Ryan Redington on Tuesday won the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, bringing his six dogs off the Bering Sea ice to the finish line on the main street of Nome, Alaska.
Redington, 40, is the grandson of Joe Redington Sr, who helped cofound the arduous race across Alaska that was first held in 1973, and is known as the “Father of the Iditarod.”
“My grandpa, dad and Uncle Joe are all in the [Musher’s] Hall of Fame. I got big footsteps to follow,” Ryan Redington wrote in his race biography.
Photo: AP
He previously won the Junior Iditarod in 1999 and 2000. His father, Raymie, is a 10-time Iditarod finisher.
Ryan Redington, who is Inupiat, is the sixth Alaskan native musher to win the world’s most famous sled dog race.
After crossing the finish in Nome at about 12:15pm, he said it has been a goal of his since he was “a very small child to win the Iditarod, and I can’t believe it. It finally happened.”
“It took a lot work, took a lot of patience, and we failed quite a few times, you know? But we kept our head up high and stuck with the dream,” he said.
Ryan Redington won the Iditarod on his 16th try. He was scratched from seven of those races, but his performance this decade was the best of his career. He finished ninth last year, seventh in 2021 and eighth in 2020 — his only other top-10 finishes before this year’s race.
The nearly 1,609km race started on March 5 in Willow for 33 mushers, who traveled over two mountain ranges, the frozen Yukon River and on the Bering Sea ice. Since then, three mushers have been scratched. A fan-friendly ceremonial start was held in Anchorage the day before.
It was the smallest field ever to start a race, one short of the first race run.
Among those who were scratched was defending champion Brent Sass, who was leading when he withdrew on Saturday.
Sass said he had been sick the entire race with a bad cold.
Then on Friday “some cracked teeth started giving me issues and over a 12-hour period turned into nearly unbearable pain,” he said. “My body basically shut down... Ultimately I couldn’t care for the dogs.”
Ryan Redington is to earn about US$50,000 for winning. The exact amount is only to be calculated when the total number of finishers is known to split the prize purse.
He won the race in 8 days, 21 hours, 12 minutes and 58 seconds. Pete Kaiser finished second, more than an hour behind Ryan Redington, while Richie Diehl was third, finishing about an hour behind Kaiser.
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