It turns out that this year's winner is the equivalent to a grandfather/grand-daugher mating and the Reserve Dog is the equivalent of a father/daughter mating.
As Landauer points out, it's totally unnecessary. There is quite a lot of extant genetic diversity in Border Collies. The problem is that it is split into factions of type or geography, isolating sections of the breed in increasingly compromised gene pools.
Check out the rest of Landauer's blog here:
