Iditarod musher's fate decision due at meeting today.

By CRAIG MEDRED
Anchorage Daily News
Published: May 18, 2007
Last Modified: May 18, 2007 at 05:03 AM

An educator, a gold miner, a corporate lawyer, a retired state bureaucrat and a utility manager are part of the group that will sit down today to decide the fate of Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race musher Ramy Brooks.

The 38-year-old Healy dog driver has already been disqualified from this year's race for physically punishing his dogs in the Bering Sea village of Golovin.

What exactly happened there still remains somewhat in dispute. About a half-dozen villagers claim to have seen Brooks striking dogs with both his feet and his fists, but Brooks has confessed only to smacking some with a 1-inch-wide by 1/4-inch-thick stick of trail-marking lathe after they refused to obey his commands and ended up snarling themselves into a big tangle on slick ice near the village.

That confession was enough to get the two-time Iditarod runner-up booted from the 1,100-mile race from Anchorage to Nome.

The Iditarod Trail Committee meets today at 9 a.m. to determine whether further punishment is in order.

ITC executive director Stan Hooley said on Thursday that an attorney for the race has been to Golovin to interview witnesses about what happened and has written a report for the Iditarod board. Hooley said he hadn't studied the report, but had skimmed it.

"There were no surprises," he said.

He refused to release a copy Thursday, saying that was a board prerogative. He expected the report would become available today, and Thomas Wang, an attorney representing Brooks, said his client would be on hand to counter at least some of the charges in it.

"I anticipate (Ramy) will take the opportunity" to make a statement, Wang said. "Ramy disagrees with several of the more severe witness accounts. ... We've been in discussions with the (Iditarod) investigator."

Wang added that the situation might be clearer if the Iditarod had conducted a complete examination of events in Golovin immediately after accounts emerged. Not until after Brooks crossed the finish line in Nome did the Iditarod begin looking into accusations that Brooks had abused his dogs on the trail.

Race marshal Mark Nordman within days had concluded that Brooks struck some dogs in Golovin. Nordman said that was all he needed to disqualify Brooks from the 2007 race, and he did. Brooks then went public with the confession he'd hit some dogs with the lathe.

It wasn't until the Daily News reported that several villagers said they saw Brooks kicking and hitting dogs, and that the attack went on for some time, that the Iditarod began a more thorough investigation of what happened in Golovin.

"It's an investigation by the Iditarod attorney," Wang said, "and that was five or six weeks after the event.

"Memories fade over time," he said, "and memories can be influenced."
Since the end of the Iditarod, the Internet has been humming with scathing chat about the Brooks affair.

Heir to one of the greatest mushing traditions in the state -- his mother and his grandfather are both famous winners of the Anchorage Fur Rendezvous World Championship Sled Dog Race and the Open North American Sled Dog Race in Fairbanks -- Brooks has had his defenders, but there are many more who have called for the musher to be banned from racing for life.

The Iditarod did that before in the case of 1976 champion Jerry Riley from Nenana, another Interior Native musher. Riley was banned in 1990, but the lifetime restriction was lifted a decade later.

Riley, unlike Brooks, was several times accused of mistreating dogs. Brooks had an unblemished public reputation until the incident in Golovin.

"Ramy has already received a pretty severe penalty," Wang argued, noting that the two-time second-place finisher in the Iditarod was very publicly booted from the race and has been often vilified since.

"It's been a terrible ordeal for him to go through," Wang said.

The board is expected to decide today if further penalties are warranted.

Dog treatment is a sensitive issue for the Iditarod. For years, animal rights activists have tried to characterize the race as cruel. Just as important, however, is the fact that a number of mushers are over-the-top dog lovers.

How members of the Iditarod board, most of whom are or were dog mushers, decide to punish Brooks is likely to depend as much on personal views on dog care as on public opinion, public pressure and concerns about public relations.

As to how the board might arrive at a decision on what penalties to levy, Wang noted, "we really don't have any parameters."

The Iditarod rules provide no guidelines. Brooks' penalty, if any, could conceivably range from as little as a warning to change his behavior to a lifetime ban.

Brooks, for whom dogs are both life and livelihood, is clearly hoping to avoid the latter.

"Ramy has not wanted to contest this in the media," Wang said. "(But) his focus is on telling his story."