Westminster judges & standouts

The new Westminster profiles are interesting because they pull the camera away from the green carpet and toward the people who decide what counts as excellence. The 2026 show was not just another edition. It was Westminster’s 150th anniversary, staged in New York with more than 3,000 champion dogs entered, and it ended with a Doberman Pinscher named Penny taking Best in Show on February 3 after group judging at Madison Square Garden and breed judging at the Javits Center (westminsterkennelclub.org, westminsterkennelclub.org). That scale matters, because it explains why the judges’ own post-show accounts are worth reading at all. José Miguel Doval Sánchez’s account is the clearest example. In a new Showsight interview published April 6, he described being the first judge from Spain to officiate at Westminster in its 150-year history, and he was assigned two of the show’s biggest draws: Golden Retrievers and Labrador Retrievers (showsightmagazine.com). He said Goldens were the most numerous breed in the show and Labradors the third largest, which turns an ordinary breed assignment into a test of sorting through depth rather than finding one flashy outlier (showsightmagazine.com). His description of the task was blunt: the final decisions were not easy because the overall quality was high. That matters because Westminster judging is supposed to reward type, structure, and fitness for purpose, not just glamour. Doval Sánchez said his Best of Breed Labrador, CH Firewater’s Bronco’s Bear Necessities, matched his own ideal of the breed by looking balanced, strong, masculine, and still like a real sporting dog that could work in the field as well as stand in the ring (showsightmagazine.com). Even in Goldens, where he noted the visible split between English and American styles, he emphasized condition, balance, presentation, and movement over fashion (showsightmagazine.com). That same resistance to exaggeration runs through Denise Flaim’s account from the Hound side. Flaim’s interview, also published April 6, is really about restraint. She said she was pleased to see strong overall quality and an “appreciable absence of extremes,” then made a larger point about breed judging: there can be many correct styles within type, especially in a breed like the Rhodesian Ridgeback that she has judged across 10 countries and three continents (showsightmagazine.com). Westminster often gets consumed as spectacle, but her language points back to preservation. The show is old enough to feel fossilized, yet she argued that its 150th edition showed how a tradition survives by adapting without losing its identity (showsightmagazine.com). That idea lands harder when you look at the dogs who broke through this year. The standout Hound was Zaida, the Afghan Hound who won the Hound Group and advanced to Best in Show. Westminster’s official group results list Zaida first in Hound, and the AKC’s recap identifies her full registered name as GCHG CH Zaida Bint Muti Von Haussman, handled by Wilmer Santiago (westminsterkennelclub.org, akc.org). Zaida did not win the whole show, but she gave the 2026 circuit one of its most memorable silhouettes. In a competition that eventually crowned a Doberman, one of the enduring images was still an Afghan Hound floating through the ring with all that coat and all that history attached. The human side of Westminster is easier to miss, which is why Karrol Courtney’s story fits here. In her April 7 essay, she describes growing up watching Toy Groups, falling for Toy Poodles, and choosing the breed partly because the maintenance and difficulty appealed to her competitive streak (showsightmagazine.com). A year earlier, she writes, the idea of going to Westminster with her silver Poodle “Shinobi” would have sounded absurd. Then she finished his championship at their first Poodle specialty and walked into Westminster proud just to represent that variety (showsightmagazine.com). That is the part the polished television broadcast usually cannot show. Westminster is a machine for producing legends, but it still runs on people who once sat at home naming breeds from the couch.