• 3/15/2007
  • Nome, Alaska
  • Diana Hacker
  • AFP

It was the kind of victory that only comes true in fairy tales. A cancer survivor nobody thought could win beat the big guys in the grueling 1,100-mile (1,800-kilometer) Iditarod Sled Dog Race. And he did it on his sixth attempt wearing the same bib number — lucky 13 — that his father and brother wore when they won the Last Great Race on their sixth attempts. With a frostbitten finger wrapped in toilet paper and duct tape to dull the throbbing, Lance Mackey bounded behind his smartly trotting dog team as they passed under the burled-arch finish line in Nome, Alaska, with a winning time of nine days, five hours, eight minutes and 41 seconds at 8:08 pm Tuesday (0408 GMT Wednesday).

“Unreal,” he kept saying as he punched his fists into the sky, pounded the bib on his chest and hugged family members and well-wishers. “This is a dream I’ve been living since I was a little boy and my dad won the race,” Mackey told a cheering crowd as the setting sun glistened on the Gold Rush City. “Mission accomplished.”

Mackey, 36, camped out for more than a week outside of Iditarod headquarters last summer so he would be first in line to pick his bib number. He was hoping that lucky number 13 would give him a bit of an edge against the gang of four past Iditarod champs who were initially considered the only real contenders. “I was ready, damned and determined when I picked that number,” Mackey said. “That bib to me now is absolutely priceless. It’ll be a piece of memorabilia that I’ll cherish the rest of my life.”

Most people thought Mackey and his dogs were too worn out from running — and winning — the 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) Yukon Quest sled dog race less than two weeks before they hit the trail for the Iditarod. Few have had the strength to run both races and winning both in a matter of weeks was considered impossible. But while 22 other teams were forced to scratch because of injuries and horrible conditions on the trail, Mackey kept his focus even after several of his dogs had to be shipped back to safety and he struggled with a broken sled. “I ran with my gut feeling and what the dogs allowed me to do,” Mackey said. “We were not the fastest team, but we were the steadiest.”

Getting to the finish line at all has been an incredible journey. Mackey was just seven years old when his father Dick won the Iditarod by one second in a historic photo finish in 1978. Mackey’s older brother Rick won the Iditarod in 1983, turning the family into local superstars when they became the only father and son to win an endurance race that has become legendary because of its harsh conditions and intense demands. In awe of his father and brother, Mackey raced as a teenager, but quit to go work on a commercial crab fishing boat — one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States — after he realized the financial strain his 140-dog kennel was putting on his mother. After 15 years of riding out 50-foot (15-meter) swells in the Bering Sea, Mackey fell back into mushing almost by accident in 1998 after he moved to the same town as an old racing friend who gave him dogs which were not good enough to make his team. Soon those “leftover” dogs were helping Mackey beat his buddy in small-time races.

By March 2001, Mackey took his team to the Iditarod. A painful growth on his neck slowed him down on the trail and six days after he reached the finish line in Nome, Mackey was undergoing surgery to remove throat cancer that was cutting off the circulation of blood to his brain. Weak from his radiation therapy, Mackey spent the summer and fall training his dogs against his wife’s wishes. But the doctors would not tell him to stop. Instead they ended up sponsoring him, wife Tonya Mackey said, because they knew the dream of racing the Iditarod again was keeping Mackey alive. Mackey hit the trail in 2002 with a feeding tube under his snow pants. He ended up scratching the race because he could not keep the liquid food supplements from freezing and simply did not have the strength to continue.

Mackey had to sit out the next Iditarod for lack of funds but was back in 2004 and every year since. “People say I’m inspirational but to me there’s nothing more inspirational than living,” Mackey said in an interview before the race began. “I was this close to dying … If I can make it through that I can make it through anything.”