Day: March 15, 2022

Musher Brent Sass won the arduous Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race across Alaska on Tuesday as his team of 11 dogs dashed off the Bering Sea ice through a crowd of fans in downtown Nome.

Sass mushed down Front Street and across the finish line just before 6 a.m.

“It’s awesome, it’s a dream come true,” Sass said before he was presented the prize-winning check of $50,000, his beard and mustache partially encased in ice during the post-race interview.

“When I started mushing, my goal was to win the Yukon Quest and win the Iditarod. Checked them both off the list now,” he said.

Sass said he was “super, super, super proud” of his dog team. “It’s all on them. They did an excellent job the whole race. I asked a lot of them, and they preformed perfectly,” he said.

“Every one of these dogs I’ve raised since puppies, and we’ve been working towards this goal the whole time, and we’re here,” he said, his voice cracking. “It’s crazy.”

Fans lined the street welcoming the popular musher, who was escorted by police for the final few blocks to the famous burled arch that marked his victory.

It’s the first Iditarod win for Sass, a wilderness guide and kennel owner who was running in his seventh Iditarod. His previous best finish was third last year.

Sass took command of this year’s race early on and never was challenged, but the final stretch of the race might have been the toughest, with extreme winds blowing on the Bering Sea ice leading into Nome.

“I had to make it very interesting at the end,” Sass said.

At one point during the last few miles of the race, he took a tumble, and the sled went off the trail. He thought he was going to have to hunker down, stopping with his dogs to wait until the weather improved.

“I couldn’t see anything,” he said. “The dogs, the only reason we got out of there is because they trusted me to get them back to the trail. And once we got back to the trail, they just took off a hundred miles an hour again, and we were able to stay on the trail and get in here. It was a lot of work,” he said.

The 42-year-old native of Minnesota who moved north in 1998 to ski for the University of Alaska Fairbanks had about a 90 minute lead over the defending champion, Dallas Seavey, early Tuesday as he left the last checkpoint in Safety, which is 22 miles (35 kilometers) from Nome.

Seavey is tied with musher Rick Swenson for the most Iditarod wins ever at 5. Seavey earlier told The Associated Press that he was planning to take some time off after the race to spend with his daughter whether he won or lost it.

Sass said Seavey is “the best right now and being able to to sort of keep him at bay the whole entire race and and race against the best guy in the business, that just makes this victory even sweeter.”

Seavey toward the end of the race said he was resigned to runner-up status, telling KTUU-TV at the checkpoint in White Mountain that he couldn’t win unless something went wrong for Sass.

Seavey joked: “We’ve got a pretty solid lead over third.”

The third place musher, Jessie Holmes, was about 50 miles (80 kilometers) behind Seavey on Tuesday.

The nearly 1,000-mile (1,609-kilometer) race across Alaska began March 6 just north of Anchorage. The route took mushers along Alaska’s untamed and unforgiving wilderness, including two mountain ranges, the frozen Yukon River and Bering Sea ice along the state’s western coastline.

This is the 50th running of the race, which started in 1973. This year’s event began with 49 mushers, and five have dropped out along the trail.

Sass was the Iditarod’s rookie of the year in 2012 when he finished 13th. The next year he fell back to 22nd place, before skipping the 2014 race.

In 2015 he was disqualified when race officials found he had an iPod Touch with him on the trail, a violation of race rules banning two-way communication devices because the iPod Touch could connect to the Internet. He said he was clueless, and wanted his fans to know he had no intention of cheating.

Sass placed 16th the following year before taking a three-year break from the Iditarod. In 2020, he placed fourth and was third last year.

Sass, who lives in the tiny area of Eureka, about a four-hour drive northwest of Fairbanks, had more success in the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race.

He claimed titles in that 1,000-mile (1,609-kilometer) race between Fairbanks and Whitehorse, Yukon, in 2015, 2019 and 2020. This year, the race was shortened to smaller races on both sides of the border, with Sass winning both the 350-mile (563-kilometer) Alaska race and the 300-mile (483-kilometer) Canadian contest.

Source: Voice of America

The Pritzker Prize, architecture’s most prestigious award, was awarded Tuesday to Burkina Faso-born architect Diebedo Francis Kere, the first African to win the honor in its more than 40-year history.

Kere, 56, was hailed for his “pioneering” designs that are “sustainable to the earth and its inhabitants — in lands of extreme scarcity,” said Tom Pritzker, chairman of the Hyatt Foundation that sponsors the award, in a statement.

Kere, a dual citizen of Burkina Faso and Germany, said he was the “happiest man on this planet” to become the 51st recipient of the illustrious prize since it was first awarded in 1979.

“I have a feeling of an overwhelming honor but also a sense of responsibility,” he told AFP during an interview in his office in Berlin.

Kere is renowned for building schools, health facilities, housing, civic buildings and public spaces across Africa, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Togo, Kenya, Mozambique, Togo and Sudan.

“He is equally architect and servant, improving upon the lives and experiences of countless citizens in a region of the world that is at times forgotten,” Pritzker said.

Kere won plaudits for his 2001 project for a primary school in Gando village, in Burkina Faso, where he was born.

Unlike traditional school buildings, which used concrete, Kere’s innovative design combined local clay, fortified with cement to form bricks that helped retain cooler air inside.

A wide, raised tin roof protects the building from rain while helping the air circulate, meaning natural ventilation without any need for air conditioning.

Kere engaged the local community during the design and building phase, and the number of students at the school increased from 120 to 700, the Hyatt Foundation said in its release.

The success of the project saw the creation of an extension, a library and teachers’ housing in later years.

Kere “empowers and transforms communities through the process of architecture,” designing buildings “where resources are fragile and fellowship is vital,” the Pritzker statement added.

“Through his commitment to social justice and engagement, and intelligent use of local materials to connect and respond to the natural climate, he works in marginalized countries laden with constraints and adversity,” the organizers said.

In Kere’s native Burkina Faso, his accolade was hailed as a reminder that Burkina Faso should be known internationally for more than a violent jihadi insurgency that has gripped the country.

Groups affiliated to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group have killed more than 2,000 people and displaced at least 1.7 million.

“In the current pain of the security crisis, our country must remember that it is also the nation of exceptional men like Francis Kere,” said Ra-Sablga Seydou Ouedraogo, of the non-profit Free Afrik.

Nebila Aristide Bazie, head of the Burkina Faso architects’ council, said the award “highlights the African architect and the people of Burkina Faso.”

In 2017, Kere designed the Serpentine pavilion in London’s Hyde Park, a prestigious assignment given to a world-famous architect every year.

He was also one of the architects behind Geneva’s International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum and has held solo museum shows in Munich and Philadelphia.

“I am totally convinced that everyone deserves quality,” he said in his office, where he celebrated his award with his team.

“I’m always thinking how can I get the best for my clients, for those who can afford but also for those who cannot afford.

“This is my way of doing things, of using my architecture to create structures to serve people, let’s say to serve humanity,” Kere added.

Source: Voice of America