The Most Unlikely Sled Dogs

by Amy Fernandez

Although competitive mushing has been a big deal in Alaska since the 1840s gold rush days, its popularity didn’t really trickle down to the lower 48 until the ??????1980s. Mainly, that was because of some very weird stuff going down at the sport’s premier event, the Iditarod. Mushing fans were shocked when Libby Riddles became the first woman to win this grueling 1157 mile trek in 1985.

The legendary Susan Butcher won the following year and repeated her victory in 1987, setting a new record in the process.

The world was definitely watching when Butcher came looking for her third win. That wasn’t the only interesting development that made Iditarod 1988 a singular episode in sports history. Among other things, it inspired that memorable slogan “Alaska, where women win the Iditarod and men mush Poodles”.

That was the other big news of the event that year, the debut of John Suter’s dream team of mushing Poodles. That year his team actually consisted of six Huskies and three Poodles, Umiat, Ulu, and Toto. A mile before the finish line on Front Street, Suter switched Umiat to lead dog just to make sure everyone caught the fact that a big black Standard Poodle was pulling his team. It really wasn’t necessary.

They didn’t win, but they weren’t last either, finishing in 18 days, 1 hour, 50 minutes to place 38th out of 52 starters. The important thing was that they finished and that’s never a guarantee, because as we know, the Iditarod is not merely a race. Often called “The Last Great Race on Earth” it qualifies as an extreme sport. The basic challenge of running 1157 miles over three mountain ranges is typically spiced up with sub-zero cold, blizzards, white-outs, random moose attacks, and for the first time this year, drunken kamikaze jerks on snowmobiles. Simply finishing counts as a major achievement – and that’s with a real sled dog team. Complicating this ordeal by running Poodles is simply insane.

A subsequent Washington Post editorial commended Suter “for elevating the image of dogs that don’t choose to be trimmed to look like ornamental shrubbery.” Needless to say, there are a million easier ways to make that point, but that’s not how hypercompetitive type-A people like to do things.

Suter began life like countless other sports-loving California kids and found himself stationed in Alaska
after joining the Army in the early ‘70s.

For a diversion, he joined the Army’s biathlon team and became Alaska’s Army middleweight boxing champ of 1973. He stayed on in Alaska after his discharge working as a truck driver, a stevedore, and a support man for the pipeline. In 1974, he got married and settled in his new wife’s hometown of Chugiak, about 20 miles outside Anchorage.

That’s when things got weird.

Short URL: https://caninechronicle.com/?p=114773

Posted by Alex on Nov 1 2016. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.