I spent this weekend glued to my computer screen watching the coverage of the FCI Agility World Championships. Probably many of you did also. If you didn’t see the competition yet, it’s well worth watching. The people at Agility Vision still have it available as Video-On-Demand for a reasonable price.
There was an interesting closing sequence in the Large Dog Team Agility (Standard) course. Of course there are always a lot of interesting and exciting things at the World Championships, but this was particularly pertinent to running-contacts, specifically a running dogwalk.
Here’s the closing sequence from the course.
This was a difficult sequence for a fast dog with a running contact as there was a tricky sequence at each end of the dogwalk. On the approach to the dogwalk, handlers had to manage:
- The back-side approach to #14
- Followed by a threadle #14 – #15
- Then a send to #16 – if they were planning to be at the end of the dogwalk with their dog.
After the dogwalk the dogs naturally wanted to do #18 from the wrong side. I saw a few strategies for handling this that worked well, but the handler had to be there to execute any them. If the handler spent too much time making sure they got the wall jump at 16, then it was very hard to beat the dog to the end of the dogwalk and manage the back-side approach to the 270.
Here is a link to the whole course:
Course map of 2009 FCI Large Team Agility
The course shown above, and all of this year’s courses and results can be found on the FCI WC 2009 page of Louis Hillebrand’s web site.
Results are also available from the Official Site for the 2009 FCI World Agility Championships.
Tags: 2009, Agility, Competition, Dogwalk, FCI, Running Contacts, World Championship