UnexpeCted Win CAps UnexpeCted hobbY By Kerri Fleming Vautour ’07


When ricardo “rico” PorTa- laTin lined up behind his eight best dogs at the start of the 2011 Can-Am Crown International Sled Dog race, he was cautiously opti- mistic. The winter had been a long and snow-filled one, perfect for training. His dogs looked good and ready. of course, there was plenty


standing in Team portalatin’s way before the finish line, not least of which were the 60 miles of snow- covered terrain in Fort Kent, Maine, right on the border of Canada. The dogs had covered these trails before, but only in smaller doses, with strong showings in the 30-mile competition during the last three years. Then there were the other teams, including last year’s winner, Dave Turner from oregon, and a collection of top Canadian mushers. Starting in the 16th position, portalatin


and his dogs were up to sixth by the time they checked into the halfway point. Ten miles after that, with about 20 left to go, the group passed a lone musher who began waving his arm at portalatin. “He was saying, ‘You’re first, you’re first!


You’re in the lead!” portalatin recalled. “I was excited about that. The dogs looked fantastic, and I thought, ‘I’m just going to let them go.’” They went, crossing the finish line a half


hour before the second-place team. “It was kind of unexpected,” said paula


Munz portalatin, Rico’s wife and partner in dog training. “The guy from oregon, we had checked his stats, and he had been winning everything. So I thought, ‘There’s no way we’re going to beat him.’ You never know what can happen.” The road to the finish line began 14 years


ago, when paula’s birthday present from Rico was a white Siberian husky puppy named Jazzmine. The couple, who met at Springfield College, had only been married a short time, but paula had made one thing abundantly clear: She was a dog person. “My family never had dogs or cats. I had


TRIANGLE 1 Vol . 83, No. 1


a turtle for a year as a kid and that was the extent [of pet ownership],” Rico said. Jazzmine’s energy soon had her owners


completely overwhelmed. Both were athletes—Rico was a gymnast, and paula was a tennis player—but neither was active enough to keep the dog calm. A chance meeting with Mike Santos, a sled-dog racer based in Ludlow, Mass., who has competed in the Iditarod, introduced the couple, who live in Westhampton, Mass., to the sport of sled-dog racing. “We had so much fun with Jazzmine and


Santos and his dogs that we wanted to give this a try. We got three or four dogs, enough to get on a sled and get going,” Rico said. “We liked being outdoors and running behind the sled. It was an activity for our lifestyle.” The portalatins bought dogs from a breeder in Maine, and when Jazzmine


succumbed to bone cancer at age three, named their kennels after her (jazzmineskennel.com). Today, the couple has 12 racing dogs and two pet German shorthair pointers who occasionally take part in the training runs for fun. Team portalatin has competed


in a number of classes, using between four and eight dogs. While training is a team affair, it is Rico who takes the reins during competitions. “Eight dogs for me, by myself, is a lot,” paula said. “They’re


very powerful.” Both graduated from Springfield College


in 1994 with degrees in physical education, and both went on to earn master’s degrees – paula in sport management in 1997 and Rico in teaching and administration in 1998. And both now work at Smith College in northampton, where Rico manages the oneCard system and paula works as a veterinary assistant. But the couple’s passion is with their


dogs. The Can-Am race, which Rico refers to as the “Super Bowl race of the East,” was the team’s first 60-mile win. While they could go on to longer races, which would require 12 dogs attached to the sled, in the future, they are sticking with the mid- distance races for now. “Maybe down the road, if we get our act


together, we’ll try longer distances with more dogs, but I want to wait a little bit,” Rico said. “My favorite distances are the 30s and 60s. usually, in the shorter runs, they’re going super fast, super hard, but on the longer races, it’s more like you’re hiking with them in the woods. You get to see things, and you’re on the trail longer with them.” And for the dogs, winning comes with its


own rewards—namely, a fresh packet of liver or beef. “It’s nothing too rich because—like with


a marathoner—after a run, you don’t want to gorge yourself too much,” Rico said. “But they love it.”1


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