NOME -- Iditarod fans beware: If a happy, bearded man in Carhartt brand jeans ever wants to make a bet with you about who the next winner of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race may be, don't take it. Unless you have a penchant for paying up, walk away from a wager with Mark Nordman.
Nordman is the Iditarod's on-the-go race marshal who is also the event's go-to guy. Easily found in Nome shaking finishers' hands beneath the burled arch that marks the finish line, Nordman spends the days leading up to that point dealing with the myriad things that inevitably come up. Problem with the trail conditions? He'll dispatch trailbreakers to fix it. Injured musher? He'll help coordinate care. Dogs or mushers that shouldn't keep going?
Nordman is the guy with the power to make the call, if necessary, to sideline a team, as he did this year with Mitch Seavey, the former champ who had nearly cut his finger off at the checkpoint in Ophir.
These are decisions that Nordman makes out in the open, in full view of everyone connected to the race. But there is one call he makes year after year that he keeps to himself -- predicting who the winner will be.
In seven of the last eight years, Nordman has said he correctly guessed ahead of time who would win.
It was a combination of watching John Baker compete over the years and then, this fall, seeing how he trains, that gave Nordman the hunch Baker would be the musher to end Lance Mackey's four-year reign as champion. Nordman had been on a caribou hunt near Kotzebue when he had a chance to get a first-hand look at Baker's team on its home turf. What stood out most was Baker's mellowness about the upcoming race.
"To see someone who wasn't worrying about what kind of plastic to put on their sled," among other things, Nordman said, signaled to him that teams training along the road system would have a tough time beating Baker.
Often, mushers with the feeling that the upcoming year will be their year for victory get noticeably excited about their prospects, he said. And often, they don't pull it off. Mushers who race closer to the larger hubs are constantly adjusting and tweaking their teams based on variables they encounter race after race. Baker didn't exude that level of hyper-activity, Nordman said.
"He just had a really well traveled, low maintenance dog team," he said.
Nordman's prediction has failed only once in the years since Mitch Seavey won the Iditarod in 2004. He correctly guessed winners Robert Sorlie and Lance Mackey (who held the title four years straight), and this year, Baker.
Only in 2006 did he expect someone other than Jeff King to win, but he won't say who.
There is, however, a historical record of Nordman's skills as a fortune teller. But only he knows where it is. Every year before the race, he writes his prediction down on a piece of paper, seals it in an envelope and leaves it with a friend in Denali.
Opening the envelope after the race is a ritual he keeps to all to himself.
Contact Jill Burke at jill(at)alaskadispatch.com