It’s 1978. Two windburned mushers paused on the Iditarod Trail just outside Nome, their beards crusted with ice, their bodies aching from 1,000 miles of trail. Both had reputations as tough mushers, ruthlessly competitive men capable of seizing any advantage. As they squinted through the predawn darkness, mutual distrust hung between them as thick as the blowing snow.

One was Rick Swenson, who would go on to win the race five times, still unmatched to this day. The other was wily Dick Mackey, one of the race’s founding fathers.

As he urged his dogs forward, Swenson shouted back at Mackey: “We’ve got first and second sewn up. Just stay right where you are!”

Mackey thought to himself: “Like hell.”

Another Mackey has made history. In a feat most considered impossible to achieve and foolhardy to try, Lance Mackey just drove a team of dogs to the championship of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race only 12 days after the same animals won the Yukon Quest.


The third Mackey to win the Iditarod, Lance and his dogs ran two 1,000-mile races back to back, emerging with dogs in good shape. His finish with nine dogs was nine days, five hours, eight minutes and 41 seconds — completing the Willow-to-Nome trek with an average speed of 5.07 miles per hour.

But there’s a twist. A bit of Iditarod lore we’ll all remember when we’re creaky in the knees and boring the grandkids with old stories. For Lance Mackey wore Bib No. 13 — the same number worn by his father, Dick Mackey, when he beat Rick Swenson by one second in 1978. It’s also the same number worn by Rick Mackey, Lance’s brother, when he won the race in 1983.

The tale of the Iditarod’s only “photo finish” is worth repeating.

Here’s a story I wrote about Dick Mackey’s 1978 one-second victory, until now considered the greatest Iditarod finish of all time. It was originally published in 1989 in We Alaskans, the former Sunday magazine of the Anchorage Daily News.

Just hours before the end of the 1978 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race from Anchorage to Nome, Dick Mackey was following Rick Swenson on the trail east of Nome. After a two-week game of cat and mouse with a small group of frontrunners, the race for the championship had been distilled to a contest of two.

The next closest contender was Emmitt Peters, the Yukon Fox, but he’d been halted for an hour at Solomon as punishment for accepting a pail of hot water for his dogs. Other frontrunners Joe Redington Sr., Ken Chase, and the brothers Eep and Babe Anderson were pinned down by gale winds that had suddenly pounded the trail between Solomon and White Mountain.

Fearing a lastgasp surge by Peters, Mackey and Swenson kept their breaks small and quick — nine minutes at Solomon, the last checkpoint, and 45 minutes at Hastings, where they drank a cup of hot chocolate. As they remounted their sleds for the final push into Nome, Swenson turned and looked at Mackey.

It was a moment that belonged on a poster. The two windburned mushers pausing, their beards crusted with ice, their bodies aching from 1,000 miles of trail. Both had reputations as tough mushers, ruthlessly competitive men capable of seizing any advantage. As they squinted through the predawn darkness, mutual distrust hung between them as thick as the blowing snow.

And then, as he urged his dogs forward, Swenson shouted back at Mackey: “We’ve got first and second sewn up. Just stay right where you are!”

Mackey thought to himself: “Like hell.”

This was the sixth Iditarod, when the race was still labeled “impossible” and dominated by Bush mushers and lean village-bred dogs. Five-time winner Swenson had only won once, and Susan Butcher, who went on to win four times and become the race’s most famous musher, was running as a rookie and had been officially proclaimed the “Iditarod Trail Queen.” No one had ever reached Nome in less than 14 days.

To say that Mackey was determined to win hardly expresses what he felt as he urged his dogs after Swenson for the final push to Nome.

“You have to be willing to sacrifice,” he says. “To win the Iditarod, you have to be willing to push until you drop dead.”

For Mackey, then 46, the Iditarod had come to dominate his life. Yet he had an unlikely background for a musher. Born the only son to a Concord, New Hampshire banker in 1932, Mackey was bred not for dog mushing, but for business.

His father, Eno, was an exacting, strict man. He and Mackey’s mother, Shirley, never argued in front of the boy, never smoke or drank. He was conservative in business. As Mackey would later recall, “if you could cover a 10-cent loan with a dollar, he’d consider it.”

But Mackey’s father was also an outdoorsman and an athlete. He was the state president of the Appalachian Mountain Club, and took his son on frequent camping trips to the White Mountains. He could outwrestle the boy, and even threw the 16-year-old Mackey during an impromtu match at a family reunion.

