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The Quiet Rise of Canine Competition
A fragmented world of agility, canicross, and dock diving is quietly setting the stage for something much larger.
Collin Armstrong
December 03, 2025
Issue #275
December 3, 2025
Quick Hits:
Dog sports already flirt with mainstream media in ways that might surprise you. ESPN runs canine agility and dock diving competitions on weekend slots.
Over the past five years the AKC National Championship â the biggest all-breed dog show in North America â has grown steadily.
Conformation entries rose about 10% (from 5,051 in 2021 to 5,557 in 2025), while total participation across companion and competitive events climbed from roughly 8,540 dogs to over 9,400.
That growth underscores a rising base of canine competitors and adds weight to dog sportâs potential as a serious entertainment category.
There's a dedicated dog-sports streaming service in AKC.tv and a Peacock docuseries called A Different Breed that goes behind the scenes of the Purina Incredible Dog Challenge.
Fantasy leagues and betting experiments have emerged, from Fantasy DockDogs where fans draft teams of diving dogs, to sportsbooks posting odds for Westminster's Best in Show.
While FanDuel doesnât offer direct betting on Weiner races, theyâve sponsored them due to their high entertainment value and growing interest over the years.
And yet, for all this activity, there is no centralized league, no star canine-athlete storylines, no unified season calendar, no "X Games for Dogs" that packages these feats into a must-watch entertainment product.
Here's the thesis:
Dog sports today are where niche human sports like snowboarding, skateboarding, or pickleball were just before they exploded into streaming darlings.
The raw infrastructure existsâŚpassionate competitors, loads of grassroots events, and a growing fan audience, but the packaging and narrative cohesion do not.
The opportunity is to connect the dots and build a formalized canine sports league or tour that can captivate mainstream viewers and unlock a new media category.
For scale, consider that the U.S. has roughly 68M dog-owning households while over 20M Americans played pickleball in 2024.
Last week the National Dog Show pulled in 12.8M viewers (up 4% from last year) on Thanksgiving (directly competing with NFL games), and formal agility trials see over 1M entries a year.
Meanwhile, an upstart niche like World Chase Tagâcompetitive parkour tagâhas amassed 400M+ online views.
The ingredients for canine sports to break through are all present.
The Current Patchwork: Talent Everywhere, Story Nowhere
The existing dog sports ecosystem is vast but highly fragmented.
The AKC alone sanctions around 22,000 events each year across dozens of sports, from agility and obedience trials to rally, scent work, herding, flyball, dock diving, and disc dog.
At the elite level, there are countless champions and impressive canine athletes, but they're spread across local clubs and federations with little crossover storytelling.
Television coverage is surprisingly real, albeit sporadic.
ESPN has an AKC agility and dog sports programming block featuring events like the AKC Agility Invitational and UpDog frisbee finals.
NBC/Peacock broadcasts the annual National Dog Show and streams a library of agility, diving dog, and frisbee competitions.
AKC's own OTT service, AKC.tv, runs a free 24/7 stream.
Yet these broadcasts feel like one-off exhibitions rather than chapters in a larger story.
There's no continuity.
A viewer might enjoy an agility championship on ESPN, then have no idea when or where the next major dog sport event is, or who the top-ranked teams are in any given discipline.
Even digital communities reflect this patchwork.
DockDogs operates its own circuit for dock jumping with a World Championship and fantasy league overlay, but it's entirely separate from the UpDog disc freestyle circuit or the North American Flyball Association.
K9 Sports Nation, a startup grassroots streaming hub, bills itself as the central hub for K9 sports with live streams, trial info, and athlete spotlightsâa promising step, but still more a content aggregator than an ESPN equivalent.
The content exists. The athletes exist. The audience exists.
What doesn't exist is a cohesive entertainment product. Right now, dog sports are siloed into hundreds of clubs and events, each cherished by die-hards but invisible to broader sports culture.
Lessons from Fringe Sports That Broke Through
To see the latent potential, consider how other once-fringe sports cracked the mainstream code.
The Snow League provides a compelling template. For decades, pro snowboarders and skiers chased disparate events with no consistent season.
In 2024, Shaun White and partners launched The Snow League to unify freestyle snow sports under one global circuit with cohesive storylines.
Investors saw the opportunity, with the league raising $15M this year to build this structure.
Their thesis?
A circuit with real structure, season-long rankings, and star narrative will convert a passionate niche into a scalable media property.
Packaging was the missing piece, not athletic talent.
The Snow League secured a partnership with NBC/Peacock for broadcasts and is turning freestyle snowboarding into an investable entertainment asset.
Pickleball offers another roadmap.
A few years ago, it was an obscure paddle game mostly played by retirees.
Now it's America's fastest-growing sport with celebrity team owners and prime-time broadcasts.
