Dan Seavey, patriarch of Alaska mushing family who raced in the first Iditarod, dies
The Minnesota native, who competed in the first two Iditarod races in 1973 and 1974, was out helping tend to his dogs shortly before he died last Thursday, his son Mitch Seavey said. Dan Seavey had been adamant in his later years about remaining at the south-central Alaska home in Seward he had moved his family to decades earlier, the younger Seavey said.
"It's hard, and everybody will miss him. But he lived a great life and passed away in his own fashion," Mitch Seavey said.
The Iditarod race organization called Dan Seavey a "true pioneer and cherished figure" in the race's 53-year history and said he was instrumental in the establishment of the Iditarod Trail as a National Historic Trail in 1978. He also wrote a book, The First Great Race, which his son said drew on notes Seavey recorded during the first edition of the Iditarod.
Dan Seavey in total ran the Iditarod five times. His last, in 2012, was aimed at celebrating and drawing attention to the trail's history.
That year featured three generations of Seaveys, with Mitch's son Dallas winning the first of his record-breaking six titles. Mitch, a three-time Iditarod champ, that year finished seventh.
Dan Seavey moved with his family to Alaska in 1963 to teach in Seward, a community about 200 kilometers south of Anchorage. In an interview for Project Jukebox, a University of Alaska Fairbanks oral history project, he recalled being inspired as a kid by a radio program centered on a character who was with a Canadian mounted police force and his trusty sled dog, Yukon King, who took on bad guys during the Gold Rush era.
Dan Seavey said finding time to train to race was difficult.
"Having to make a living, it kind of interfered with my dog mushing," Dan, a longtime history teacher, said. He trained on nights and weekends, and around the first two years of the Iditarod he petitioned the school board for time off, he said.
Dan Seavey didn't have competitive aspirations past those first two Iditarod races, his son said, but he continued to mush recreationally. Dan at one point thought about letting Mitch have his dogs but couldn't bear the thought of not having dogs around, Mitch said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CBC
13 hours ago
- CBC
2025 World Athletics Wanda Diamond League: Eugene
Watch Brooklyn, N.S.'s Sarah Mitton compete in the women's shot put event as part of the latest stop of the 2025 World Athletics Wanda Diamond League at Hayward Field in Eugene, Ore.
Globe and Mail
17 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
Trump's plans for a UFC event at the White House marks the end of sports being for everyone
If you had to put the major sports on a left-to-right political continuum, it would probably go like this: basketball, soccer, baseball, football. Hockey's Canadian so it plays things down the middle. Women's sports are leftie regardless of what's being played. Combat sports are rightist, often cartoonishly so. There must be no more conflicted athlete in the world than a women's mixed martial artist. These are generalizations, not hard rules, but they are becoming so. In the midst of a long, live rant on Thursday, U.S. president Donald Trump said that among his goals for the coming year, he'd like to host the fights at his place. 'We're going to have a UFC fight – think of this – on the grounds of the White House,' Trump said. A spokesperson later said that Trump was 'dead serious.' Some days it really does feel like Idiocracy was a documentary. We've been headed in this direction for 15 years or so, but this is the actual end of the idea of sports being for everyone. Going forward, they will be for people who agree with the political goals and objectives of a critical mass of the owners, players and followers of that particular sport. Want to watch women's soccer? Great. Welcome. Have some thoughts on abortion? They better be the right sort, or you're out. The opposite right-sort-of-opinion rule applies if you'd like to get on the SEC football bandwagon, but the eviction rules are the same. There is no such thing as a socially conservative WNBA fan, unless they're keeping it a secret. There are no out-and-proud BLM-supporting NASCAR obsessives. How you feel about transgender participants in sport probably delineates which sports you are interested in, and rigidly determines what you would be willing to say about the issue while sitting in the stands at a game. For years, people have been warring over the direction of the leagues they enjoy. Some leagues are able to manage this divide. The NHL does a fairly good job of it, talking progressive, being regressive, and still maintaining their reach. Still, the tenuousness of this detente is occasionally revealed. Remember the hysteria when people thought they'd heard Toronto Maple Leaf Morgan Rielly yell a homophobic slur in the midst of a game? For a couple of hours, you could feel the political rumble brewing as the sides fronted up online. Then it turned out that Rielly was yelling, 'Rag it' – a hockey term of art. And everyone just melted back over their side of the line. The fight to come was still to come. I'm sure there are exceptions to all these examples, but each of them proves the rule. As much as your earning power, your education and your background, your sports preferences have become unmissable expressions of your politics. For 75 years, sports worked the opposite angle. Since Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier in baseball, sports were for everyone. That was the whole appeal – a popular entertainment that could be obsessed about (and paid for) by