HOW GOBI WON FAME AND HEARTS WORLDWIDE
Stray dog lands book, movie deals and a new home in Scotland after an amazing race in China
As dog stories go, this NEW YO R K one about a scruffy little stray named Gobi has legs for miles.
The sand-coloured pooch with big soulful eyes has a book out and a movie deal after she happened on ultra-runner Dion Leonard last year during a 250-km race across desert dunes, over mountains and through yurt villages in the remote autonomous region of Xinjiang in northwest China.
On short but powerful legs, Gobi kept pace with Leonard for nearly 130 kilometres in extreme heat, securing a spot in his heart forever.
While the Australian living in Scotland returned home to Edinburgh to figure out how one adopts a stray dog from China, Gobi went missing from the home of a person in the race community Leonard had met during the seven-day race. The acquaintance had been kind enough to temporarily shelter the dog as Leonard untangled the red tape.
But Gobi’s disappearance led Leonard to hustle back to China and join a search for the dog in the densely populated city of Urumqi, where street cleaners disposed of their reward posters about as fast as they could plaster them on lampposts, cars and shop windows.
Looming over the search was fear that nearly $50,000 raised for Gobi’s cause through crowdfunding might have created a “dognapping” scenario.
About 10 days after Gobi disappeared, she was found and the two were reunited, though the dog had suffered a hip injury and a deep head gash.
Together, they waited out 90 days of quarantine in a dank Beijing apartment before making it to Scotland in January.
So what made Gobi, named by Leonard for the desert where they met, choose the 42-year-old Aussie in the first place?
“That is the million dollar question,” Leonard said. “I wish she could tell me because I get asked that quite a lot and I think about it quite a lot and I have no idea why, whether it was my smell — we don’t shower during the week in these races — or whether it was something else, whether it was a past life connection.
“It was definitely fate and I’m so glad that she chose me … she’s brought lots of joy to people around the globe with our story.”
It was Day 2 of the race that Gobi sought out the lanky Leonard, who still seems genuinely baffled by it all. He marvels at Gobi’s ease crossing a mountain range and the distance she covered.
He arranged for comfortable car transport for Gobi from checkpoint to checkpoint after her unbelievable stretch on foot.
Dog safely nestled in man’s arms, the two beamed at the finish line, medals on red sashes around both their necks, after Leonard came in second.
“Me being able to help Gobi through the race and actually be the person who could step up and take her out of the situation she was in was something I was really wanting to do because those were the sort of things I needed when I was younger and no one was there for me to do that,” Leonard said, explaining his own tough start back in the Queensland country town of Warwick.
It’s a strait-laced, churchgoing, family-focused place that didn’t take kindly to the crumbling of his own home life when he was 9.
That’s when Garry, the man he called dad, died and his mother re- vealed Garry was not, in fact, his biological father.
The news, and watching his stepdad fall fatally ill, sapped his mother emotionally. Leonard left home at 14, choosing to go it alone.
“I was living in pubs, hostels, caravans,” Leonard said. “It was pretty grim. I was trying to go to school and I was trying to work as well because I didn’t have any money.
“I use the negative energy of my childhood and my upbringing, which was very volatile and depressing and an abusive situation, to drive me forward during a race.”
Married for more than a decade, with a great life and now Gobi, Leonard said “there’s always those demons in the basement that you think you’ve dealt with, and when I go to these races, I deal with them and I don’t think about those things at any other time.”
Now that Gobi has settled into Edinburgh life, making friends with the rescue cat Leonard and his wife already had, things are popping for man and dog.
They’re on a book tour for Finding Gobi, just released by Thomas Nelson, with young-adult and picture book versions as well.
Their story has been sold to 21st Century Fox for a movie and Leonard had enough crowdfunded Gobi money left over to donate $10,000 to an animal rescue and adoption group in Beijing, the Little Adoption Shop.
The founder, Christopher Barden, was instrumental in helping Leonard.
Leonard will donate a portion of book and movie proceeds, too.
“Animal welfare in China isn’t governed by anyone and they’re all desperately dying for donations,” Leonard said. “There are so many stray dogs. It’s really sad to see.”