Milwaukee Brewers’ Famous Racing Sausages inspire and delight for over 30 years

Brian Adam has no trouble understanding the appeal of the Milwaukee Brewers’ five sausage mascots — Bratwurst, Chorizo, Polish, Hot Dog and Italian — which have been barreling across home field ahead of the seventh inning for the past 30 years.

“They’re giant, silly characters. You don’t really know what’s going to happen,” said Adam, president and owner of the mascot manufacturer Olympus Group, which makes the mascot costumes. “A giant mascot costume, by its nature, is not designed to be raced. They’ll topple over, they’ll trip, and it’s just a fun, engaging part of the baseball experience.”

The sausages will be back racing for the Brewers’ 2025 Major League Baseball home opener on March 31 against the Kansas City Royals. 

Adam recently told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” about how his company manufactures racing sausage mascots, as well as many other iconic mascots for other baseball franchises or companies. 

The Brewers’ Famous Racing Sausages began as a cartoon on the team scoreboard, Adam said. But starting in the 1990s, team officials decided it’d be fun for the fans to actually see people wear impractically huge sausage mascot costumes on the field. Olympus Group helped bring that vision to the field, Adam said. 

The first sausage foot race took place in June of 1993 in the old County Stadium. The antics were such a success that dozens of other major and minor league teams, as well as teams for different sports, created their own versions of the racing mascots in the decades that followed. 

You can find racing pierogies in Pittsburgh, American presidents in Washington and hot dogs (not sausages) in Kansas City. Olympus Group makes many of those other mascots, too, right in Milwaukee. But it all began with the Brewers.

Olympus Group started in 1893 in Milwaukee making American Flags. Adam said he wouldn’t have his company based anywhere else. 

“This is where our team is. This is where our talent is,” Adam said. “We love this city, and we have some great people that work for us. I can think of two team members who work on our sewing team who started here in 1988 and 1989 and have been making all sorts of printed graphics and mascots for 30-plus years. It’s (the people) who are on our team that keep us here.” 

Every mascot Olympus makes is unique because they’re made by hand, without molds or manufacturing pieces that are used for mass-produced Yogi Bears and Tony the Tigers, Adam said. Just a handful of the costumes exist for each mascot.

A sausage immortalized in plastic bricks

You can find artwork and plushes of the Famous Racing Sausages online or at the Brewers’ souvenir shop. And soon, you may be able to build your own LEGO set of the sausages. 

Todd Elliott is a former Milwaukee resident and the creator of a LEGO Ideas design for the sausages. Elliot also spoke to “Wisconsin Today” about how the sausages inspired his LEGO project. 

Should Elliott’s designs get up to 10,000 votes, the LEGO Group would review the design and consider it for an official company product. Elliott’s design currently has more than 3,400 votes with over a year to go in the voting.

After coming up with the initial idea, he said he pretty quickly knew the LEGO sausages were something special. 

“At some point, a reporter from the (Milwaukee) Journal Sentinel reached out, and then FOX reached out, and then CBS, so it just snowballed from there,” he said. “I was really taken aback by all the love that people had for these, and it’s just been a lot of fun.”

Though Elliott now lives on the East Coast, he said he has plans to return to Milwaukee later this year to attend some Brewers games and drum up more support for the LEGO project. He said it’s one of his life goals to race through American Family Field as one of the Famous Racing Sausages. 

Learn more about the LEGO Ideas Famous Racing Sausages design and vote for its official consideration here.