More drama for Gobi marathon man, dog
EDINBURGH: A small stray dog had won hearts all over the world after deciding to follow an Australian runner for several days during an ultramarathon through China’s vast, forbidding Gobi desert.
Dion Leonard fell in love with the dog, named her Gobi and planned to bring her back to his home in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Then, on August 15, just before she was due to travel to Beijing to enter quarantine, the dog disappeared, scampering out of an open door in the Chinese city of Urumqi, where she was being looked after.
Leonard flew to China to look, launching a media and social media campaign and putting posters up around the city. Volunteers helped him scour Urumqi, asking guards, taxi drivers, cleaners and fruit vendors, visiting parks and dog shelters.
Local television reporters interviewed Leonard, residents stopped him in the street to say they were looking, crying about the story, he said.
But Leonard feared it would be a fruitless quest.
Urumqi is a huge city of three million people, and he feared the dog could even have run back into the countryside that surrounds it where people speak the Uighur language, do not use social media and were unlikely to even be aware of the campaign.
“I needed to come and do it, just to be sure in my own mind I had done it,” he told BBC Radio Five Live. “But realistically I was dreading having to go back home next week without her.”
Then, on Wednesday evening, a Chinese man called: he and his son had seen a small stray dog in a local park while walking his own dog. They had brought her home and thought she could be the one.
“Walking into the room, I was already thinking this isn’t going to be Gobi, and I’m a bit down about the last few days,” he said.
“I walked into the room, and I didn’t say a word. There were about 10 people in the room. Gobi spotted me as soon as I walked in, and she started running towards me. Literally she was running up my leg, and jumping all over me, and squealing with delight.
“It was just mind-blowing to think that we had found her,” he told The Washington Post. “It was a miracle.”
Talking to the BBC earlier, Leonard called it “love again at immediate sight”.
He said Gobi had not left his side yesterday, and said he couldn’t pinpoint why the dog had formed such an immediate and close bond with him.
Leonard raised £19 700 (R369 523) through a crowdfunding campaign to cover the costs of taking Gobi back to the UK, and £9 300 to finance the search.
Leonard says Gobi now has to undergo 120 days of quarantine, and hopes to have her home with him by Christmas. – The Washington Post