Dania Cup part 2... The competition

We took Scandal and Fire-work with us, Fire for the socialisation, new experiences, and also because she is such a happy puppy to have around. Scandal I entered in the grade 3 and open classes. We had deliberated about bringing Jed but in the end decided against it for a number of reasons, mainly that I wanted to concentrate on Scandal with it being so close to EO. In FCI, there are 3 grades, and UK grade 6-7 dogs go into grade 3. Each day we had a grade 3 agility and jumping class plus an open. There were 5 open classes over the week, and they then take your best 2 agility rounds and best jumping round, to calculate the top 30 large dogs to go through to the finals at the end of the week. There were about 270 dogs in the large height.

The show had some really great judges from all over the world, including 2 of the EO judges, Tamas Traj and Veronika Herendy, plus both world championship judges Jozef van Eester and Jos Thines, so I wanted to get some experience running their courses.

After the first three open rounds Scandal was lying in 1^st place on the leader board, with a 2^nd (clear) and 37^th (5 faults) in her 2 agilitys, and a 6^th in the jumping. On the 5^th day, Scandal won the agility class meaning her results were 1^st, 2^nd and 6^th, giving her a total score of 9 (the lower the score the better). This meant we’d be running last in Saturday’s finals. 

The Finals - I really liked the course, there was a handly bit after the aframe and I wasn't sure which way to run after the aframe - take the long but safer route back to the tunnel entrance, or send her to the tunnel and run in the opposite direction. After watching a few of the larges run, I decided I would do the latter. It worked, and was definitely quicker. Really pleased with her weave entry in this, and her stop-dogwalk too. We won it by 0.3secs, the dog that came 2^nd in the finals was Marje's Susi from Estonia. At EO 2013 in the finals they were only 0.2s off the winners Jaanita with a dropped bar, refusal, and not pushing on the final stretch, so it was pretty cool to be  faster than them :-)

I was really pleased to get a clear and a place under each of the EO/FCI judges. 2^nd and 1^st under Jozef and Jos, and 1^st and 5^th under Tamas and Veronika. We also came away with a number of things to train and practice in the run up to FCI. I was very happy that Scandal was 100% on her contacts, and weaves were 94% perfect (1 missed weave entry due to my handling, out of 18 runs).

The courses differ in FCI, mainly I think they are able to test speed and control at the same time, better than we do over here. One thing I took from it is that they LOVE running, and really attack courses.

Below is the video of some of my favourite runs…

Thank you to Dennis Bay for all the photos, it is lovely to have them all to look back over :-)