Written by Rachel D’Oro and Mark Thiessen at Chicago Tribune.com
Cycling. Baseball. Track. Horse racing. Now dogsledding has become the latest professional sport to be engulfed in a doping scandal, this one involving the huskies that dash across the frozen landscape in Alaska’s grueling, 1,000-mile Iditarod.
The governing board of the world’s most famous sled dog race disclosed Monday that four dogs belonging to four-time Iditarod champion Dallas Seavey tested positive for a banned substance, the opioid painkiller Tramadol, after his second-place finish last March.
It was the first time since the race instituted drug testing in 1994 that a test came back positive.
Seavey strongly denied giving any banned substances to his dogs, suggesting instead that he may have been the victim of sabotage by another musher or an animal rights activist. He accused the Iditarod of lax security at dog-food drop-off points and other spots.
But the finding was another blow to the Iditarod, which has seen the loss of major sponsors, numerous dog deaths, attacks on competitors and pressure from animal rights activists, who say huskies are run to death or left with severe infections and bloody paws.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals seized on the scandal Tuesday.
“If a member of the Iditarod’s ‘royalty’ dopes dogs, how many other mushers are turning to opioids in order to force dogs to push through the pain?” PETA said in a statement. It added: “This doping scandal is further proof that this race needs to end.”
Fern Levitt, director of the documentary “Sled Dogs,” an expose on the treatment of the huskies, said, “The race is all about winning and getting to the finish line despite the inhumane treatment towards the dogs.”
Seavey won the annual Anchorage-to-Nome trek in 2012, 2014, 2015 and 2016 and has had nine straight top-10 finishes. He finished second this year to his father, Mitch, who collected a first-place prize of $71,250.
Dogs are subject to random testing before and during the race, and the first 20 teams to cross the finish line are all automatically tested.
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