Competitors
There were 83 mushers that entered to race. The 51 Alaskans included four-time champion and speed-record holder Martin Buser, three-time winner Jeff King, 2004 winner Mitch Seavey, and the only five-time champion Rick Swenson, including a few Alaska Natives like Ramy Brooks, John Baker, and Ed Iten. There were 23 mushers as well from the lower 48 states, including four-time champion Doug Swingley.
Internationally, Canada is represented by three-time Yukon Quest winner Hans Gatt, Karen Ramstead, the owner of the only all-Siberian Husky team in the race, Sebastian Schnuelle, and rookie Warren Palfrey. Norway had three mushers in the race in that year, the 2005 rookie of the year, Bjørnar Andersen, and newcomers Tore Albrigtsen and Tove Sørensen (2005 champion Robert Sørlie is not racing this year). Fabrizio Lovati of Italy and Ben Valks of the Netherlands brought the European total to 5 mushers.
Celebrity mushers included Gary Paulsen, who ran his rookie race in 1983, scratched in 1985, withdrew prior to the race in 2005, and became the first musher to scratch in 2006, on March 6 at 1:08 a.m. at Skwentna. Legally blind musher Rachael Scdoris of Bend, Oregon, has also attempted the Iditarod for the second time, after he scratched in Eagle Island last year. Her visual interpreter for that year was Tim Osmar.
According to Iditarod reporter Little, the field was just as competitive as it was during the 2005 Iditarod, making it very hard to pick a winner. Former champions Buser, King, Swingley, and Seavey were all strong candidates to win. Of that elite crowd, King won the Kobuk 440 last year and the Kusko this year; while five-time winner Swenson, who scratched for the first time last year and has raced a long distance race since is probably out of the running. The last of the likely winners is Bjørnar Andersen. As this year's representative of Team Norway, he inherited half of Robert Sørlie's winning 2005 team of dogs, and even without them Andersen's 4th-place finish in 2004 was the best finish by a rookie since the race first started in the 1970s.
Other racers who expected to finish well were Lance Mackey, who won the 1,000 mi (1,600 km) Yukon Quest, three-time runner up DeeDee Jonrowe, 2005's 2nd-place finisher Ed Iten, two-time runner up Ramy Brooks, perennial top-10er John Baker. A third tier of capable racers included winner of the 2005 Klondike 300 Cim Smyth (who also recorded the fastest time from Safety to Nome in 2005, despite only having 5 dogs left), Jessie Royner, winner of the 2005 Sheep Mountain 150 Ken Andersen, Aaron Burmeister, 2nd-place finisher in the 2005 Klondike 300 Matt Hayashida, Melanie Gould, Paul Gebhardt, and former Yukon Quest winner Aliy Zirkle. A win by either Aliy Zirkle or Lance Mackey would place them in the elite company of mushers to have won both the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod — in Lance's case, in the same year, an historical first. Hans Gatt is normally a contender, but this year he is running a team of young, inexperienced dogs.
Warren Palfrey of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories or Tore Albrigtsen and Tove Sorensen from Norway were likely to be rookies of the year.
Read more about this topic: 2006 Iditarod