Westminster 2020 is in Full Swing!

By Amy Fernandez

You gotta give credit where it’s due. Back in 1877 when Westminster first ventured into dog shows, the club recognized that strategic PR was the key to success. And 144 years into the deal, they got this down. As show chairman David Helming proudly announced, they are ready to roll, and nothing makes that point better than the Empire State Building which will once again sport purple and gold in honor of America’s Dog Show.

They had all the major media suppliers rounded up for their preshow press event Tuesday morning at the New Yorker and they cut right to the big news, the logistical rearrangement due to the closing of Pier 92. You may recall that it was declared structurally unsound after that little mishap with a cruise ship a couple years back.

So, Westminster has reverted to its previous space-saving format of champions only. They’ve also expanded the show to three days to fit the benching and judging onto one pier.  This should work out to 800-1000 dogs benched and judged each day, with Herding and Hounds on Sunday, Toys, Terriers and Non-Sporting on Monday, Working and Sporting breeds on Tuesday, and the preliminary judging of 100+ Junior Showmanship semifinalists all three days.  The Junior Finals, along with Group and BIS judging still happens at the Garden Monday and Tuesday night.

The fifth annual Obedience Championship and the seventh annual Agility Masters Championship again takes place over at Pier 94 Saturday and Sunday. This year’s conformation entries come from 49 states and 19 countries representing 204 of the 205 recognized breeds. Westminster Director of Communications, Gail Miller Bisher, happily announced that this includes the Azawakh, the newest Westminster competitor. Six will be there Sunday and two were on hand Tuesday morning. There are 31 foreign judges on this year’s panel, with a vintage domestic version, Bob Slay, slated to do BIS Tuesday night. A former AKC VP, Slay has presided over Westminster Working and Herding Groups in past years.

The other big news was the show’s “Roaring Twenties” theme, which was a clever nod to the club’s long history, and a good excuse to parade out all the old favorite traditional breeds that won Westminster during the 1920s starting with the Wire Ch. Conejo Wycollar Boy in 1920. Noting that he’d already won in 1917, she also pointed out that the breed has so far won Westminster 15 times, most recently last year, of course.

1921 marked the Cocker’s first Westminster win, for the particolor Ch. Midkiff Seductive. She also took home the Mortimer trophy for Best Am-Bred in Show, and that big dazzly hunk of silver was also on display at the press conference. Then in 1922 BIS was an Airedale, and although Ch. Boxwood Barkantine wasn’t the breed’s first Westminster winner, she did take home the Mortimer.  Unfortunately, they didn’t find a Sealyham to represent the winners in 1924 or 1927, but conveniently, Wires also went up 1926 and 1928 . They did round up a Pointer to represent the 1925 winner, Ch. Governor Moscow, and a Collie, the decade’s last Westminster BIS dog, Laund Loyalty of Bellhaven, is still the youngest dog ever to pull it off.

And for a smooth intro to their newest sponsor, Gail added that Prohibition was full swing in the ‘20s  sparking a run on alcoholic dog names and illicit distilleries, cuing the arrival of the tray full of “Sensation” cocktails, invented in honor of the show by the Portland, Oregon distillers of Aviation gin.

The photographer mob was then herded to the other side of the room where, like last year, they had a mini agility course rigged up to entertain the media with the 2018 and 2019 Agility winners on hand for demos and pictures.

So, the show takes place over at Pier 94 from Saturday to Tuesday, at the Garden Monday and Tuesday night, and thanks to the Proplan sponsorship you can also catch it live on FS1. Breed judging will again be live streamed, and Fox will run a one hour broadcast of Westminster highlights February 23. And there’s still time to enter the Million Dollar Bracket Challenge at dogshowbracket.com.

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Posted by admin on Feb 5 2020. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.