Rochester’s Own ‘K9 Ninja’ Competes on American Ninja Warrior July 25th

Make sure to keep an eye out for Rochester's Andrew Yori on American Ninja Warrior (the reality TV show sports competition where athletes go up against insane obstacle courses) at the end of the month.

Andrew was one of the people selected (they had over 70,000 submissions this year) to compete in the regional qualifying event in Indiana and the top 30 from that move on to the finals course. (He made it and moved on to the finals, but can’t talk about how he did in that or if he moved on. So, we all just have to watch the show and find out at the end of the month.

Yori, who is known as the K9 Ninja on the show, said the obstacle courses are kept secret until the competition begins, and there are no practice runs.  "It really was just one shot only. We got to see it and they had someone run through and demonstrate that it COULD be done, but we couldn't try or touch any of it until our turn," he said.

He was really only worried about ONE of the obstacles. "I was a little concerned going into it about the Fly Wheels and hanging from my fingertips, but the one that gave me the most difficulty was the Rolling Log. It's not a matter of IF you get tossed, it's a matter of WHEN.  You just hope that when you get tossed you get tossed in the right direction, and I was lucky that I was tossed in the right direction."

Andrew: lab tech at Mayo Clinic by day, Ninja by night, dog advocate all the time.  Andrew and his wife have been rescuing dogs for about a decade and started his own organization: the Wallace the Pit Bull foundation. “I had Wallace, a national champion Frisbee dog, and Hector (who was one of the fighting dogs rescued from NFL quarterback Michael Vick’s property) who became a certified therapy dog, and both of them passed away recently. They had huge online followings, so I tried to use that to leverage that audience and continue to help dogs that still need help. There are still lots of dogs in kennels and in bad situations that still need a lot of help. A big part of doing this for me was to get the word out about dog adoption and feature my two dogs. I had two pit bulls, and some people are still scared of pit bulls. So, I was able to use my skills to be able to get out a message that is important. I’m not out there to be famous or be on TV, I wanted to do this because it would be a great platform to put some good back in the world,” Yori said.

You can visit  www.facebook.com/k9ninjawarrior to follow along his American Ninja Warrior journey. Wallace and Hector have facebook pages as well, and you can get more info on the foundation at

http://www.wallacethepitbullfoundation.org/

The Indianapolis Finals of American Ninja Warrior will air on July 25th on NBC and if you missed his qualifying round, you can see the full episodes on nbc.com. Good Luck Andrew!