The father had hoped Dick would become a banker, too. But from the beginning, Mackey’s interests strayed. He learned to be a teletype operator, serving as a Western Union operator during the Korean War. With his father’s backing, he started what became a successful business trucking chickens to butchers and ran it for four years. But he always had a desire to visit or move to Alaska.

“It just held some kind of a magic spell for me,” he says.

When Mackey’s main client transferred to another state in 1958, his trucking business fell off. He decided it was time for a change. After a visit to Alaska, he decided to shut down the New Hampshire firm and transfer to Alaska. His father could not comprehend the move.

“What for?” Mackey recalls him asking. “You’ve already seen it once.”

In 1959, the year Alaska became a state, Mackey moved to Anchorage, arriving in Mountain View with $14, his family — wife Joan, sons Rick and Bill, daughter Becky and the last truck from his fleet. Within a day, he had a job.

Throughout the 1960s, Mackey worked for the Alaska Railroad and as an ironworker. He also started a dog kennel, breeding black labradors into his huskies and developing a strain of dogs that he began entering in local races. People remember him as a driven man, demanding and strict, according to son Bill.

Late in the decade, Dick and Joan got divorced. Mackey remarried this time to a pilot and sleddog racing enthusiast. Dick and Kathie eventually had two sons, Lance and Jason. Both husband and wife became increasingly active in dog mushing and began entering races.

Mackey’s father never came to visit his son in Alaska. There seemed to be a lingering tension between the two. Dick says he always felt guilty about moving. After his dad suffered two heart attacks in the early ’70s, he returned for a visit.

It was a hard parting, Mackey recalls, because he knew he’d never see his father alive again. But then Eno told him: “You know, I’ve always envied you going to Alaska.”

For Dick, it seemed to make everything all right.

As he and 36 other competitors left Anchorage the morning of the first-ever Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in 1973, Mackey’s father died. His mother requested that Dick not be told about his father’s passing until after he finished the race.

He finished the race in seventh place out of 22 mushers.

For the next five Iditarods, Mackey continued to run with the leaders, always placing in the top ten. He’d become a full veteran. By 1978 only Mackey and Anvik musher Ken Chase had run in every race.

Then came ‘78. The race had begun at a near-record pace, led by a small group that included Swenson and Mackey. The two men shadowed each other for the last 600 miles. Usually Swenson had the edge. Mackey believed his team was just as fast but took longer to get moving.

“Over a quarter of a mile, I can build up speed and climb right into his sled,” he told reporters at the time. “It just takes me a while to get there.”

Still, by the time they reached the coast, Swenson’s team consistently held an edge over Mackey’s.

“I can’t catch Rick unless he makes a mistake,” Mackey told reporters in Unalakleet.

In the end, the only mistake Swenson made was in assuming that Mackey would “stay right there,” running 10 yards behind all the way to the finish line.

By the time the two men reached the streets of Nome, they were virtually running side by side. Swenson led by half of a dog team.

Despite the bitter cold 9 below in a gusting wind, more than 1,000 people had been rousted out of bed at six in the morning by news of a close finish. They jammed the streets, shouting, surging, narrowing the passage taken by the two staggering men and their panting dogs.

At first Swenson held the lead. They both cracked their whips. The teams surged forward. Then Swenson cracked his whip again, accidently startling Mackey’s leaders, Skipper and Shrew, and they veered onto the sidewalk. Within moments, Swenson, too, was snarled in the crowd.

Mackey disengaged his team and pulled ahead. Swenson began moving too. One hundred yards out, they were even. By the time they entered the 50yard chute, Mackey had a slight edge. Both men were running.

Then Mackey’s dogs trotted under the burled arch, the finish line. The leaders ran under the legs of the camera tripod of a German television crew. Their harness tangled. His sled stopped just short of the finish line. Mackey collapsed.

Swenson, his leaders just yards behind Mackey’s leaders, kept going and dragged his sled under the finish line. Though his leaders crossed second, Swenson himself crossed under the arch ahead of Mackey.

Bedlam erupted.

Rick Mackey, who had run the race the year before and would go on to win in 1983, shouted at his father: “They say it’s the sled! They say it’s the sled! You didn’t win! You’ve got to get up!”

“It’s the leaders,” Mackey gasped. “It’s the leaders.”

For a few moments, no one knew who won the race. Then Mackey was declared the winner by Race Marshal Myron Gaven, who Mackey recalls saying:

“They don’t take a photo of the horse’s ass, do they?”

© 1989 Anchorage Daily News