consumers from the smallest child to the creakiest oldster. In recent years, sports had widened this outreach across the gender divide and around the world. Manchester United started out as a preserve of south and west Manchester. Now it is for the entire world, providing they have enough cash to buy a shirt. No other form of culture is like this. You don't read Proust when you're 8 and you don't go to punk shows when you're 80. You don't go to a museum and scream at the Jenny Savilles. Sports was a permanent DMZ in the culture wars, where all that mattered was that you pulled for the home team. No initiation required. Buy a hat, show up and cheer in the right places. For two or three hours, the people sitting beside are your best friends. There was no need to quiz them on their thoughts on immigration. Sports for everyone helped drain the bile by giving us an other to root against harmlessly. It was a ready-made community of your neighbours and group therapy for people who can't afford the real thing. I guess that was working out so well that we had to ruin it. From a business perspective, the change makes sense. Sports for everyone worked when there were two or three sports you could reasonably follow. As a little kid, I loved NWA wrestling, and never once saw it on TV. We didn't have cable. I followed it exclusively through magazines. Now there are dozens of sports and you can be watching them as quickly as it takes you to type out a few words. The Toronto Blue Jays are competing with the Indian Premier League. Like social media does, it's time to break people down to their basest characteristics in order to extract money from them. The loyalties of casual fans are shaky. The loyalty of a political operator is rock solid, since the team is now tied up in their sense of identity. At best, two million people will purchase a typical UFC pay-per-view event. Seventy-seven million people voted for Trump in the last U.S. election. That's a lot of growth potential. What would baseball give for that audience? More to the point, can they build a regulation diamond on the White House lawn? In the distant past, a person might say that they don't follow football or cricket because they don't like violence, or don't understand the rules. In recent years, the expectation became that everyone should know and enjoy everything. If the Raptors were winning, you were a Raptors fan. If the World Cup was on, you liked soccer all of a sudden. In future, we'll be back to the old way. There will be things you don't watch, but not because you don't get them, but because you do. Not in any certain way, but in the uneasy way that you get when you wander into a neighbourhood where you feel you don't belong. It's another step toward breaking down our institutions and turning us against each other. In that future, you'll like the sports that you think like you, and you will hate the other, but for real this time.
National Post
a day ago
- National Post
Michael Higgins: Total capitulation! UPenn forfeits gender ideology for Trump funding
Article content Thomas went from a ranking of 554th in the 200 men's freestyle in the 2018-19 season to being one of the top-ranked female swimmers in that event. Article content In 2022, Thomas won the women's 500 freestyle at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championships, finished fifth in the women's 200 freestyle and eighth in the women's 100 freestyle. Article content While the transgender athlete had supporters, there were also detractors who complained about Thomas competing as well as using the female locker rooms. Article content Why is it always the women who have to suffer? The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is now investigating because a school in Denver converted a female restroom into an all-gender restroom. Boys, however, still get exclusive use of a male restroom. Article content Under the Biden administration, academia could get away with such conduct. But the Trump administration was always going to be different. Article content U.S. President Donald Trump has pledged to crack down on diversity, equity and inclusion policies and use Title IX (which prevents sex discrimination in education) to support women. Article content It was Title IX that landed Penn university in trouble. The Education Department threatened to withhold $175 million in federal funds from the university unless it complied with the law. Article content In a statement in March, Penn President Larry Jameson pledged, 'We expect to continue to engage with OCR, vigorously defending our position.' Article content But he folded almost as fast as Prime Minister Mark Carney on the Digital Services Tax. Article content This week, the university said it would comply with two executive orders from Trump. The first, Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, decries 'efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex' because it deprives women 'of their dignity, safety, and well-being.' Article content The second, Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports, states, 'It shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women's sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.' Article content Article content In a statement, Jameson said the institution was only following the rules at that time, but would now, 'apologize to those who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxiety because of the policies in effect.' Article content It was a craven statement that sought to deflect responsibility to those damnable rules at the time. It's a pity Jameson didn't have the courage just to admit that what happened was wrong. Article content
