Westminster Kennel Club show kicks off with agility competition, drawing parallels to Super Bowl and showcasing canine athleticism. (AP/Heather Khalifa)
- Westminster Kennel Club show opens on Super Bowl weekend, showcasing agility dogs and other canine sports
- Border collie named Vanish wins agility contest featuring 350 champion-level contestants from diverse breeds
- Event expands to include obedience competition for mixed-breeds and first-ever demonstration of flyball
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NEW YORK — They’re at the top of their sport. They run, weave and go airborne. And they went all out for this weekend’s championship.
Sorry — no, they’re not the Chiefs or the Eagles. They’re the agility dogs at the Westminster Kennel Club show, which began Saturday by showcasing agility and other dog sports.
Westminster: The Super Bowl of Dog Shows
Dog folk often call Westminster the Super Bowl of dog shows, and the comparison might be especially fitting this year. The United States’ most prestigious canine competition opened on the same weekend as pro football’s Super Bowl, which features the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday. The rare coincidence comes after both competitions’ dates shifted in recent years.
“I always said I wanted people to call the Super Bowl ‘the Westminster of football,’ ” quipped dog expert David Frei, who has a foot in both worlds: He used to work in publicity for the Denver Broncos and the San Francisco 49ers.
The Westminster of football? Well, Westminster is 90 years older than the Super Bowl, after all.
From Rescue to Champion: Guster’s Journey
Being at Westminster was a triumph for Guster the rescue pug. He and owner Steve Martin took up agility after Guster started wagging his tail and tilting his head while they watched the Westminster agility contest on TV several years ago.
“We never thought we’d be here. And now we’re here,” Martin, of Austin, Texas, said Saturday.
A border collie named Vanish won the contest, which featured about 350 champion-level contestants in one of dogdom’s most popular sports.
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Diverse Competitors in Agility
Saturday’s canine competitors were a spectrum of dogdom, from a great Dane to a seven-pound (0.9-kg) papillion, and they included such lesser-known breeds as a large Munsterlander and a Danish-Swedish farmdog.
They navigated jumps, tunnels, ramps and other obstacles as handlers gave hand and voice signals. The object is to be the fastest, without making mistakes.
Beyond Agility: Obedience and Flyball
Westminster’s traditional, breed-by-breed judging happens Monday and Tuesday, capped by the coveted best in show prize Tuesday night.
That’s for purebreds only, but mixed-breed dogs also were eligible for Saturday’s obedience competition, an event that Westminster added in 2016. The top prize went to Willie, an Australian shepherd who also won in 2022 with handler Kathleen Keller of Flemington, New Jersey.
The show also featured Westminster’s first demonstration of flyball, a canine relay race that involves retrieving a ball.
“It’s a lot of organized chaos,” Hillary Brown said with a chuckle after competing with her Boston terrier, Paxil. His teammates on a York, Pennsylvania-based squad called Clean Break are a standard poodle, a border collie and a whippet-border collie mix.
“It’s a blast. The dogs love it,” Brown said.
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