5-year-old Pine girl teams with pet fish to take gold at Betta Winter Olympics

With a little knowledge and persistence, even a young child can teach a dog to do a trick.

But getting a tiny betta fish to do acrobatics takes an ocean of patience that begins with getting the cold-blooded creature to warm up to its human trainer.

Five-year-old Lily LaBrozzi of Pine did just that with Max, her deep-blue betta that she entered into the 2023 Betta Winter Olympics, an international event hosted by Aquascape Art, which is based in the United Kingdom.

Lily and her brother, Mason, 4, are the children of Justin and Katie LaBrozzi.

Max and Lily — the only child who entered the Betta Olympics — made it through a series of head-to-head qualifying rounds against 11 other contestants to walk and swim away with this year’s gold medal.

“The Betta Olympic games are an international betta sports celebration, held twice a year,” according to organizers. “The ultimate goals are to unite and celebrate talented bettas across the world, educate others on how to interact with their pet betta, as well as cultivating engagement within the Instagram aquatic community and beyond. (But) most importantly, it’s for betta fish and their trainers to bond and have fun together.”

Participants in the event were from the United States, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Participants submitted a highlight reel of their betta’s performance, and the winner of each round was selected by voters on Instagram during the Jan. 10-31 event.

The LaBrozzis were notified by Aquascape and will receive a plaque in recognition of their achievement.

Betta fish, or Siamese fighting fish, are tropical freshwater fish native to Southeast Asia, where they inhabit rice paddies and still-water canals, according to bettafish.org, which advocates for proper care of the species. The group is affiliated with the International Betta Congress.

Lily started training betta fish after getting one she named Tyler as a gift from her grandparents on her fourth birthday.

But it wasn’t until the family watched a YouTube video while at home during the covid-19 lockdown that they discovered the world of betta training and competitions.

The LaBrozzis admit that what they saw on the video was news to them.

“I’d never even heard of a betta fish, let alone that they could be trained,” Justin LaBrozzi said. “It was pretty fascinating. But it’s not easy. I tried to get it some tricks but didn’t really have much luck.”

After Tyler died, he was replaced by Max, who Lily trained by following the steps she learned in the video.

“You want it to get used to the wand,” she said in reference to a small pencil-sized device used to catch a fish’s attention and coax it along.

“I kept trying and trying to get him to follow the wand,” she said. “Even if he followed it a tiny bit, he would get a treat. Now he loves the wand.”

Once she got Max to repeat the task, she shared her excitement with her parents.

“I showed my Mom and Dad what I taught him, and they were like, ‘Wow, how did you do that?’ ”

Standing on a stepstool to reach the small aquarium in the family room, Lily begins a training session by simply talking to Max in a cooing voice.

Even before she places the wand into the water, the tiny fish swims near the surface to greet her, seemingly treading water in anticipation.

“He doesn’t understand me, he’s a fish,” Lily said. “But I think he knows me.”

In addition to the first feat Max mastered — passing through a tiny plastic hoop — Lily has taught him to go through tunnels, shoot a basketball into a hoop, swim through a slalom course, dive and jump out of the water.

Lily said Max has learned his tasks so well that he sometimes tries to trick her into giving up a treat without performing.

“He’s so smart that, when I use the hoop, he tries to go under or around it and grab the treat instead of going through it,” she said. “But I just put the treat inside the hoop so he has to go through to get it.”

Lily’s father said he was surprised by his daughter’s ability to focus on teaching Max.

“It took a lot of commitment and perseverance to train him,” he said. “And there was a lot of bonding time with her getting to know Max and him getting comfortable with her. It was a process.”

Lily described Max’s initial attitude toward training in more blunt terms.

“He was really wild,” she said. “He would just keep going super fast, like fish running, to go to the other side of the tank away from me until I trained him.”

Lily said she loves school — “especially reading” — but is still thinking about what she wants to do when she grows up.

She doesn’t know what the job would be, but she would like to be in a position to make changes in the pet store industry.

“I’m kinda mad that they keep the bettas in these really small containers,” she said. “And I also want to be a paleontologist because I like dinosaurs.”