Call it the Dog Bowl. Westminster show’s canine athletes get their piece of Super Bowl weekend

NEW YORK (AP) — 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.

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.

And there have been some other connections between the gridiron and Westminster’s green carpet. Los Angeles Chargers defensive end Morgan Fox co-owns a French bulldog who came within a smushy-nose length of winning at Westminster in 2022 and was a finalist the following year. (Many other NFL players also have dogs for fun, if not for show, including Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes.)

Whatever the analogy, 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.

“She’s very intuitive, very natural — probably smarter than me,” handler Emily Klarman told a Fox interviewer in the ring. While Klarman said the win initially left her speechless, Vanish had plenty to say, barking enthusiastically.

A sizeable, black-and-white dog named Gable won a special award for the best mixed-breed competitor.

Westminster added agility in 2014, marking the show’s first event with mixed-breed dogs since the 1800s. Last year saw the first mixed-breed agility winner, a border collie-papillion mix named Nimble, who competed again this year.

She’s an intentional blend of two top agility breeds. But the sport also draws rescue dogs such as an Australian cattle dog mix named Sawyer, or Soy Sauce for short.

His owner, Dr. Amy Ondeyka, has a complicated work schedule as a New Jersey emergency room doctor and EMS medical director. But she made time for agility after realizing she’d adopted a super-energetic dog who opens cabinets, unzips things and otherwise causes domestic mayhem when bored.

“He’s always exciting — he does ridiculous things,” she said as he intermittently leaped into her arms during what was ostensibly down time between agility runs Saturday. “We have fun, regardless what happens.”

While some dogs do agility to burn off energy, the sport helps others come out of their shell. Tully, a lanky, shaggy, mostly-Labradoodle mix, used to be “afraid of the world” but now is excited to go to agility classes and competitions, owner Carla Rash said.

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.

Regardless of scores, some dogs won cheers from spectators. There was a bichon frise with its tail dyed blue, a standard poodle that took a leisurely trot across an A-frame ramp, and a curly-coated mix that apparently had second thoughts about the weave poles, circled around and went through them again.

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.

Steve Wesler sported a Philadelphia Eagles sweatshirt as he cheered on partner Jennifer Weinik and Cookie, her Belgian Malinois. They came away with a ribbon, which Wesler deemed more exciting than the Super Bowl — because he was confident the Eagles would prevail.

There are no cash prizes at Westminster, but the agility and obedience winners each get to direct a $5,000 donation to a training club or the American Kennel Club Humane Fund.

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.

This story corrects that the dog named Cookie won a ribbon, not the overall prize, in obedience..