Porkers Hog Limelight as Fair Opens

After weeks of training--eating hard, sleeping hard and eating some more--the All-Alaskan Racing Pigs made their competitive debut Friday at the Orange County Fair in a sort of Idita-hog.

The weather was warm and breezy and crowds of children with their parents flocked to the fair’s opening day, roaming from food stands to arts-and-crafts booths, games and rides. By 9 p.m., 33,459 people had visited the fairgrounds at the start of its 17-day run.

The late afternoon pig races found the stands packed with folks who picked their favorite porker to bring home the bacon--literally. (The purse for the winning pig was a pound of free bacon for everyone who “bet” on him).

The piglets, 13-week-old crossbreeds, are not Alaskan, but they belong to a former Alaskan sled dog musher and his wife, Chuck and Deanne Noll of Washington. The Nolls put their first team together about 10 years ago, after Chuck saw some pigs featured on the “Tonight Show,” and since then they have sent the piglets to fairs around the country.

When their racing days are over--the pigs get too big after one season--they usually are sold back to farms or to individuals as pets.

For optimum speed and endurance, the piglets are given a commercial feed augmented by specially formulated, sucrose-laden enticements irresistible to piglets.

“I give ‘em Chips A’hoy and Animal Crackers,” said Dorothy Lindsey, one of the pigs’ handlers. “They like Oreos too.”

Naturally competitive, it does not take long for the piglets to catch on to the sport. In three days, they are racing and by the end of one week (with enough Oreos for encouragement) they’re jumping hurdles.

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But the pigs are also prima donnas.

They’ll stroll for one or two people, even work up a trot if a group is watching. But if they’re going to break a sweat and really run, they demand an audience.

“We’ve been in situations where television crews had come to see them and we had to put together a fake crowd,” Deanne Noll said. “They do have their requirements, and one of them is they have to have a crowd.”

Especially a frisky piglet named “Kobuck.”

“Kobuck just keeps trying to hog the limelight,” said Dan Lindsey, the pigs’ other handler. “He thinks that if he wins enough, he’ll get his picture on the cover of Snort’s Illustrated.”

Typically, the pigs race four times a day, dashing and hurdling in four heats that ultimately determine the top hog.

Dan prepped the audience with porcine puns and warned folks that after seeing the pigs they’d be spoiled for plain old horse races.

“Right now, they’re in the locker room warming up, stretching out so they don’t pull a hamstring.”

Three heats eliminated some of the crowd’s favorites: “Porkille O’Neal” didn’t progress to the finals, and neither did “Swinefeld.”

But “Dennis Lardman” made it to the finals and was championed by a substantial part of the crowd despite the controversy surrounding him.

Kobuck ultimately won the day, and his fans received some of the 16,000 bacon coupons, courtesy of Ralphs and Food 4 Less supermarkets.

The audience was made up mostly of parents with children, but even adults without an excuse joined the crowd to cheer on a pig.

Phyllis Shettler, 57, and Peggy Cole, 56, had supported one of the losing pigs and were in the midst of expressing their dismay when Shettler stopped and said, “This really is dorky.”

Dorky but fun, they agreed.

“We’re living our second childhood,” Cole said laughing.

Unbeknownst to the audience, there was one minor glitch. As a joke, Sourdough Jack was supposed to crawl under an impossibly high stack of hurdles rather than try to leap it. But the hurdle was set up wrong and the pig could not get through.

The Lindseys’ granddaughter, Kelsey Chittock, lifted the pig over the hurdle and the crowd laughed, but it was a tense moment for the handlers.

“Whew! I’m glad it worked out and everyone thought he was supposed to be lifted over,” Dan Lindsey said after the show.

Because, like the show’s motto, no matter the obstacles or difficulties, “Either Rain or Swine, the Sow must go on.”