Iditarod champion among four added to Alaska Hall of Fame
ANCHORAGE - Lance Mackey, the three-time defending Iditarod champion and winner of all four of his Yukon Quest races, is one of four athletes who have been added to the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame.
Mountaineer and adventurer Bradford Washburn, World Eskimo Indian Olympics champion Reggie Joule and Olympic snowboard bronze medalist Rosey Fletcher also were on the 2010 list announced Monday.
Mackey's father and fellow Iditarod champion, Dick Mackey, will be honored for his part in the closest finish in Iditarod history.
The one-second triumph over Rick Swenson in 1978 settled the question of whether the winner was the first dog nose across the line or the first sled - it's the nose.
Joining the Mackey-Swenson Iditarod finish on the 2010 Hall of Fame list of sports moments is Elliot Sampson's upset victory in the 1981 state high school cross country championships.
Sampson, from the tiny village of Noorvik, topped a field that included Marcus Dunbar of Bartlett, who would go on to win a national indoor mile championship after running in college. Sampson died in 2005 at age 40 in Fairbanks.
The Midnight Sun Baseball Game was selected as the 2010 event.
"We think this is the absolute cream of the crop," Harlow Robinson, president of the Hall of Fame, said of the 2010 selections.
Joule, now a state representative from Kotzebue, set numerous records during the 1970s in events such as the one-foot and two-foot high kick and won multiple gold medals in the blanket toss.
Fletcher, of Girdwood, is a three-time Olympian who won her bronze medal in snowboarding at the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy. She also won two silvers at the world championships and collected eight World Cup wins.
Washburn, who died at age 96 in 2007, was the first person to ascend many Alaska peaks, including Mount Crillon, Mount Sanford, Mount Hayes and Mount Dickey.
Washburn pioneered the popular West Buttress route up Mount McKinley now used by hundreds of climbers a year. The Massachusetts native also founded the Boston Museum of Science.
In February, Lance Mackey is expected to seek his fifth Yukon Quest victory and an unprecedented fourth consecutive Iditarod championship a month later.
"If Lance retired just this minute and never did another thing in sports he'd still be an inductee," said selection panelist Lew Freeman, an author and former Daily News sports editor.
The selections were made by a committee of seven people long involved with Alaska sports. The induction ceremony will be Feb. 25 at the ConocoPhillips atrium.