When Munich hosted the 1972 Summer Olympics, the organisers chose a dachshund named Waldi as the mascot — the first official mascot of the modern Games. A striped, brightly coloured longhaired dachshund was picked to represent resistance, tenacity and agility, and the marathon route was even laid out roughly in his shape.
It was a canny choice. Few animals read as instantly friendly and faintly comic as a dachshund, and Waldi set the template for every plush Olympic mascot since.
The artists' dog
Andy Warhol kept two dachshunds, Archie and Amos, took Archie to interviews and openings, and painted them. Pablo Picasso's dachshund Lump lived in his studio in the late 1950s and appears woven into his reworkings of Velazquez's Las Meninas. David Hockney's dogs Stanley and Boodgie filled a whole series of paintings in the 1990s.
E. B. White wrote essays about his dachshund Fred; Anita Loos, P. G. Wodehouse and John F. Kennedy all owned the breed. The dachshund's studio-and-salon reputation is genuinely earned.
Sausage dog everywhere
The breed's silhouette does an enormous amount of cultural work: dachshund-shaped draught excluders, phone cases, cartoon characters and the enduring "wiener dog race" at fairs and baseball grounds. The annual dachshund parade in Germany draws thousands.
For a dog originally bred to fight badgers underground, ending up as the world's favourite visual pun is a strange career. The dachshund, characteristically, seems entirely unbothered.