In 2023, the Association of Pickleball Professionals inked agreements with ESPN and CBS Sports for hundreds of hours of coverage.
Major League Pickleball attracted investors like Mark Cuban and LeBron James, who recognized that storylines and personalities could be built around what was essentially a casual hobby.
The key was creating a league format with team competitions and season finals to turn casual interest into fandom.
Pickleball's lesson is clear, you don't need a sport to change - you need to change how it's packaged and presented.
PPA & MLP generated $46M in revenue in 2024, theyâve hit $60M this year (+30% âŹď¸) and are projected to do $74M next year.
World Chase Tag shows that with creative format tweaks and narrative framing, even the simplest competitions can captivate massive audiences.
World Chase Tag
WCT literally turned playground tag into a professional spectator sport by creating a league format with teams, a standardized obstacle course, and tournaments. ESPN picked it up for a multi-year deal in 2021, and the concept has since spread globally.
The athletes became characters with nicknames and rivalries, and the league built a narrative around "who is the ultimate tag champion?"
The common thread is that fringe sports broke through by adding structure, storylines, and consistent exposure without losing their grassroots charm.
Dog sports are similarly visual, emotional, and relatable. Like action sports, dog events are inherently thrilling to watch. Like pickleball, participation in dog sports is growing under the radar, indicating an audience-in-waiting.
And like World Chase Tag, dog sports have universal appealâyou don't need to know the rules to ooh and aah at a frisbee dog's backflip catch.
The Hybrid Sports Frontier: Dogs + Humans = Content Gold
A particularly exciting subset of dog sports blurs the line between human endurance sport and dog competition.
Canicross (cross-country running with a dog tethered to you), bikejoring (mountain biking with a dog pulling out front), and skijoring (skiing with dog power) are exploding in popularity and could become the bridge that connects outdoor adventure audiences with the dog sports world.
The GoPro factor alone makes these worth watching.
Strapping a GoPro to a runner or biker as a high-energy dog charges down a forest trail makes for incredibly engaging POV footageâevery run is an adrenaline-fueled ride-along.
On social media, canicross and bikejoring clips consistently rack up shares. The scenery tends to be beautiful, and the action is unpredictable.
These sports also tap into huge existing communities. Trail running, mountain biking, and cross-country skiing are massive lifestyle markets.
By adding dogs into the mix, you invite those athletes to bring along their best friend, doubling the passion. Many endurance races are starting to include canicross divisions in the U.S. and Europe, recognizing the interest from runners who want to compete with their dogs.
In Europe, national federations host dedicated canicross and bikejoring championships, and the International Canicross Federation holds World Championships that draw athletes globally.
From a spectator standpoint, the hybrid nature provides a compelling narrative hook. Instead of just watching a dog perform or a human race, you're watching a team working in sync.
This dynamic naturally creates stories that viewers can latch onto the bond between handler and dog, the communication, the trust when bombing down a hill at full tilt.
Every team has a backstory ("Gunner is a shelter dog who found his calling pulling his marathoner mom through the woods"), which can be as heartstring-tugging as any Olympic profile piece.
Companies like Nonstop Dogwear have emerged as go-to outfitters for canicross and joring gear, providing specialized harnesses, bungee lines, and waist belts.
Niche adventure dog brands (like the ones we covered last week) are gaining aspirational cachet among young, outdoorsy dog owners.
These brands often share stunning user-generated content of dogs scaling mountains or running ultras with their humans, further popularizing the concept of the adventure dog athlete.
Building the League: Three Models
What would the structure of a canine sports league actually look like?
Here are 3 plausible models.
1. The Canine Endurance Tour
This would be a multi-stop annual tour for hybrid sports, staged in scenic outdoor locations. Teams of one human and one dog would compete in a series of races across different venues.
A mountain 10K canicross in Colorado, a bikejoring race in the Pacific Northwest, a skijoring sprint in Vermont.
Each race awards points, and a season-long leaderboard crowns an overall tour champion.
This model taps into travel and adventure narrative. It's as much about the journey as the competition. The hook is the athleticism of both dog and human, capturing the booming interest in trail running and cycling while giving it a compelling twist.
2. The Canine Games
This could be an X Games-style festival where multiple dog sports championships take place under one big tent.
Picture a long weekend extravaganza featuring agility championships, dock diving finals, disc dog freestyle showcases, and canicross races on a short, spectator-friendly course.
Add exhibitions of niche skills like nosework challenges and flyball relays. The idea is a program where at any given moment over 2-3 days, something amazing is happening. Elements of this exist already.
Purina's Incredible Dog Challenge has for years combined agility, diving dogs, freestyle disc, and hurdle racing in a multi-event championship that's been running nearly 30 years.
The difference here is scaling it up and branding it as a cohesive spectator event marketed like the "Olympics of Dog Sports."
