Cancer claims Iditarod champion Rick Mackey. His father and brother also won famed Alaska race
ANKERAGE, Alaska — Rick Mackey, the winner of the 1983 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, has died of lung cancer, his daughter told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Mackey, who died Monday, was 71.
The Mackey name is closely tied to the history of the Iditarod, the grueling race that takes mushers and their dog teams 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) through the Alaskan wilderness to the finish line on the coast of the Bering Sea. Rick’s father, Dick, won the race in 1978, and his late brother Lance won an unprecedented number of consecutive championships from 2007 through 2010.
According to Rick Mackey’s daughter, Brenda Mackey, Rick Mackey was diagnosed with lung cancer two weeks after his brother died of cancer in September 2022.
All three Mackeys won their first Iditarod on their sixth attempt, and all wore bib number 13.
“It honestly felt pretty deep that my dad passed away on May 13,” Brenda Mackey said. “You know, it seemed pretty appropriate.”
Rick Mackey was born on May 1, 1953 in Concord, New Hampshire, and moved to Alaska with his family in 1959.
Before the first Iditarod in 1973, Brenda said her father Dick Mackey asked for a dog. “My grandpa gave him a dog, and then he got two more,” she said. Soon they were spending weekends at sled dog races: Rick racing junior events on Saturdays and Dick Mackey racing adults on Sundays.
Rick met his future wife, Patti, at a community meeting in 1973 to prepare Dick Mackey to compete in the first Iditarod.
Their love and the start of what is now the most famous sled dog race in the world have been intertwined from the start. She and Rick handled dogs at the start of the 1974 Iditarod. A year later he ran his first race.
“We were both really good with dogs, so it was a pretty good match,” Patti Mackey said.
They married in 1977. Brenda was born a year later and son Roland was born in 1996.
When they weren’t racing, Rick and Patti Mackey ran their own kennel and bred dogs. Not only does she consider her husband the best musher, but he was also an “incredible” trainer, she said.
“This guy could train a dog team, he just had a great rapport with those dogs,” Patti Mackey said. Her husband twice won the Iditarod’s Humanitarian Award for exceptional dog care.
“Throughout our lives we have been fortunate to be able to live such a lifestyle and raise our children in an environment that not many people have the privilege of experiencing,” she said.
Rick Mackey competed in 22 Iditarods between 1975 and 2004 and had 13 top 10 finishes, including a second-place finish in 1994 behind four-time champion Martin Buser.
Mackey is one of six mushers to win the 1,000-mile sled dog races in North America, the Iditarod and the now-defunct Yukon Quest International Sled Race between Alaska and Canada. Lance Mackey is also one of those six.
In the 1999 Iditarod, “All My Children” actress Susan Lucci won an auction to be an Iditarider, or the person who rides in a musher’s sled during the ceremonial start in Anchorage, and in Rick Mackey’s sled the 11 miles (17.7 km). -kilometer) relax through the streets of Alaska’s largest city.
Rick Mackey’s greatest achievement was his family, his wife said.
“He loved dogs, he loved racing, but at the end of the day nothing was more important than his kids and me,” she said. “He was just really nice.”
His racing career slowed as he got older, and he and Patti took jobs in the school district in Nenana, a community about 60 miles southwest of Fairbanks. He managed maintenance and custodians for 17 years before retiring.
The family is tentatively planning services for Memorial Day weekend.