Part Two By Hank Nuwer
It was 1958 when longtime musher Dr. Roland Lombard of Massachusetts, already 47 but super fit, came to challenge the best of Alaska’s sled dog racers.
Newspapers in Fairbanks and Anchorage listed his racing credentials. His big wins had been in Manitoba at LaPaf and the Quebec International.
Dr. Lombard’s competitors snickered. Yeah, sure the veterinarian won some races in Canada and the Lower Forty-Eight, but just wait until he tried the rough, rugged and often icy courses of Alaska, they assured one and all.
He soon dined on humble pie. In his initial race, he ended up watching the rear ends of Alaskan competitors cross the finish line long before him.
The veterinarian concluded that his sled team needed hardier dogs used to harsher winter conditions than those in New England. Consequently, he approached a noted Alaska musher and asked to buy his lead dog Scamp and a promising younger dog. Amused, but tempted by the vet’s stack of greenbacks, the musher sold the two dogs to Dr. Lombard
And show them he did in 1959, the only non-resident to sprint away with the title in the event’s fifteen-year history, noted the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
His strategy was to cut his two most inexperienced dogs and to run a team of only ten dogs with Scamp as his mainstay. What he’d learned in his 1958 loss was that he needed dogs that wouldn’t quit when the weather turned bad and temperatures plummeted.
“As a result of better animals, it was an easier race for me,” Dr. Lombard told reporters.
Nonetheless, his pride took a beating in ’61 and ’62 when his team ran out of steam. Racing aficionados told him no winner of the championship who had then lost ever managed to notch a second win.
But 1962 proved to be his comeback year. He proved his skeptics wrong and won the 30-mile Fairbanks run in the best winning time up until then.
After that, he came back annually to Alaska and raced anywhere and often.
His wife and fellow sled-dog racer Louise Lombard raced against him often between 1960 and 1970, but she cherry picked her races and devoted most of her time to helping her husband train his teams and tend to their needs.
Dr. Lombard’s arch-rival was the legendary musher George Attla in the annual Fur Rendezvous championships. Perhaps his most memorable feat was snaring the Rondy trophy in 1974 when he was past 60.
At long last, Dr. Lombard reached the age when his body just wouldn’t obey his mind, but he loved the sport and running his dogs too much to hang up his sled just yet. He competed for several years until at age 72 even he acknowledged that Father Time had beaten him to the finish line.
When the racing veterinarian lost a battle with cancer and died at 78 on October 10, 1990, the tributes from his competitors showed their appreciation for his mettle and talent.
“He was about the best there was,” said Attla, his longtime fierce rival.
The Anchorage Daily News ran a cartoon of five sled dogs baying in sorrow. The caption read, “A funeral mass for Rolan Lombard.”
That paper’s editorial writer gave “Doc” a fine farewell. “While his competitive fires burned fiercely, he never compromised his dogs’ health. Indeed, he heightened Alaskans’ awareness of the role that animal welfare and ethical treatment of animals must play in racing. . . He taught Alaskans many a lesson about their native sport—and left dog mushing more popular and more professional for his efforts.”
In the end, Dr. Lombard left an enviable legacy of sled dog wins in Alaska. He captured eight world championships and collected six victories in the North American Open.
Earl Norris of Willow, a respected breeder of Siberians and, with his wife Natalie, the founding members of the Alaskan Sled Dog and Racing Association, said that despite his outsider status, Dr. Lombard drew a huge fan base in Alaska.
“People adored him,” said after Dr. Lombard passed away from cancer in1990.
“He was dedicated to being Number One,” said Dick Mackay, himself a sprint racer, and the winner of the 1978 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, in an Anchorage Daily News interview. “And he had the means to follow through on his ideas. He just shattered all the records and everybody else had to play catch-up.”
Hank Nuwer teaches journalism as an adjunct professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.