ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Cycling. 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.
Race officials said he will not be punished because they were unable to prove he acted intentionally. That means he will keep his titles and his $59,000 in winnings this year.
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.
“I did not give a drug to my dog. I’ve never used a banned substance in the race,” the 30-year-old Seavey said in an interview. He said Tramadol is not used at his kennel, and it is “incredibly unlikely” it was accidentally administered by anyone on his team.
Instead, he complained of inadequate security at checkpoints along the route where dog food is dropped off weeks ahead of time and at the dog lot in Nome, where thousands of huskies are kept after the race before they are flown home.
“Unfortunately I do think another musher is an option,” he said. He added: “There are also people who are not fans of mushing as a whole. They are numerous videos out that are trying to say mushing is a bad thing. And I can see somebody doing this to promote their agenda.”
Five dogs connected to this year’s race died, bringing total deaths to more than 150 in the Iditarod’s 44-year history, according to PETA’s count. And last year, two mushers were attacked by a drunken man on a snowmobile in separate assaults near a remote village. One dog was killed and others were injured. The attacker was given a six-month sentence.