Hindsight is 2020
A, Retired Dog-Musher, Mobile, AL
For the most part for the last 20/25 years our lives are kind of different from most people as we don’t see a lot of people anyway. Except for the dog-mushing aspect of it, we have a lot of dogs and we spend a lot of time outside with the dogs and on trails and all that. The other side of the coin was sponsorship so going to Exon Mobile and talking to people and that kind of thing. So suddenly our big sponsors were like, ohhh we can’t do that, 3 days before an Iditarod event when you fly down and show up at 8pm and you talk to all these people and smile and that kind of thing. They were like hey we’re going to do this virtually or hey we’re not doing this at all but hey—we’ll still pay you! So that worked to our favor. The other thing that happened with one of the big races, with the Iditarod, which is a 1000 mile race, is that in order to make it a fan-friendly race, where people can meet the dogs and the mushers and see the sleds, there’s a whole day before the race starts where you bring your team and you set up in downtown Anchorage which is population 500,000, there among the skyscrapers and everything and you mingle for hours and hours with, I don’t know, 50,000 people? It’s like the Superbowl but everyone’s right next to you! So that was cancelled. And we were like—good…?—because as much as it’s a benefit, really all you want to think about is the race. For 20 years we paid our dues of being good to our fans and spectators so I don’t feel bad for missing that and also we could have caught COVID at the event two days before the race!
COVID pretty much started when the race started. The race starts in March and goes on for 10 days so I didn’t know anything of what was going on so when I heard that my family might not be at the finish-line and I was like what?! I even get the chills now and I was like—what do you mean my family is not going to meet me at the finish line?! Well, they said, the town of Nome, which is a town of about 3000 people, asked that people not come there and I was like why in the world would they do that?! And then we started hearing that the basket-ball was cancelled and this and that was cancelled and we’re out in the middle of nowhere and we’re so confused! I call Al on the satellite phone and I’m trying to win the race so he doesn’t want to say things like well, the world’s falling apart….And then I heard that a good friend of ours, who is kind of our manager of our kennel/website person, who usually flies out from New Zealand was not going to be there and that she was on a flight to the US and upon hearing that the NZ government said that if you aren’t going back to NZ now, you ain’t coming home so she turned around and flew back!
For me, at the time, my first thoughts were really? Aren’t they over-doing this whole thing? But then I realized that it was real and it was serious.