Flyball at Crufts 2010

Flyball gets its own post; we spent a lot of time watching it! Katie was busy reporting for Flyball Fever and as pretty much all the teams this year were BFA teams, just under different names, we knew a lot of the dogs and people competing. Thankfully they knew us too so didn’t mind us visiting their benching from time to time for updates and the latest draw.

We watched all the heats and finals; personally, it looked to me as though experience paid off for a lot of the teams. Those that had been to Crufts before with the old box generally got through, whereas those on their first visit generally didn’t. That’s not true for everyone though! I have to say that all the teams looked great, although I’m not sure how much faster than the old-pedal-box this really was. There were some super dogs doing some super turns, but it was very difficult for the dogs to really get any speed up without having to break on a bad surface.

Major congrats to Nuneaton (or Nuneaton x Marnicks!) for winning; we spoke to them on Saturday morning and they were convinced they were going to be watching the flyball on TV at home! I think it’s fair to say that very few people were looking at them as potential winners after the morning session, they just didn’t look that good and I think Wellingborough (Molten Magnets, to the BFA’ers!) won overall and Nuneaton were 3rd or 4th. Exactly the same teams go through to the evening Final but it definitely played out differently, the Nuns just stepped up to the pressure, fantastic to watch and they really deserved to win.

We were sat just behind the madcap Broxburn supporters in the stands, I wonder if they had something to do with Nuneaton’s win?! The Nuns knocked Broxburn out in the morning session, so the Scots all donned Nuneaton jackets, borrowed a flag to support them for the evening, and made even more noise than they had for their own team. That’s flyball all over!