Kelli Stavast on Covering an Event Where No One You're Covering Can Talk

The first year Kelli Stavast signed with NBC, before the Olympics ever entered the picture, the network handed her an assignment unlike anything she'd done in a decade of motorsports reporting: the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. She covered it for a couple of years, and by her own account, it was fantastic, but it was also a completely different kind of journalism than the one she'd spent her career building.

The reason was simple. The competitors couldn't talk back.

An Assignment With a Long History Behind It

Westminster carries the weight of being the third-longest continuously held sporting event in the United States, trailing only the Kentucky Derby and the Kentucky Oaks, with its first show in 1877, predating the American Kennel Club itself by seven years. Every year since, minus a handful of wartime and pandemic disruptions, it has run its two- or three-day format at some version of Madison Square Garden, judging purebred dogs across seven groups before narrowing the field to a single Best in Show winner.

That scale and tradition meant Stavast hadn't been dropped into an obscure hobbyist event. She was covering something with a longer, more continuous history than most of the motorsports series she'd already spent a decade on, populated by handlers, breeders, and judges who took the competition exactly as seriously as any NASCAR crew chief took a race weekend. The stakes were real. The subject just couldn't speak to them directly.

A Career Built on Getting People to Say Things

Everything about Stavast's motorsports work depends on extracting information from people who are willing, if occasionally reluctant, to give it. She's described her job on pit road in blunt terms: find out what viewers can't get anywhere else, whether that's a driver who was up all night with a newborn or one who quietly reworked a setup that wasn't working the day before.

The entire craft rests on a two-way exchange. She asks. A driver, crew chief, or coach answers, however briefly, and that answer becomes the broadcast.

Westminster removed that exchange entirely. The dogs weren't going to explain how they felt about the ring conditions or whether a rough grooming session had thrown off their focus. Whatever story existed had to be assembled from somewhere else.

Where the Story Actually Lives

At a conformation show like Westminster, the exhibitor almost never speaks for the dog, at least not in the way a coach speaks for an athlete. Handlers are working the entire time they're in the ring, presenting a dog's structure and gait to a judge who's comparing what's in front of them against a written breed standard. The dog is being evaluated on how closely its build, movement, and coat match an ideal description, not on anything it says or does verbally, because there's nothing verbal on offer in the first place.

That structure changes where a broadcaster has to look for material. Stavast couldn't ask a competitor what winning would mean and get an answer that could run on air. She had to build a story out of everything surrounding the dog instead: the handler's read on the animal's mood that morning, an owner's years of breeding decisions that led to this specific entry, a judge's reasoning for a placement, the visible tells of a dog that's performing well or struggling under the lights. None of that involved doing less preparation than she was used to. It just meant preparing for a completely different set of sources.

The Skill That Traveled With Her

What made the Westminster assignment survivable was the same skill she'd already built calling races at a track where she didn't know one driver from another: watch closely, ask the sharpest available question with whatever information is actually on hand, and stop treating the absence of expert-level knowledge as a disqualifier.

She's said as much about her broader approach to unfamiliar assignments. Nobody expects a broadcaster to have the technical knowledge of someone who's spent years in the sport. The job is knowing which questions elicit that knowledge from the people who do have it.

At Westminster, that meant the handler, the breeder, or the judge became the source in place of the athlete. The instinct underneath didn't change. What changes is who's actually capable of answering.

A Story With No Bad Days to Report

There's another difference that has nothing to do with sourcing and everything to do with tone. Motorsports coverage regularly requires delivering hard news alongside the good, from crashes to disappointing runs to the kind of setback that ends a season.

Stavast has talked about covering the sport's version of both, being present for someone's best moment and someone's heartbreak in the same career, sometimes in the same weekend. That range is part of what makes pit road reporting demanding: a broadcaster has to be ready to pivot from celebration to hard questions about a wrecked car within the same segment.

Westminster doesn't really have that register. A dog does not have a career-altering wreck. It either shows well that day or it doesn't, and even a loss isn't a story about failure so much as a story about a standard not quite being met on a given afternoon. There's no equivalent of a driver explaining what went wrong on live television minutes after a crash, because there's no wreck to explain and no driver to ask. The event Stavast has described as fantastic drew that description from something other than ease. It let her build a broadcast around pure craft and character rather than the emotional stakes she was used to navigating in NASCAR and IndyCar.

Getting Out of the Motorsports Bubble

Stavast has talked about the Westminster years as a specific kind of relief, a chance to step outside what she's called the bubble of motorsports. That's worth taking seriously as a professional decision, not just a scheduling quirk.

Reporters who stay inside one beat for a long stretch risk letting their instincts calcify around a single kind of source and a single kind of story. Westminster forced a full reset. There was no pit road, no scanner feed of radio chatter, no driver climbing into a car minutes before a green flag. There was a ring, a judge, a handler, and a dog that had no interest in explaining itself to a television audience.

Handling that reset well requires trusting that the reporting instinct itself, not the specific subject matter, is the actual skill. Stavast had already tested that instinct early in her career, when she covered sports she knew comparatively little about and had to prepare her way into competence each time. Westminster asked for the same trust in a venue about as far from a racetrack as it gets.

What Silence Actually Requires

It would be easy to assume that covering an event where the subject can't speak is simpler than one where it can. In some ways it is: there's no risk of a bad quote, no chance a driver says something combative on a hot mic.

But the burden of preparation doesn't disappear. It moves. A reporter who can't ask the competitor a single question has to know enough about breed standards, handling technique, and the specific dog's history to ask everyone else the right one instead.

That's the same discipline Stavast has applied everywhere else in her career, just aimed at a different kind of gap. Whether the missing information belongs to a driver who's hard to reach before a race or an athlete who's literally incapable of answering a question, the job comes down to the same thing: find whoever can actually supply the answer, and be prepared enough to ask them something worth hearing.

The Assignment That Came Right After

The timing of the Westminster years matters as much as their content. By Stavast's account, the Olympics arrived shortly after her Westminster run wound down, which makes the dog show look less like an isolated detour from her motorsports career and more like the transition point between two very different kinds of assignments. Rio's diving competition and, later, Pyeongchang's freestyle skiing asked her to do something closer to what Westminster had already required than what a decade of NASCAR pit road had: build a broadcast around athletes she'd have limited access to mid-competition, working from preparation and secondary sources as much as from direct interviews.

Westminster didn't just happen to appear on her résumé before the Olympics. It functioned as practice for exactly the kind of reporting the Olympics would demand at a much larger scale, minutes of airtime built from research and a handful of well-placed questions to people other than the competitor. A dog show and an Olympic diving final have almost nothing in common on the surface. Structurally, for a broadcaster, they asked for the same muscle.