The dogs of the Iditarod: powering sled teams on snow and social media

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/05/iditarod-sled-dog-race-dogs-sponsors-social-media

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The world of professional long-distance dog mushing is rough, dirty and staunchly analog. Many of the 85 or so mushers who left this city to begin the Iditarod sled dog race live modestly in remote, unplumbed cabins.

The next few weeks on the trail, as they travel roughly the distance from New York to Florida, powered by dogs, many mushers will jog behind their sleds for hours over uneven terrain in extreme weather. The sport is an old-fashioned test of endurance, but increasingly, getting by as a musher is linked to savvy in the digital world. Many live without indoor toilets, but most have Wi-Fi. A Facebook profile has become an essential part of mushing.

“Social media is huge for the sport,” said musher Brent Sass, who has nine friends that help him manage a page with more than 30,000 followers. “The future lies in mushers letting people into their world, so we have thousands of people who show up to watch every year.”

Mushing is high-overhead and doesn’t pay even its best athletes well. The winner of the Iditarod, the dog-sledding equivalent of the Super Bowl, will take home $70,000 and a new truck. Meanwhile, running the race could cost between $20,000, for a recreational musher, to more than $100,000 for a professional, said Stan Hooley, CEO of the Iditarod Trail Committee. And that doesn’t take into account the cost of running a kennel the rest of the year.

“As professional sports go, it’s a little different than buying a pair of sneakers and a basketball,” he said.

Dog-sled racing has never been a spectator sport, said Danny Seavey, who manages the Facebook feed for his father, Mitch Seavey, who won the Iditarod in 2013. His brother Dallas Seavey is a three-time Iditarod champion, who won last year and has starred in the the reality television show Ultimate Survival Alaska.

The race’s most dramatic moments play out on lonely trails, Seavey explained. There are no ticket sales. Its arena is harsh wilderness. But, more than ever, mushers must have sponsors to make racing pencil out. That’s where Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Instagram, come in, he said. Social media give race fans a front-row seat. When there are fans, there can be advertising. And that keeps the sport alive.

“Our whole Facebook feed is very much sponsor-driven,” Seavey said. This month he’s been posting intermittently about an essential oil company, he said.

Seavey, in his 30s, came of age with Facebook, but managing a page supporting his family’s brand has been an education. He keeps posts positive, chooses strong images and focuses on what it feels like on the trail.

“Human emotion is by far, from a business standpoint, one of the most profitable things there is,” he said.

Brent Sass, who spends most of the year with a few handlers at a cabin miles outside Fairbanks, was Iditarod Rookie of the Year in 2012. He started out with a small-time operation, he said, but through donations and sponsorship from Facebook, he grew to become an Iditarod contender. For example, he offers fans the opportunity to sponsor individual dogs via Facebook every fall. In half a day this year, every dog got a sponsor, an inflow worth $25,000, he said.

On the Iditarod, though, when fans are paying most attention, keeping them in the loop on social feeds gets complicated for individual mushers. Long stretches of the trail have no cellphone service. And, mushers are not allowed to carry two-way communication devices by race rules. (Last year, Sass was disqualified because of an iPod Touch he says he brought with him to listen to music without thinking about the fact it could receive a signal.) The hundreds of volunteers along the race are discouraged from posting to social media.

“It’s like anti-everything in our society,” Sass said. “What people do naturally every day, they are asking us not to do.”

People managing pages for mushers during the race do their best to pick up photos from friends and handlers along the trail and repost journalist photos and videos, Seavey and Sass said.

The Iditarod organization itself is invested in keeping what happens on the trail exclusive. It owns Iditarod.com, where it posts in-depth live content from people it hires to report on the race. It requires fans, who flock to the site by the hundreds of thousands, to subscribe to see it.

Seavey and Sass said that encouraging, rather than discouraging, social media on the trail would grow interest in the sport and attract more sponsors for the race. Opening up the in-depth race content to a broader audience would only increase interest, they said.

Hooley, with the Iditarod, said the business of financing the race itself, which also relies on sponsors, is more complicated than it looks. A paywall is a direct source of financing.

The Yukon Quest, another long-distance race earlier in the season, allowed mushers to use iPod Touches and encouraged them to upload at checkpoints, said musher Cody Strathe, who runs Squid Acres Kennel with his wife Paige Drobny.

It was a few days before the Iditarod in Anchorage and Strathe had just come from a race meeting where he’d been cautioned about carrying a GoPro camera that could receive a Wi-Fi signal. He was planning to a buy a camera, he said. He didn’t own one because he relies on an iPod touch to document his life. He called the difficulties for social media on the trail “a bummer”.

“I think it’s really important to share what we’re doing,” he said. “We want our fans to feel a part of it.”