Coloradan Joyce Vanek to judge at iconic Westminster Dog Show

EVERGREEN — Outside, even on an overcast and chilly spring morning, the foothills rise around Joyce Vanek’s home and wrap the slowly thawing vale in the striking natural beauty that drew her to Colorado. 

Inside, a 3-year-old champion Portuguese water dog curiously greets visitors before hopping onto the couch and settling next to her owner. Harper, named in part for famed novelist Harper Lee (earlier pets included a miniature donkey named Atticus and a cat named Scout), offers living, breathing evidence of Vanek’s appreciation of rare and beautiful things — whether it’s champion pups, bagging four of the Seven Summits or appreciating fine wine as a certified sommelier.

All around them, walls and tables covered with books, photos, framed sketches and assorted mementos reflect Vanek’s passionate life spent breeding, showing and — after years of experience and training — judging dogs in competition. 

One particular keepsake, a page of typewritten lines beneath an iconic logo of a pointer mid-stride, captures the culmination of that passion: an invitation to judge this year’s Westminster Dog Show in New York, widely regarded as the world’s premier canine event. 

“I’m just excited and exhilarated that I’m honored to do this,” says Vanek, 69 — and preparing for a birthday celebration later this month atop a Colorado fourteener. “There’s I don’t know how many thousands of judges that they draw from. That’s a huge honor.”

The show begins Saturday with ability and obedience championships open to all types of dogs before breed competition — the traditional mainstay among “purpose-bred” dogs that Vanek will help judge — starts Monday at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, New York.

The number of potential judging candidates approved by the American Kennel Club and considered from across the globe hovers somewhere in the low thousands, while the number selected for Westminster in any given year fluctuates between 30 and 36, says Don Sturz, president and show chairman for the competition’s 148th edition, making it the second-longest continuously held sporting event in the U.S. next to the Kentucky Derby.

“Judging at Westminster is the pinnacle of any judge’s career and it’s highly sought after and highly regarded,” Sturz says. “And so we try to maintain that image of bringing the best that we have.”

Those standards are established within the sport through judges’ conduct in the ring, he explains — from how they examine the dogs to the choices they make to how they engage with the exhibitors and their dogs. Are they personable? Are they kind? Are they fair, giving each exhibitor the same amount of consideration? Have they established themselves in the sport as someone people respect? 

Those qualities form a baseline for selection, but so does past performance. Judges who have worked Westminster previously and done well often find themselves invited back. Sturz, who now heads the selection process, says Vanek falls into that category. This marks the second time she’s been chosen, with the first coming in 2017. 

“When you watch her in the ring, she exudes confidence, but at the same time, she’s approachable and friendly with the exhibitors and kind with the dogs,” Sturz says. “She is very decisive in her choices. She gets through the examination and the sorting very efficiently, while at the same time giving everyone their fair time to impress her. And you know, she just looks the part when she’s in the middle of the ring. And that’s part of the Westminster magic.”

That magic nearly turned to disappointment for Vanek. Owing to the frustrations of small-town mountain mail delivery, she very nearly missed this opportunity after the post office discontinued individual delivery in her area in favor of communal boxes. Last summer, as sort of a silent personal protest, she didn’t retrieve her mail for a couple of weeks.

Vanek decided to break her boycott the day before she was to leave town to judge a dog show in Idaho. After emptying her mailbox and tossing the stack of envelopes on the kitchen table, she noticed one that featured that familiar pointer logo. Vanek figured Westminster either was asking for a donation or offering tickets to this year’s event.

When she opened it to find an invitation to judge, she also realized how close she’d come to blowing her chance: She was just hours away from the deadline to respond. She immediately telephoned Westminster, which had been wondering why they hadn’t heard from her.

Her first invitation to judge had proven even more memorable, as it arrived, entirely unexpected, on her birthday.

“When I got the envelope and looked at it that first time I was like, are you kidding me?” she recalls. “It was like one of the best birthday presents, because I didn’t think I was worthy.”

Sturz, who first showed a dog at Westminster at age 10, recalls the first of 10 times he has been invited to judge. He felt that same sense of unreality, of having to read and re-read the invitation before grasping what it all meant. 

Judging that first year instilled what he recalls as a tremendous sense of responsibility to the history of the event — a feeling that for him has never diminished.

“I remember getting very emotional as the moment came to choose the winners,” he says. “And that has happened every single time. You just don’t get jaded about that event. It kind of ruins you for every other dog show.”

A competitive family background

For Vanek, the genesis of her passion for the competition surrounding showing beautiful things, whether dogs or horses or even “inanimate objects like rocks and shells and whatnot,” began during her upbringing in St. Louis, where she helped her mother show American cocker spaniels. In a family where her siblings were significantly older, she notes, the puppies “were like my brothers and sisters.”

