Before this weekend, John O'Neill had no idea his dog, Razz, had a little Superman inside him.

On a whim, the Reinholds veterinarian took his 5-year-old Labrador retriever out Saturday to the 2007 Golden Liberty Leap competition, held at the Delaware Valley Golden Retriever Rescue shelter.

O'Neill tossed Razz's favorite toy, a floatable closed tube about a foot long known as a "bumper," into the competition pool, and Razz leaped 20 feet through the air to fetch it.

That jump qualified Razz for Sunday's top flight of dogs in the "Big Air" event, in which dogs leap off a dock into a pool and are judged for distance.

Competing against the 12 top dogs, Razz finished fourth.

"I just got him up off the couch yesterday to see what he could do," O'Neill said Sunday. "He has no fear. I just throw the bumper, and he's going to get it, no matter what."

Nearly 100 dogs and their handlers competed in the Golden Liberty Leap, hosted by the Keystone DockDogs Club.

DockDogs is a national organization that promotes and sponsors tournaments for dogs who love to leap.

Dogs compete in the Big Air event, for horizontal jumping, and the "Extreme Vertical Challenge," which gives points for height.

Owners throw dog toys to get the animals to jump in Big Air. Catches are not required. For the Extreme Vertical Challenge, the toys are suspended from a pole, and the dogs begin much closer to the end of the 35-foot-long dock.

O'Neill, who works at Adamstown Veterinary Hospital, has been training Razz the past three years for field trials, which test a dog's ability to follow commands from its handler to find hidden objects.

One of Razz's weaknesses as a field trail competitor is a strength as a jumper.

"He gets all worked up at the field trials, and then he gets deductions for barking," O'Neill said.

All the handlers who competed Sunday began each jump by exciting their dogs into a frenzy.

Terri Mathias of Middletown alternately showed a toy to, and then hid it from, her Great Dane, Charm, right before Charm's jumps in the big air event.

When Mathias threw the toy out into the pool, the 5-year-old Charm soared 21 feet to chase after it.

Charm is the only Great Dane among the 10,000 dogs registered with the DockDogs organization.

"Jumping into water is not really instinctive" to Great Danes, Mathias said.

When Charm was just a few months old, however, she started swimming in pools and ponds on her own. Mathias gradually taught her to dive at the Canine Companions training facility in Bainbridge.

"Now we don't train at all, because I have to save her energy and she gets bored with things," Mathias said. "So we come here, and we jump in our waves. She knows what to do, and she does it."

For the Golden Liberty Leap competition, dogs were separated into classes according to their abilities.

The dogs that could jump the farthest and the highest competed against each other, and then classes went down from there.

The longest jumps in the Big Air competition were just over 26 feet, and the highest jumps in the Extreme Vertical Challenge were just over 7 feet.

Dock jumping has rapidly become one of the country's fastest-growing sports involving animals.

Robin Adams, founder and president of Delaware Valley Golden Retriever Rescue, said her operation invited the Keystone DockDogs to hold the meet at the shelter's 4-acre facility off Vera Cruz Road in East Cocalico Township to attract attention to her group's rescue mission.

"We are a nonprofit organization, and we are a shelter strictly for golden retrievers," Adams said.

 The shelter houses and provides medical care for up to 41 dogs with the intent of finding them new homes.

"A lot of them are turned in by families who realize that the golden retriever is a dog that sheds too much or requires too much activity," Adams said. "Before we send one of our dogs home with new owners, we make sure they know what they're getting into."

Delaware Valley has placed more than 1,600 dogs since 1993, according to its Web site.

Email: preilly@lnpnews.com