3. The Always-On Digital League Hub
A digital-first platform that becomes the central hub for all things competitive dog sports.
Features would include athlete profiles with stats, rankings that update based on worldwide results, a calendar of upcoming competitions with links to livestreams, and a newsfeed of stories and highlights.
Built into this platform could be fantasy leagues or pick'em games to drive engagement.
Users could follow favorite dogs and teams, get notified when they compete, and vote on awards. Year-round engagement matters because sports fans today expect to engage 24/7, not just when an event is happening.
These models aren't mutually exclusive.
A Canine Sports Entertainment Company could emerge that runs a Canine Games festival, sanctions a Canine Endurance Tour, and manages a digital league platform tying it together.
Interactivity: Fantasy Leagues & Ethical Betting
One major lever to pull in modern sports entertainment is interactivityâgiving the audience a stake in the game. Dog sports lend themselves surprisingly well to this.
DockDogs piloted a Fantasy DockDogs competition where fans could draft teams of top dogs and score points based on diving event performance. While those fantasy leagues were small and experimental, they demonstrated appetite for fans to play along rather than just watch.
On the betting front, casual betting in a controlled, welfare-first way already exists. Major sportsbooks have offered odds on things like Westminster Dog Show, with bettors wagering on which breed would win Best in Show.
These were treated as novelty "entertainment" betsâmore like betting on the Oscars than on an NFL gameâbut they signal fan interest in dog competitions.
If outright betting is a bridge too far, the middle ground is free-to-play prediction games and bracket challenges.
Fans could fill out brackets for a national agility championship similar to March Madness brackets, or play pick-the-winner games for each event.
These second-screen activities keep viewers engaged throughout a broadcast and drive social sharing. Sports that have strong second-screen or fantasy components generally see a big uptick in media value.
The ethical key is that none of these involve encouraging harmful practices. All dogs in these sports compete because they love it, and any gaming layered on top is simply about spectators predicting outcomes.
The Founder Opportunity
For founders, this is largely uncharted territory, which means whitespace.
Media rights for dog sports currently have low-to-no fees associated with them, making it relatively cheap for new entrants to negotiate carriage on streaming platforms or secondary cable channels.
A plausible path is launching a FAST (Free Ad-Supported TV) channel dedicated to dog sports on Pluto or Samsung TV to prove viewership numbers, alongside live streaming and short form clips on social platforms (IG, YouTube, TT).
Then you could consider selling a package of events to ESPN+ or a niche Fox Sports slot once you have critical mass.
The monetization stack for events could be robustâticket sales, VIP experiences, sponsorships from pet food and outdoor brands, merchandise, clinics and workshops, and media rights.
Many brands are eager to connect with passionate pet parents in unique ways.
Sponsorship opportunities extend beyond pet brands to outdoor apparel, auto manufacturers who explicitly market to dog owners, insurance companies, and fitness brands.
The total addressable market is substantial. Even if just 1% of U.S. dog-owning households become avid viewers, that's around 680,000 householdsâmore than enough to sustain a league.
Global potential exists too, from dog-loving countries in Europe to Japan's fascination with certain dog events.
The pet industry keeps growing, and people's emotional connection to dogs is only deepening. That suggests a strong foundation for turning hobby interest into a viable spectator sport economy.
The Race Is On
Dog sports aren't a quirky sideshow, they're an under-packaged asset sitting in plain sight.
The same forces that turned obscure pastimes into big business are present for canine athletics, with the added bonus that dogs already have universal appeal.
It's content that can trend on TikTok one minute and bring families together in front of the TV the next.
The audience is waiting.
They just don't know it yet because no one's consistently given them this content in an irresistible format.
Interest in ârodeo dogâ has climbed steadily over the past five years, moving from a fringe curiosity to a small but consistently growing search category.
Despite its niche footprint, the trend line shows real momentum.
A 34% YoY increase and a baseline that has doubled since 2020. The spikes in search volume reflect moments when viral clips of dogs barrel-racing or weaving through rodeo-style patterns hit social feeds, but the rising floor beneath those spikes is the more important signal. It means people arenât just reacting to content; theyâre actively seeking out this sport, which is remarkable for an agility-derivative format that isnât formally structured or widely promoted.
What this really highlights is how dog sports are constantly evolving, spinning off new hybrid or derivative competitions as handlers experiment with formats that are fast, fun, and visually satisfying.
Rodeo dog is essentially a Western-flavored remix of agility and barrel racing, yet itâs building its own micro-community and generating measurable search interest without any major league, governing body, or national spotlight.
Audiences are hungry for novel canine performance sports, and small innovations, or even playful reinterpretations can create entirely new lanes of competition.
Rodeo dogâs rise is less about the sport itself and more about what it represents, a signal that the ecosystem is fertile, flexible, and ready for new formats that blend speed, skill, and spectacle.
See you Friday!