She inherited competitive instincts from her father as well. Ollie Vanek spent his career in professional baseball, including as a scout for the St. Louis Cardinals — he famously scouted and convinced the Cardinals to sign a lanky teenager named Stan Musial, who developed into a Hall of Fame slugger — and later for the New York Mets. Ollie’s scouting territory covered New York and Pennsylvania, where she attended her first AKC dog shows in the 1960s while spending summers often traveling with her dad.

The very first dog she could call her own, though, arrived when she was just a kid, courtesy of an older brother who was attending dental school at St. Louis University. His connection to the school qualified Vanek for discounted orthodontics, and on her appointments at the medical campus she heard dogs barking outside and wondered why. Her brother didn’t have the heart to tell her they were used for research.

Shortly after midnight one New Year’s Eve, she awakened to feel something moving around in her bed. Her brother had liberated a beagle puppy from the medical school. Given the magical hour of the gift, she named the pup Cinderella.

Vanek eventually added an affinity for horses, specifically Missouri fox trotters and Tennessee walking horses, though she also rode thoroughbreds in steeplechase competition. Her attachment to animals was sealed after she migrated to Colorado in 1975 and met her future husband, a dentist named Steve Nielsen. When he proposed, she told him she didn’t want an engagement ring — she’d rather have a dog and a horse.

He gave her an Old English sheepdog and three horses — “It sounds like he traded something for me, doesn’t it?” she says — with the dog constituting his engagement gift and the horses marking their wedding. (He also came through with a diamond engagement ring.) They settled on horse property but Vanek’s involvement with horses eventually waned, and she turned her competitive instincts fulltime to her sheepdog, which she first entered in obedience competitions, with great success.

To those events she eventually added the predominant dog show template of conformation — or how well the dogs conform to standards of a particular breed. Now even Westminster has added competitions from agility to dock diving, featuring all breeds, including mixed, ahead of the main event. 

But it was the world of conformation that shaped Vanek’s understanding of such a variety of breeds that she eventually judged shows in all 50 states and internationally in Australia, Scandinavia, South America, Mexico, Europe and China.

“It’s based on breeding stock, that’s first and foremost,” she says. “You want to persist in supporting and preserving this particular breed. And so just like anything — horses, cattle, sheep, whatever — you have to try to preserve what’s the best. And then we go not only to what they look like, but what’s going on inside — their health, their brain, their temperament. You want to preserve everything that those particular breeds were based on.”

Vanek recalls the precise moment when, in the midst of a competition, she decided she would pursue judging. And it came, not surprisingly, when she felt that her Old English sheepdog pup Tank — short for Lord Tanqueray, a nod to the British gin — got shortchanged in a competition in White Sands, New Mexico. It marked the first dog show she entered with a dog she’d personally bred.

“I thought nobody in the universe could ever beat this dog, this glorious, gorgeous sheepdog puppy that I bred,” she says. “And he didn’t not win, but he didn’t win everything. And that’s how people get — you think you or your dog or both of you are deserving and something goes awry. Well, then I had something to prove. 

“And I went, I can do as good as she can,” she adds.” And that was the start of it.”

The journey to judging dogs

The road to becoming a judge takes years to travel, but starts with a minimum of 12 years of experience with a given breed — including breeding and raising at least five litters at home and breeding or owning four or more champions from those litters, according to the American Kennel Club. 

Along the way, candidates have to become familiar with dog anatomy and ring procedure at shows — and pass exams on both. Experience as a ring steward at a minimum of six shows demonstrates understanding of event logistics and complements additional instruction in judging and other eligibility requirements.

“You have to show that you’re involved in preserving and improving the breed by having litters,” explains Vanek, who juggled judging with work as a dental hygienist before stepping away from that job a few years ago. “Not an overabundance, but you have to breed and then you have to show these dogs and prove that what you were breeding is hitting the standards, so that my Old English doesn’t turn out looking like a Chihuahua.”

Portuguese water dogs quickly revealed themselves to be a good match for Vanek, who found them a perfect complement for the outdoor lifestyle she and her husband enjoyed. But the breed also held an additional attraction that complemented her love of competition and beautiful things. She especially likes rare things.

When she discovered Portuguese water dogs, back in the late ’70s or early ’80s, there were fewer than 300 in the world. They had nearly gone extinct in the 1960s. She managed to acquire a dog named Lancer, who became one of the breed’s most significant sires, begetting a string of champions in conformation and title holders in performance.

The dogs particularly loved to tag along on kayaking trips. At one point around the late 1980s, Lancer even performed a water rescue of a rafter dumped in the “Eye of the Needle” rapids on the Colorado River near Kremmling. Lancer, her first champion in the breed, wasn’t specifically trained to rescue people from the water, but he knew how to retrieve objects. And so Vanek quickly weighed whether to give the command, knowing she could be sending her dog into danger. 

But clearly it was a life or death situation. When she talks about that moment, her voice falls to an emotional whisper.

