Iditarod Live Tracking is brilliant

This year, a number of Iditarod mushers volunteered to have their sleds outfitted with GPS devices so that the race could be tracked live online. Only about 17 of this years’ mushers agreed to have their sleds outfitted, but as luck would have it, front runners Lance Mackey and Jeff King are both carrying the GPS units on their sleds, enabling Iditarod fans from around the world to get up-to-the-minute updates on the race.

This appears to have been a good year to try out this test program, as the past few days of the race have been tight between Mackey and King, and it appears that it will continue that way all the way to Nome. Even though the offical Iditarod website has provided excellent race coverage so far this year, you only get to see when the mushers have come and gone from a checkpoint, so there is no way to see all the dynamics of what is really happening out on the trail.

Until this year, that is. With Iditarod Live Tracking, I can see that Jeff King is currently about a mile behind Lance Mackey on their way towards Koyuk. I can also see that King’s team is running at 6mph to Mackey’s 5mph.

In contrast, currently on Iditarod.com, the most recent update I can see is that King left Shaktoolik 39 minutes after Mackey at 6:36 this morning.

In an increasingly on-demand world, we need this kind of interactivity to keep us interested. Hopefully this new use of technology will help bring more fans to the sport of dog mushing.