When a loose dog trotted across an Olympic cross-country skiing course last month, the whole internet had a lovely time. It was a good clip. It was also, in a way that took a few weeks to become obvious, exactly the wrong idea of what a dog does at a Winter Games.
The Paralympic Winter Games opened at the Arena di Verona on March 6, running through March 15 across Lombardy, Veneto, and Trentino-Alto Adige, with around 665 athletes contesting 79 medal events in six sports. And among the accreditations and the ski wax and the wheelchairs came a small number of dogs who are not surprises, not garnish, and not there to be cute.
They are there because their athletes’ daily lives, including the parts that have nothing to do with sport, run through them.
The guide dogs: the ones who own the commute
Start here, because this is the largest group and the most misunderstood one. A guide dog’s contribution to an elite athletic career is not what happens on the snow. It is everything that happens on the way to the snow.
Riley belongs to Carina Edlinger of Austria, who races in both cross-country and biathlon and who is visually impaired. She first competed at the Paralympics in 2018, at nineteen, taking a bronze in her debut Games. She won gold in 2022. Asked at the time to weigh that medal against what mattered, she said the dog outranked the hardware, and she has been open about the fact that she was not much of a dog person before Riley, and that his arrival in 2019 gave her something to care for at a genuinely dark moment. She had one request when she was matched: a black dog, so that she might one day be able to make him out against the snow.
Pickle guides Hester Poole of Great Britain, competing in Para Alpine skiing at her first Games. She was born with a condition that affected how her retinas developed, and at fourteen she put in an application for a guide dog. What she has described Pickle giving her is not comfort but bandwidth. Navigating a corridor by sight alone, when your sight is the thing costing you effort, burns energy that then is not available for anything else. Handing the navigation to the dog gave that energy back, and she was spending it on her A-Levels.
Gigi is paired with Australia’s Taryn Dickson, a serving naval officer who came to snow sport sideways. She was a cyclist first, and moved into biathlon and cross-country after a diagnosis of degenerative eye disease. Gigi came to her through Defence Community Dogs, an independent program placing service dogs with serving and former Australian military personnel. They have been a team for five years, more than half of Dickson’s service time, which is the detail she keeps returning to.
That is the pattern in all three: the dog is not an accessory to the athletic story. The dog is what makes an ordinary week possible, and the athletic story is built on top of an ordinary week.
The assistance dogs: the ones who changed what was possible
Odell belongs to Amanda Reid, an Indigenous Australian athlete with cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities, and one of the most quietly remarkable competitors at these Games. Reid has been in the Paralympic movement since 2012, when she swam for Australia, and holds medals in cycling and swimming from the Summer Games. Snowboarding at a Winter Games makes her a genuine three-sport Paralympian. Odell supported her through the Paris Summer Games before this one, and Reid has said plainly on Instagram that the dog changed her life.
Willow works with Matt Brumby, another Australian in biathlon and cross-country, and another former Naval officer. Brumby was discharged after a spinal injury in 2001, spent time traveling, and eventually found his way into Ironman training. Willow came into his life in 2018 at the Invictus Games, the international competition created for injured and ill service members and veterans, and the two have been a unit ever since. Eight years is a long partnership by any measure, and it predates this entire chapter of his athletic career.
The dog carrying an entire family
Suki accompanies Dave Miln, a third Australian naval veteran in the biathlon and cross-country field. In December 2022, Miln pushed his daughters clear of an oncoming motorized snow blower and lost both legs doing it. Suki arrived shortly afterward.
Her job description is where this gets unusual. Service dogs are ordinarily trained to focus on one handler, and the training is explicit about it. But the trauma from that day did not land on one person. The whole family lives with some form of PTSD, and Suki has, by Miln’s account, simply worked it out: dividing her attention, moving between four people with complex needs, and trying to cover all of them.
That is not what she was trained to do. It is what she does.
“People see a service dog lying quietly under a chair at a huge event and think the job looks easy,” says Dr. Priya Nair. “It is the opposite. Crowds, noise, altitude, unfamiliar surfaces, and a handler running high on adrenaline are the hardest conditions a working dog will ever face, and holding steady through it is the entire skill.”
What the dogs are actually doing at a Winter Games
It is worth being precise, because the sentimental version of this story does the dogs no favors.
None of these animals compete. They do not accompany their athletes down a ski course or onto a biathlon range. What they do is hold together everything on either side of the event: the airport, the shuttle, the unfamiliar athletes’ village, the room that is not their room, the corridor full of strangers, the wait, the aftermath, and the flight home.
For a visually impaired biathlete, the difference between arriving at a start line calm and arriving at it drained is not a small margin. That margin is the dog’s contribution, and it does not show up in any results table.
The loose dog on the Olympic course got a bigger cheer than the skiers, and it deserved one. But the dogs who traveled here on purpose are doing something considerably harder, and mostly they are doing it lying still, under a chair, while nobody watches.
