BUTCHER, SUSAN HOWLET

born Dec. 26, 1954, Boston, Mass., U.S. American sled-dog racer and trainer renowned for having won several times the challenging Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska, U.S. Butcher began to train dogs at age 16. By 1972 she had moved to Colorado, where she attended Colorado State University, Fort Collins, and raced a group of 50 Alaskan huskies owned by a local musher. Butcher moved to Alaska in 1975 to start her own kennel. A serious athlete from the outset, she broke onto the international mushing scene in 1979 after driving a team of huskies to the top of Mount McKinley. She first entered the infamous Iditarod Trail race in 1978. Begun in 1973, the 1,150-mile (1,850-km) Iditarod is the longest and most physically challenging of all sled-dog races. Butcher twice finished in second place (1982, 1984) and had begun the 1985 race with a solid lead only to be disqualified by a moose who charged across her path, killing 2 dogs and wounding 13. That year Butcher lost her chance to become the first woman to win the Iditarod to Libby Riddles. The following year, however, Butcher came in first with a record-breaking time of 11 days, 15 hours, and 6 minutes. She repeated her firsts in both 1987 and 1988 to become the only musher in the history of the sport to win the Iditarod in three consecutive years. She won for a fourth time in 1990. Butcher runs a kennel in Eureka, Alaska, where she houses more than 150 huskies and trains dogs year-round. She is considered by many to be one of the strongest and most disciplined female athletes of the century for her determination to rise to the top of a physically grueling sport that is dominated by men.