs, not a single vial was broken, and the serum was still viable. Around two weeks later, the vials from Seattle arrived in Nome: half via plane and half via dogsled.

The twenty mushers were awarded gold medals by the United States government and $25 (about $448.28 in today’s money) for their bravery.

Today

Today, the Iditarod is a 1000-mile race from Anchorage to Nome. In even years, the route covers 430 miles of the 1925 serum run and 261 miles in odd years. While it is decried by animal rights advocates as abusive to the dogs, the Iditarod Trail Committee insists that the dogs are well-treated and are bred for the event. Mushers are required to submit their dogs to veterinary care before, during, and after the race and Veterinarians check on the dogs’ wellbeing throughout the race at the various checkpoints. Due to the work of animal rights activists, major companies, such as Exxon, Alaska Airlines, and Jack Daniels’ have withdrawn their sponsorship of the event.

Fantasy Mushing

Fantasy mushing was started in 2013 when Danny Seavey, whose brother Dallas Seavey is a favorite to win this year’s race, developed the game in Google Spreadsheets. Four years later, he partnered with a computer programmer from Texas to build fantasymushing.com and the website has been up ever since.

Interestingly, the website is not set up for gambling like in other fantasy sports. Instead, the site is a way to track the stats and updates of the race and was designed to encourage people to learn more about this niche sport. In an interview with Anchorage Press, David Hunt, the site’s programmer, stated that many schools use the site as a way to educate their students about the Iditarod and that his interest in the sport only exists because of a unit his fourth-grade teacher did.

How to Play Fantasy Mushing

To participate, after signing up for an account, users can join one of many “packs.” Think of these as leagues in other fantasy sports, where a group of friends, coworkers, or other like-minded individuals join to compete against each other. While packs are free to institute their own cash prizes, the website cannot facilitate that exchange and has to be organized differently.

Each user is given 27,000 gold to draft 7 mushers, who are priced based on their expected performance in the race. This is determined by Seavey, who sets the prices between 1000 and 6000 by using past performance in this and other races. Once the race begins, mushers are assigned points based on their position, run time, number of dogs still in the race, and bonus points for the various awards the ITC gives out.

The pack I am a part of is called “Most of us have no idea what we are doing….” and, for me, that is true. I don’t understand why position and run-time are different. I picked my players in large part based on how trustworthy they look, if their profile passed the vibe check, and how much it would cost to have them on my team.

What makes this fun for me is that it is another opportunity to learn something new. Before getting involved in Fantasy Mushing and writing this article, I had no clue that the Iditarod is still a thing that happens. I knew vaguely of the history of the 1925 serum run because my childhood dog was a Husky that we named Balto after we saw the movie of the same name, but I didn’t realize that the namesake Balto was not as important to the run as Togo. And, of course, I did not know just how essential the indigenous population of Alaska was to its success.

The Iditarod officially starts on Saturday, March 2 at 10 AM AST.

Thank you for reading my blog! If you want to join us, reach out via Contact and I will send you the code to join “Most of us have no idea what we are doing….” Leave a comment below to let me know your thoughts and subscribe if you want to be notified of new posts. If you’re new here, check out About or this article next!