{"id":304615,"date":"2026-02-18T17:43:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T17:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/304615\/"},"modified":"2026-02-18T17:43:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T17:43:09","slug":"competitors-hounded-by-husky-at-winter-olympics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/304615\/","title":{"rendered":"Competitors hounded by husky at Winter Olympics"},"content":{"rendered":"

A husky with lots of enthusiasm but no credentials gatecrashed a women’s team sprint cross-country race at the Winter Olympics on Wednesday, giving an impromptu performance that had spectators howling with delight.<\/p>\n

The dog wandered onto the stadium course in Tesero during the qualifying event, spotted a couple of athletes on the finishing straight and decided to join the action.<\/p>\n

The canine sniffed around for a bit before racing across the line ahead of the skiers to wild cheers from a crowd clearly entertained by the unexpected addition to the field.<\/p>\n

“It was so fun. I like dogs, we have a dog at home,” said Sweden’s Jonna Sundling, who went on to win gold with team-mate Maja Dahlqvist.<\/p>\n

“When it came to the finish line I was like, ‘Okay we have a new member.’ He or she wanted to go through the mixed zone as well, so it was fun,” she added referring to the area where competitors speak to the media.<\/p>\n

\"Husky_Winter
\nThe hound bounds after exhausted competitors<\/p>\n

Not all racers agreed.<\/p>\n

“I was cooling down on the bike, and I saw the dog and I was like, ‘That’s crazy’ and I was just happy I wasn’t skiing next to the dog because I’m a bit afraid of dogs. I was happy I was already at the finish,” said Nadja Kaelin of Switzerland.<\/p>\n

The Swiss skier won the silver medal with team-mate Nadine Faehndrich in the finals race.<\/p>\n

Officials eventually got hold of the dog, but not before timekeepers preparing for a photo-finish in the race captured an image of the animal crossing the line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A husky with lots of enthusiasm but no credentials gatecrashed a women’s team sprint cross-country race at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304616,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-304615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304615\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}