After 23-year-old Willow musher Dallas Seavey won the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race as a rookie in 2011, he became an odds-on favorite for the big prize -- the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race – a couple weeks later. Some tagged him leader of the young guns in the old sport of long-distance, sled-dog racing and a potential Iditarod victor. But his team never marched into contention. They hung with the leaders going north from Willow to the Bering Sea coast, and then put on a powerful surge to finish a more-than-respectable fourth.

But the team, driven by a musher inevitably tired from more than a week on the Quest trail, was never in position to make a winning move. So this year, Seavey sat out the Quest. Hugh Neff from Tok won the race early Tuesday in a squeaker over Allen Moore from Two Rivers. It was a breakthrough victory for Neff, a longtime journeyman dog driver, and it fueled the inevitable speculation as to what it means for his Iditarod fortunes in March.

Fluke no more

Blame four-time Iditarod champ Lance Mackey from Fairbanks for all of this. Mackey was still pretty much a nobody when he first won the Quest in 2005. He got a little more attention when he successfully defended the title in 2006, but not all that much. The Quest was still regarded as Alaska's "other" long-distance sled dog race, and the prevailing opinion was that anyone who put the time and energy into winning the Quest doomed their Iditarod prospects.

Mackey seemed to support that belief as much as anyone. His winning Quest teams ran with the frontrunners in the Iditarod after each of those early Quest victories but never challenged for an Iditarod championship. Then came 2007 when Mackey simply dominated the Quest and went from there to victory in the Iditarod, proving that what had long been thought impossible was clearly possible.

More than a few thought it a fluke. Some pegged Mackey a one-shot wonder like his brother, Rick, who won in 1983, and his father, Dick, who won in 1978. Neither of the older Mackeys could repeat the feat. More than a few thought Lance had doomed his chances of Iditarod victory No. 2 when he announced he'd do the Quest-Iditarod double again in 2008.

When he repeated the impossible -- back-to-back victories in the world's two longest, toughest sled dog races -- the whole paradigm shifted. Suddenly a lot of mushers began thinking, "Hmmm, maybe the Quest is a good warm-up for an Iditarod team."

And it may well be. Experts in sled-dog physiology years ago started talking about how if a musher managed his team just right he could take the canine athletes to a point that metabolically allowed them to keep going and going and going like the Energizer Bunny.

The Quest, a slower race than the Iditarod due to the bigger sleds the teams must tow, seemed the perfect setup. It eased the dogs into a workload that primed them to be at their best for the Iditarod.

Were Gatt, Schnuelle drained?

There is certainly some evidence to support this belief. Now-retired, Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada, musher Sebastian Schnuelle, won the Quest in 2009 and then posted his

Which leaves begging a couple big and unanswerable questions.

First is whether Schnuelle or Gatt might have had that bit of extra energy needed to win the 2009 or 2010 Iditarod if they'd sat out the Quest. Canines might have a metabolic switch that when tripped allows them to keep going and going. But there' s no evidence of such a switch in people. Fatigue in humans just keeps building and building until it becomes disabling or causes mistakes in judgment. Schnuelle, for one, doesn't buy that as a problem.

"Running the Quest before gets a musher better in the groove," he said. "You start Iditarod, and it feels like you never left the trail. Right off the get-go you are in the checkpoint routine."