An Over Crowded Population Of Strays Roam The Olympic City Streets Of Sochi
U.S Winter Olympic Athletes had a tough time during the 2014 Games in Sochi Russia because their full concentration and focus had to be put into each of their sports disciplines, training and competitions, without distractions of the city’s over populated stray community.
But back at the Hotel, their main concern was how to save at least a few tens or dozens of street dogs that have become a common sight in the Russian City of Sochi, host to the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. Every dog they set their eyes on, probably would disappear the following day thanks to the city’s Extermination Squad, who pick hundreds off the streets every single day.
Many of these athletes returned to the U.S not only with Olympic medals but with the greatest prize of all, saving dozens of cross-breed strays doomed to live miserable lives and imminent death.
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These are good days for Sochi Jacobellis. A typical morning for the wiry-haired mongrel with the deferential demeanor and big, floppy ears begins early, when he wakes and races downstairs to the back door of the house that his owner, 29-year-old Olympic snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis, shares with her parents near Stratton, Vt. ……When the weather is nice, he spends most of his time wandering the Jacobellises’ 2½ acres, …… Otherwise, he’ll stay inside and gnaw on a chew toy or search for sunny places to nap, often alongside the family’s other dogs, an 11-year-old German shepherd named Bear and Gidget, a 9-year-old Yorkie.
Altogether, it’s a long way from where Sochi was 16 months ago, when Lindsey met him at her hotel in Rosa Khutor, the Russian resort town in the Caucasus Mountains that hosted Alpine events for the 2014 Winter Olympics. Back then Sochi—a mix of borzoi, Dalmatian, German shepherd, German shorthaired pointer, Tibetan terrier and white Swiss shepherd, according to the results of a DNA test—was just trying to survive. The 3-month-old stray was malnourished and had an eye infection; he sustained himself by begging for food while staying clear of hotel security. ……Not long after, she began looking into how to bring the puppy, whom she would name for the Olympics’ host city, back to Vermont.
Besides Jacobellis, three other U.S. athletes—hockey players David Backes and Kelli Stack and slopestyle skier Gus Kenworthy—each brought at least one stray dog home from Sochi.
It wasn’t just the ubiquity of those strays that turned them into social-media sensations—it was the Russian government’s hiring of an exterminator, who called them “biological trash” and cited the danger of a ski jumper landing on one. Hundreds of dogs were killed in the weeks before the Games.
Some athletes couldn’t just, in the words of Backes, “give them a last meal, say a prayer and hope for the best.” And so a few took action. For Jacobellis, who disappointingly failed to match the snowboard cross silver she won at Turin in 2006, bringing Sochi home from the Games was more meaningful than returning with a medal.
Stray dogs have a rich history in Russia. Literary references to Moscow’s mongrels date back to the 19th century, and St. Petersburg’s Stray Dog Café was a popular hangout for cast-aside novelists and poets in the early part of the 20th. The first living creature to orbit the Earth, in fact, was a 3-year-old female Moscow stray named Laika, who was shot into space aboard Sputnik 2 on Nov. 3, 1957. Today, an estimated 35,000 mutts roam Moscow alone; a group of so-called “metro dogs” are even sophisticated enough to have become regular users of the subway system.
Moscow’s population is about 12 million; Sochi’s is around 365,000. According to Neuronov, there are no statistics on the number of stray dogs in that city (one estimate puts it at 4,000), but theories about where they come from focus on the construction of venues for the most expensive Olympic Games in history. Some belonged to families displaced by construction, a number that Human Rights Watch has estimated to be about 2,000; others were owned (or fed) by the tens of thousands of construction workers who made the area their temporary home. When those workers departed, the thinking goes, they left their dogs behind.
………In a country whose people have a reputation for inscrutability, and where smiling at passing strangers is a cultural taboo, Sochi’s sociable mutts provided a window into the hearts of every-day Russians. “The behavior of strays has 100% to do with their human interaction,” says Humane Society International’s Kelly O’Meara. “We found out that many of the locals in Sochi were taking care of these dogs.”
The international outcry over the culling of stray dogs was immediate, and as the Games began, two hastily constructed shelters popped up near Sochi. One, PovoDog, was funded by Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who’d financed development of much of the area in advance of the Olympics. The other, Sochi Dogs, was founded in Morristown, N.J., on the eve of the Games by the mother-daughter team of Tanya and Anna Umansky. ………..
During the Games the two shelters were critical in helping athletes bring their adopted dogs home. Stack, who won a silver medal, adopted Shayba (named for an Olympic hockey venue, itself the Russian word for puck), a 45-pound German shepherd mix, through Sochi Dogs. But most athletes got outside help. Jacobellis relied on the staff at her hotel to get Sochi’s paperwork in order. Kenworthy, who also won silver, had to return to the U.S. for a media tour after the Games, so his friend Robin MacDonald stuck around for nearly a month to complete the adoption of five mutts—a mother and her four puppies—that he’d bonded with near the Olympic media center. ………
All these athletes have heard the criticism that instead of adopting strays from Sochi, they should have rescued dogs in the U.S. But the opprobrium doesn’t account for the circumstances. Rescuing the dogs, says O’Meara, was “a very natural human reaction to a very terrible situation.”
“I saw these dogs every day, and I knew what was happening to them,” says Kenworthy. “I didn’t want that to happen to dogs that I had fallen in love with.”
………….For Sochi Jacobellis, who splits his time between Stratton and the Jacobellises’ other house, in Roxbury, Conn., the days of privation and neglect are a distant memory, if they’re a memory at all. Lindsey notes that he’s not abnormally obsessed with food—he doesn’t snap at those who come close to his dog bowl…….
“I wasn’t really looking to adopt a dog,” says Jacobellis, “but Sochi significantly impacted my three weeks over there. I felt like I had to repay that kindness in some way.”
Article: Mark Beech – Sports Illustrated
Photo: Talisman Brolin for Sports Illustrated
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