There ain’t no rule says a dog can’t compete in an Olympic cross-country skiing event, so Nazgul the Czechoslovakian wolfdog went ahead and did this morning. There’s great video too.¹

Perhaps the best part is the amazing photo finish from Omega:

You might notice that the photo’s vertical line is aligned with Nazgul’s nose. My guess was that the system read his leg as a ski, and that the ski doesn’t count for crossing the finish line. A quick read NBC’s cross country primer seems to confirm this:

In cross-country skiing, the race finishes for each skier when the toe of their front boot crosses the finish line. A finish is not determined by the tip of a ski.

Nor, apparently, the tip of the leg of a dog.

The aforementioned primer goes on to note:

Electronic timing technology is used to identify official race finish times, like a photo finish system.

Thanks to that, we got this delightful photo.

Previously in dogs doing human activities: Peanut Butter Hit a Walk-Off Dinger

Footnotes:

1. Said video is, of course, archived here. ↩︎