2025: Conquering the world

2025 was the year our “little event” started living a big life: the Corgi Race brand was officially registered internationally. This is no longer a temporary adventure, but an event with the potential to become truly legendary and last for decades. With Vilnius firmly holding its place as the “Corgi Capital of Europe” and locals absolutely obsessed with corgis, the recipe is there for exactly that to happen.

It’s becoming a tradition for the event to be hosted by fresh new faces each year. This time, those faces were actors Džiugas Grinys and Aurelijus Pocius. And here’s the detail I really wanted to “frame”: my dogo is also named Džiugas. So we figured we had to settle it properly, once and for all, and find out who the fastest Džiugas really is:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DK7ViuxNJHj/

After the success of 2024, everything ran on adrenaline for a while (and corgi hair), and we finally learned the key lesson: “it’ll be calm after the event” is a myth. At the start of the year, the plan seemed simple: align partnerships, assess risks, and get our communications in order. In reality, it was phone calls, spreadsheets, contracts, “could you do it by tomorrow?”, and a ridiculous number of meetings that could have been just an email. But… once you sort out one thing, three others catch fire at the same time. One hand on the phone with a partner, the other holding a leash, the event plan running through your head. And in the end, the math is simple: an event’s success is 50% logistics, 30% communication, and 20% improvisation - because about a fifth of everything collapses on the actual event day.

And it all worked out: a total of 140 corgis from six European countries registered for the event! Another thing that clearly showed our growing scale in 2025 was the programme itself. Corgis and their humans competed in five events, two of them completely new. The first was the puzzle challenge (where brains matter more than speed), open not only to corgis but to dogs of all breeds—because if we’re throwing a celebration, we’re doing it for every friendly four-legged guest. Someone on the partner side joked a better name would be “the best nose competition.” We liked that. The second new addition was the “widest-reaching bark” challenge, where it’s no longer about who barks the cutest, but who can genuinely fill the whole park with sound. And alongside the newcomers we had the classics: the “Solo Sprint” (three attempts to set your best time), the costume parade, and finally the main show - the races themselves, with plenty of starts and even more surprises, because corgis, as always, may decide to run anywhere… just not where you planned.

So many great moments—and there’s no way we could fit them all here. For more, go find us on social media :)

The next day added a whole new international stamp: in Vilnius’ Town Hall Square, by the “Portal” sculpture, we hosted a world corgi meet-up, playfully called a “corgi-moment.” There we connected with our corgi friends across the Atlantic in Philadelphia, while similar gatherings were happening at other “Portals” at the very same time—in Dublin and in Lublin. I love this format because it takes something simple (a meet-up) and turns it into one global “shared moment,” where short-legged friends in different countries suddenly feel like one community.

And our results… Based on the 2025 summaries and a conservative calculation, our total potential reach came to around 2.8 billion, with roughly 3,200 publications. For a full week, “Corgi Race Vilnius” was being talked about across different channels and by different audiences, and the geography was wild - just in the media recap we had 40 countries and 20 languages, with mentions spanning from South America (Brazil and Argentina) to Asia (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan), and from North America all the way to Australia and New Zealand. Our humble little event may have become the most successful piece of news to travel the world in the entire history of the Baltic states. Major outlets covered it - ABC News, Sky News, ZDF, New York Post, Fox News, People, AP, Reuters, and countless others. A true corgi-mania.

The main takeaway from all of this: if you want to show up on the world stage, get yourself a corgi and take part in “Corgi Race Vilnius 2026.”

2026 already smells like new formats, new challenges, and that same good corgi-flavoured chaos we somehow manage to turn into an event… and it looks like, alongside the corgis, dachshunds are knocking louder and louder on our plans too. See you in 2026!