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Legally blind Rachael Scdoris is the youngest musher ever to complete a 500-mile sled dog race and was twice named one of the nation's 100 Most Outstanding Female Athletes.

COMMENTARY

By Steve Wilstein

AP columnist

updated 12:31 a.m. ET March 7, 2005

WILLOW, Alaska - The tough part is over.

That’s how Rachael Scdoris felt at the start of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. All the years of training, all the cajoling and qualifying to get to this point were done. Now it was time to run.

No matter that she faces terrible hazards and that fellow mushers fear for her safety. The legally blind 20-year-old from Bend, Ore., ventured confidently with the last of 79 teams in Sunday’s restart of an 1,100-mile journey through darkness — her own and this hostile northern landscape’s — to the frigid finish in Nome.

Maybe she won’t get that far. She surely won’t get there first. If she gets there at all, it will be astonishing. Success is defined differently for each of us. In this case it began with her cries of “Hike!” to the handsome team of 16 dogs, led by her favorite, 7-year-old Duchess — “kind of a hairy human,” she said — that she trained from pups in pursuit of a lifelong dream.

Scdoris arrived at this moment after years of defying doubts about her abilities. She ran cross-country races in high school when others thought that was impossible. She competed in shorter sled dog races when officials wanted to keep her out.

She endured cruel taunts from classmates growing up, took up rock climbing, horseback riding and racing on a tandem bicycle. She learned to put her faith in herself and refused to give in to her blindness. Her father, Jerry, a sled dog breeder and former musher, encouraged her and watched over her.

She wishes she could be known simply as an athlete, an elite, 5-foot-8 musher competing in one of the world’s most demanding sporting events. But she knows all too well that her legal blindness from birth — caused by a rare retinal condition called congenital achromatopsia that reduces her perception of light, color and depth of field — distinguishes her, even if it does not define her.

That uncorrectable visual impairment, which limits her to seeing blurry shapes of objects more than a few feet away and makes her acutely sensitive to bright lights, is the reason why so many people will follow her progress in this race on her Web site, www.gorachaelgo.com. It is the reason why she was invited to appear on TV talks shows — her model looks and confident demeanor didn’t hurt — and why her autobiography, “No End in Sight,” was recently published.

She has a publicity agent and she hopes her story will be turned into a movie, setting off suspicions among some critics that she’s more about hype than serious competition, and that she’s putting personal profits ahead of the safety of her dogs. That she was allowed to have a “visual interpreter” in the Iditarod — Paul Ellering — and that he comes from the gimmicky world of pro wrestling, added to misgivings about her motives.

Yet it doesn’t take long in talking with Scdoris and Ellering, or in reading her book, to realize she takes sled dog racing very seriously. Not satisfied with simply starting, she wants to do exceed everyone’s expectations.

Ellering, who finished 54th after 13 days in his only previous Iditarod in 2000, had to talk Scdoris out of being too competitive.

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Lm Otero / AP file

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