Lance mackey story
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An iron-man musher with a kennel of wonderdogs, Lance Mackey has dominated long distance sled-dog racing like nobody in the history of the sport.
A throat cancer survivor who started his career in Kasilof on the Kenai Peninsula and later moved north of Fairbanks, Mackey in 2007 accomplished what most people thought was impossible when he won both the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race and the 1,000-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
Just to show it wasn’t a fluke, he went out and accomplished the same feat in 2008. In 2009, he skipped the Quest – giving someone else a chance to win the race he owned for four straight years — but won his third consecutive Iditarod. In 2010 he won an unprecedented fourth straight Iditarod.
In the year of Mackey’s first double victory, eight dogs ran both races — an incredible 2,000 miles in less than 40 days. At the Iditarod finish line in Nome , their tails wagged as their master basked in the spotlight. The dogs came from Mackey’s aptly named Come Back Kennel. Just as Mackey defied conventional wisdom that said a musher couldn’t
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Musher Details
Alaska born and raised, Lance Mackey, 49, grew up with dogs and Iditarod. He started his current kennel in Kasilof, Alaska, in 1999 and entered his first Iditarod in 2001, finishing 36th. He spent all of 2002 and 2003 recovering from stage four throat cancer, and returned to Iditarod in 2004 where he traveled the entire trail with his younger brother and two puppy teams. In 2005, he entered both the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod, racing both form 2005 – 2009, and winning each four years in a row (and winning both back to back in 2007 and 2008.) Since 2011, he says, “My race record has been dull and not much fun; my last Iditarod was in 2016. It ended in Galena, and I haven’t been the same since. So for me, 2019 was about having fun, enjoying the checkpoints and the people of our state and its sport, about my dogs, fans, sponsors, friends and my family. Lance thanks his fellow mushers for nominating him for the Most Inspirational Musher Award last year. He received a free entry for this year’s Iditarod so “I guess it means they want to see me out there again. Lance i
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Lance Mackey
American dog musher (1970–2022)
Not to be confused with Lance Macey.
Lance Mackey (June 2, 1970 – September 7, 2022) was an American dog musher and dog sled racer from Fairbanks, Alaska. Mackey was a four-time winner of both the 1,000-mile (1,600 km) Yukon Quest and the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.[1]
Early life
Lance was born on June 2, 1970, in Anchorage[2] into a family of sled dog mushers. His father, Dick Mackey, was one of the founders of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, and won the event by a one second margin over Rick Swenson in 1978. Lance's half-brother Rick Mackey also won the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in 1983. All three of them won the race on their sixth attempt while wearing bib number 13.[3]
Mackey raced from the time he was a child; his father recalls building a sled for Lance as soon as he was old enough to hold on and then, watching him enter and win his very first race.[4] However, technically speaking, Mackey's first race was from the comfort of his mother's womb, as she placed fo
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