Athletes of the Week: Aero & Sebastian lead Dallas Seavey to history

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - For the sixth time in his career, a smiling Dallas Seavey sat on a podium under the Burled Arch in Nome.

The veteran musher smiled for pictures with his lead dogs, Aero and Sebastian, tucked under each one of his arms.

It was only appropriate for the dog duo to bask in glory after helping Seavey become the all-time winningest musher of The Last Great Race.

“I don’t do anything,” Seavey said at the winner’s press conference. “I mean, yeah, I’m the one up here talking, but I don’t win Iditarods without a dog team.”

Coming into his 14th career Iditarod, Seavey was unsure which members of his team would step up, in part because some dogs came over from his father’s kennel, he said.

“This year, I feel like the team is much more even,” Seavey said last Thursday in the halfway checkpoint Cripple, five hours behind the race leader. “There’s not as many super, super, super dogs, I don’t think, or, at least I don’t know who they are or they’re still developing. A lot of those superstars you don’t recognize them as superstars until you’re in a tough spot on a race.”

Leaving Ruby on Friday with several hours of ground to gain on the leaders, it was time for the budding stars to shine. Aero and Sebastian took the lead, and less than two days later, so did Seavey upon taking off from Unalakleet.

Seavey described Aero — a 3-year-old transplant from his father’s kennel — as a “happy goofball.”

“As things got harder and harder, I kept expecting him to act like a puppy and start to really feel the challenges and every single time he rose to the occasion,” Seavey said.

Seavey said he likes to call Aero, “wiggly.”

“The most annoying thing about him is you can’t unclip his neck line or his tug line or his booties or put a coat on him without him wiggling so much, that you cannot get ahold of him,” he said. “In White Mountain, he just about broke my nose because I was trying to do something and he was just wiggling and he’s just like, ‘I’ll just kiss you with my cranial ridge on the nose!’ That’s just Aero.

“But once you get him hooked up — if you get him hooked up — he goes like heck down the trail and he’s happy to do it and he adds spice and excitement to the whole team.”

Sebastian, on the other hand, comes off as the “shy, geeky brother of Flounder, who’s the superstar quarterback.”

Sebastian, or “Seabs,” is part of the Little Mermaid litter along with his brother and Ariel.

Seavey has seen his share of sled dogs, but none quite like Sebastian.

“He has the most beautiful gait I have ever seen, the dog just floats down the trail, there is no energy expenditure unnecessarily,” Seavey said. “All of the energy he puts out goes straight to pulling the sled down the trail and floating himself down the trail, he’s just graceful.

“About halfway through the year, it’s like, ‘OK, you are way too good of a dog not to be a lead dog.’”

And lead Sebastian and Aero did, straight to the champion’s podium and into the record books.

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