[aloukissas]

The name is REALLY interesting to me as a Greek: in greeklish (using latin/english characters to transcribe greek ones -- pretty common before unicode caught on everywhere), "Balto" reads like "Valto". Now, "Valto" loosely translates to "score it!", and it's a famous snippet of a sports commentator, where he was talking to a football (ok, soccer) player about to score a very important goal.

Good luck guys!

[adam]

"Balto" was also the name of Elizabeth Holmes' (of Theranos fame) dog:

For Holmes, the dog represented the journey that lay ahead for Theranos. As she explained to colleagues at the company’s headquarters, in Palo Alto, he was named after the world-famous sled dog who, in 1925, led a team of huskies on a dangerous, 600-mile trek from Nenana, Alaska, to remote Nome, Alaska, bearing an antitoxin that was used to fight a diphtheria outbreak. There is even a statue of Balto in New York’s Central Park, Holmes told one former employee. The metaphorical connection was obvious. In Holmes’s telling, Balto’s perseverance mirrored her own. His voyage with the life-changing drug was not so different from her ambition.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/inside-elizabeth-hol...

[spencercassidy]

Love hearing this! The name originated from a Siberian husky and sled dog (Balto) who led his team on the final leg of the 1925 serum run to Nome to stop the deadly diphtheria epidemic. Given one of our challenges is a 'survival pool' we thought it was fitting as you must be the 'leader of the pack' during the long race to win/survive the challenge.

[Nicky_Montana]

Thank you for the kind words! We love the name Balto as well :)