“He got him by the collar and brought him back,” she says. “He was remarkable.”

Although Lancer died at age 15 in 1999, the dog that currently curls up to Vanek on the living room couch, born during the pandemic, is his daughter. Under normal circumstances, those dates wouldn’t line up. But Harper continues the line thanks to semen from Lancer frozen 37 years ago at Canine Cryobank in San Marcos, California.

When it comes to judging breeds, Vanek’s job varies by location. She has judged seven times in China, where she has learned about Tibetan mastiffs, a popular breed in that country. In Europe and Australia she was introduced to Lancashire heelers — not a new breed, but only recently recognized by the AKC and new this year to the Westminster show, where Vanek will judge them.

In the United States, Vanek judges seven groups: herding, working, sporting, nonsporting, toys, terriers and hounds. At Westminster, she’ll judge the sporting group (Barbet, Braccho Italiano, Brittany, Lagotto Romagnolo and Nederlandse Kooikerhondje), working group (Akita, boxer, Tibetan mastiff) and herding group (Australian cattle dog, Australian shepherd, Berger Picard, miniature American shepherd, Lancashire heeler, Spanish water dog and Polish Lowland sheepdog).

Since this is the internet era, there are also websites that judge the judges. Vanek understands the dynamic — her own frustration with a judge triggered her interest in becoming one. But she doesn’t get caught up in that kind of criticism.

“What’s the point?” she figures. “People don’t know — just like my attitude at that (White Sands) show, when I went, ‘Well, I can do better.’ Once you get into it, you know that sometimes your dog isn’t at its best in the ring. It’s hard for some people to identify that not every dog is going to be a superstar.”

It’s certainly not for lack of trying. Vanek reaches amid the books and periodicals on her coffee table and pulls out one monthly publication — full-color, slick and easily more than a half-inch thick — and flips through page after page of flashy ads touting meticulously groomed pups posing glamor-shot gorgeous to accentuate features of their champion bloodlines.

“A lot of dogs are backed by a lot of money,” Vanek notes. “I don’t really want to know that kind of stuff because we’re supposed to not know who the dogs are. We’re supposed to be impartial. These people pay a lot of money to advertise some of these dogs and some of it is valid. 

“What I try to do,” she adds, “is be as uninfluenced as possible.”

Vanek notes that judges focus on details that likely escape observers outside the ring — features like the positioning of a dog’s teeth or eyelid conditions known as entropion or ectropion that constitute finer points that impact particular breeds.

And so she pays close attention to subtle distinctions like a dog’s bite and facial expression. Judging breeds with thicker coats, she probes beneath the blow-dry, custom trims and other tricks of the dog-showing trade to determine their true frame.

“You actually have to put your hands on,” Vanek says. 

Her approach reflects a journey that began around age 25, when she began accumulating her credentials and expanding her knowledge base, though she wouldn’t officially start judging until she’d turned 39. She figures she probably started sooner than most, due to the early motivation of that snub at the New Mexico contest and her focus on animals when many of her peers may have been waiting for their kids to grow up before diving full-bore into the judging regimen.

“I didn’t have children, so my dogs and my horses were my kids,” she laughs. “Don’t we look alike?”

A pup 8 years in the making

Kidding aside, Harper does reflect traits that Vanek has wanted in a dog for years. And the pup came along on the heels of her first dog-less stretch since she was a baby. She’d lost two dogs on the exact same day — Nov. 13 — one year apart, with the second dying in 2019.

But the planning had already been underway to try to breed another Portuguese water dog, named Zellie, to the long-deceased Lancer via that previously frozen semen. 

The litter was eight years in the making, encompassing Vanek’s study of pedigrees, maintaining health clearances and timing the breeding around work, travel and judging — not to mention further scheduling issues created by COVID. But, Vanek saw her wishes come to fruition, in the form of a litter of five puppies, that put a merciful end to “what seemed like an eternity” without close canine companionship.

Part of the process, Vanek concedes, was decidedly nonscientific.

“When I do a breeding,” she says, “I whisper in the mother’s ear: This is what I want —  can you and Mother Nature and God agree on this? And so I wanted a black, wavy female with white feet and a white chest.”

The puppy she would name Harper turned out to be the last of the five to emerge. And her playful presence continues that valued connection to Lancer, a dog so devoted to family that, at the funeral following Steve’s death in 1995, he walked down the aisle at the church with a rose in his teeth and sat faithfully in front of his photograph. 

Seven years ago, shortly before she first judged at Westminster, Vanek went to look for that diamond wedding ring Steve had made for her so she could wear it at the event in his honor. But the box where she kept it had disappeared.

Around last Christmas, Harper was roaming the house, rooting around in a guest bedroom, when she emerged with the ring box in her mouth. Now, as Vanek heads to New York to determine the best of the best in the dog world, she’ll perform her job as she had hoped to years earlier —  fortified with yet one more rare and beautiful thing.

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.