Martin Buser Wins Kusko 300

From Anchorage Daily News:

Four-time Iditarod champ Martin Buser is back in form.

The Big Lake musher who slipped to an uncharacteristic 23rd-place finish in the Iditarod last year, won the $100,000 Kuskokwim 300 Sled Dog Race in Bethel on Sunday to demonstrate he's ready to challenge again on mushing's biggest stage.

For claiming victory in the Kusko -- the second-highest-paying professional sporting event in Alaska, after the Iditarod -- Buser collected $20,000 and a big emotional boost.

Thirteen years have passed since the last time Buser won the Kusko in 1994. Later that year, Buser followed up by claiming the second of his four victories in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

At the Kusko this year, he edged defending Iditarod champ and eight-time Kusko winner Jeff King from Denali Park, but that was just the beginning of the story for Buser's Happy Trails Kennel.

Buser's 17-year-old son Rohn finished only three places back in fourth with the kennel's second-string team.

After the finish, Martin Buser said he didn't know what was more exciting -- his victory or Rohn's performance.

"I'm really, really jazzed for him," he said.

Just to get into the race, Rohn needed an exemption from Kusko officials, who typically don't allow racers younger than 18. Officials granted the exemption based on Rohn's Junior Iditarod experience. He has been the runner-up in that Susitna Valley race the past two years.

"He has Martin's B team," Rohn's mother and Martin's wife, Kathy Chapoton, said Sunday by telephone from the family's Big Lake home.

"Mathematically, he could have been an hour behind me at the finish," Martin said, but inexperience, mainly in the form of checkpoint inefficiency, cost the still-learning but highly motivated young musher a little time.

"He's really competitive," his mother added.

"He put on his cross-country track shoes up in Tuluksak," said long-time Kusko observer Bev Hoffman by telephone from Bethel.

The young musher, named for a checkpoint on the Iditarod Trail, couldn't quite run down third-place Kusko finisher Jon Little from Kasilof. But he managed to hold off Ed Iten of Kotzebue, the seventh-place Iditarod finisher last March and the 2004 Kusko champ.

They were six minutes and $1,000 apart at the end. Rohn's fourth-place finish was good for $7,000. Iten picked up $6,000, Little earned $10,000 for third and King took home $15,000 for finishing second.

Excused from high school classes for what his mother described as an "outdoor recreation independent study course," Rohn also got the chance to school some top Alaska sled dog drivers as the race sped up on the frozen and snow-covered surface of the Kuskokwim River to Aniak before swinging back to retrace the course and end where it had begun.

Also behind Rohn at the finish were the likes of Ramy Brooks of Healy, a two-time Iditarod runner-up and former winner of the Yukon Quest, Lance Mackey of Fairbanks and Aliy Zirkle of Two Rivers, two more Quest champs.

Martin credited good training -- of the dogs, that is -- for his victory. Training went so well early this winter that he decided weeks ago that the Happy Trails Kennel had the potential to field two competitive Kusko teams.

Rohn was snowboarding at the Alyeska Resort with his mom when dad called to ask if the 17-year-old would take the runners of the sled behind the second of those teams.

"He said, 'Oh yeah,' " Chapoton remembered.

"This is his first big outing," said Martin, who added that the plan is for Rohn to run the Iditarod next year before heading off to college. Rohn is a first-rate student in addition to being a competent dog driver.

Chapoton was happy for her son, but perhaps happier for her husband, whose kennel has struggled a bit the last few years.

"It would be so good for him to win," she said.

Hoffman echoed similar sentiments.

"I love both of those guys (Buser and King)," she said, "but everybody's kind of pulling for (Martin)."

After years of King dominating this race -- his eight victories have clearly crowned him King of the Kusko -- it would have been understandable for race fans to want a new face in the winner's circle.

Even a familiar new face.

Buser obliged with his third Kusko victory, but it wasn't easy.

He was never sure until the end that his team was going to win, he said.

He and King ran neck and neck for much of the race. At the village of Kwethluk, the final checkpoint before the finish, Buser had a lead of only 12 minutes on the defending Kusko champ, who last year posted the fastest time in the race's history.

Buser knew the Denali Park musher would be coming.

"He can put on the finishing speed like no one else," Buser said.

King cut another four minutes off Buser's lead on the last 15 miles or so of good, firm trail, but he couldn't catch the leader.

"It's good," Buser said. "I'm pretty excited."

Outdoors editor Craig Medred can be reached at cmedred@adn.com.

KUSKOKWIM 300
As of Sunday night
Finishers:

1) Martin Buser, 2:22 p.m.; 2) Jeff King, 2:30 p.m.; 3) Jon Little, 4:31 p.m.; 4) Rohn Buser, 5:30 p.m.; 5) Ed Iten, 5:35 p.m.; 6) Hugh Neff, 6:32 p.m.

Out of Kwethluk

7) Tollef Monson, 5:12 p.m.; 8) Lance Mackey,  6:07 p.m.; 9) Ramy Brooks, 6:08 p.m.

Out of Tuluksak

10) Aliy Zirkle, 3:43 p.m.; 11) Paul Gebhardt, 3:49 p.m.; 12) Andy Angstman, 4:40 p.m.; 13) Mike Williams Jr., 5:23 p.m.; 14) Linwood Fiedler, 5:53 p.m.; 15) JJ Wells, 5:58 p.m.; 16) Mike Williams Sr., 6:13 p.m.

Into Tuluksak:

17) Gerald Riley, 5:29 p.m.

Into Kalskag:

18) Ben Bruce, 4:35 p.m.

Into Aniak:

19) David Fitka, 6:15 p.m.