Thursday, March 17, 2005
The good and the bad
Washington won tonight, 88-77 over Montana. It's a great start, and a good sign since they haven't advanced to the second round of the basketball playoffs in a very long time. I hope this is the year they go all the way to the finals. All week, they have been challenged as being undeserving of the first seed in the Western regionals, and they just had to shrug it off. Their next opponent is Pacific which beat Pitt 79-71 in the first round. That will be an interesting game since Pacific plays a slow, deliberate game while Washington prefers an up-tempo, fast paced game. Go Huskies!
My other favorite husky team scratched in the Iditarod, in Unalakleet after traveling roughly 900 miles of the 1100-mile course. The dogs were really suffering in this year's warm weather, that sometimes reached almost 40F in the daytime and almost never dropped below freezing even at night. It was raining at times, and this was deep in the middle of Alaska. The web cams in Fairbanks and Nome showed clear, wet roads more suited for Californians than sled dogs.
The winner was Robert Sorlie and his team of dogs from Norway, in 9 days and 19 hours. He also won 2 years ago but skipped last year. There were 3 other teams in hot pursuit, but ultimately he beat them by over one hour and a half. Only 40 minutes separated No 2 through 4, so that made for a very close race, similar to last year. Martin Buser faded near the end and finished 13th because many of his dogs got sick and were dropped. He limped to the finish line with just 6 of the original 16 dogs. It was a fairly disappointing end to a race that started out very promising for several of my favorite teams, but Mother Nature wasn't in the mood to play nice this year. I feel like I am going into dog race withdrawal.
- posted by Woofwoof @ 9:42 PM
