On walks when my pup sees another dog in the distance approaching he jumps and whirls and twists all about and basically goes a bit bonkers. it's all excitement. he has not done this at ringcraft so i am hoping he won't do it at shows. either way, as he is so large people do not think/believe he's a pup and are a bit frightened. Any solution to this, i appreciate his excitement but i think i am the only one.

My Safi is like that when on lead out, but doesn't react to dogs at shows much at all.

Hoping my boy will be the same, he didn't do it at ringcraft so fingers crossed, our next show is next week and it's enough to wonder about whether he will move remotely decently, or just chew the lead, or will he stand still for one millisecond for the judge without wandering will he be flailing about all day to meet all the dogs!! LOL

My lurcher Vic went through a phase like this, he would also scream at the top of his voice in frustration which was horrible because some people used to think I was doing something cruel to him to cause the screaming.
He sort of grew/trained out of it and doesn't do it anymore. I worked on the 'look at me' exericise at home and at dog club a lot which seemed to help. Of course if he'd already gotten excited I could have waved a steak under his nose and he would not take notice, then I would grit my teeth and walk (stagger, dragging unruly dog) away.
I found with mine he was a lot more into toys than food rewards when out and about and getting him hooked on fetching really helped with keeping his attention.

Good luck with your show too :) The first lurcher show Vic went to was a disgrace! He did pretty well behaviour wise until the last minute, he decided he'd had enough of standing and would lie down and commando crawl to the edge of the ring to see a puppy.
Everyone had a good snigger at me, it wasn't nearly as mortifying as I thought it would be though and everyone was very nice despite their laughing :D

My 1 year old lurcher bitch is the same. She gets very very excited, even over people and passing cars. I can not let her run free anywhere where their are other dogs running free as she would dart straight to them and not even a game of fetch or tug of war will stop her. We used to go to some fun shows when she was younger and she was 'ok', but I am to scared to go now becasue of how excited she now is. And yea she does the screaming things aswell when she can see other dogs running and playing, and it is very off putting.

> On walks when my pup sees another dog in the distance approaching he jumps and whirls and twists all about and basically goes a bit bonkers

Buster sterted doing this when he was about 7 months old, due to his size I struggled to stay on my feet.
I got a chest harness and another lead, I would walk him with a lead on his collar and a lead on the chest harness (clipped to the ring at the top, between his shoulders). This gave me the ability to stop him spinning around, this lowered his excitment level enough for me to be able to teach him that that is not the way to greet another dog, eg. only allowed to greet other dogs when NOT spinning and jumping like one of those fake bulls you have to see how long you can stay on for :-D