Small taste of the FCI 'World' Championships

O.k., I'll admit I'm grouchy about the notion that the FCI is a legitimate 'world' championship.  How can you seriously claim you're showcasing the best in the world when a significant portion of competitors in the world are not invited to play based on non-performance criteria (ie pedigree, absolutely the most stupid criteria there is)?  Mixes and rescues and non-kennel club recognized breeds aside, what if you have a working dog like a Border Collie and you don't want to register it with the AKC (or whatever the country's kennel club is) for ethical reasons?  The team format waters down the competition as well.  Anytime you limit entry based on non-performance criteria you water down your competition.  Sure there are a lot of great teams there but how much more awesome would the competition be if entry was based purely on merit and not pedigree or political boundaries?

Anyway, for those of you who, like myself, have limited funds and a short attention span and lots of other fun things to do on a beautiful Saturday I found a short video of some of the large dog Individual jumping runs.  A great taste of the courses and handling at the 'worlds' without having to spend your whole day watching your ass get bigger and your eyes go square.

What a crazy looking course on paper but those handlers made it look easy.  Sort of.  The widest variation in handling was the closing #16 to #20 jumps.  The top 5 finishers were .66 seconds apart.  I'd love to see a Dartfish overlay of some of those runs to see exactly where the differences were.  Were the time differences due to handling strategies, obstacle performance, tightness/speed of turns, speed on the flat?  The engineer geek in me wants to know.

My favorite run was the second place team, Anja and Pray, who were only .47 seconds behind the leader.  Such a smooth, flawless looking run, poetry in motion.  Gotta love a team who can run fast and clean and look pretty doing it.  That is how I'd love to be able to run my dog.  Maybe someday.  I love watching Silvia Trkman run too, so much energy and enthusiasm.  And that crazy guy near the end, wow, that was a wild and wooly ride but it worked for him.  Fun to see all the different handling styles.

There are some more runs posted by the same woman here at her YouTube site.  As for me, I'm off to work on those dogwalk turns.  Maybe I'll even shoot some video to share.