THE PLEASURE IN ANALYSING RESULTS
by John Clements
I take great pleasure in digesting and analysing each year those big International book results that annually drop through my letter box. The latest to drop was the biggest of them all ‘The International Barcelona’. This result comes in two parts one for the overall result and one for the hens. These big results are fascinating and transparent information compared to UK National results. They are also a shop window for continental fanciers to market their pigeons abroad.
Providing you have sufficient confidence to go it alone and educate yourself in how they do things on the continent and know what to look for, a great deal of information is contained in these documents for these results are examined from Shanghai to Southport and from Warsaw to Washington State. They are essential reading for those who are seriously interested in long distance pigeon racing from an ‘worldwide’ point of view. Everyone knows that if you live in Belgium, Holland, France or Germany and you pretend to call yourself a long-distance fancier, this is the one race above all others you have to be in and the full book result is the one document that counts above all others.
One thing about the way these results are presented and the information they contain is they provide huge factual detail of the whole event. There is no hiding place here everyone knows how many each fancier sent and how many each fancier timed in. Everyone knows the positions you take and the percentage of your returns. There is no mention of strain names or other commercial diversions this is strict and accurate result information for a race flown on that particular day in that particular year.
Looking down the lists away from the obvious winners a little gem emerged this year. It is this little gem that I now want to concentrate on just to give everyone a glimpse of the kind of information that is possible if you carefully study results.
One chap (unknown to me) sent eight pigeons and time all eight high in the result; his last and 8th pigeon being in 1488th position out of the total entry of 21,169. This man is C. Shermer of Castricum in the Netherlands. His distance from Barcelona is 1254km, which makes him one of the longer flyers flying over 770 miles. How his pigeons arrived I will list below. The birds were liberated at 09.00 the previous day.
Pos Sent time clocked Vel
1. 218th 8/3 08.14am 1223.64
2. 312 8/8 0836 1197.69
3. 326 8/7 08.39 1194.34
4. 478 8/1 09.07 1163.48
5. 550 8/2 09.19 1150.44
6. 593 8/4 09.25 1143.94
7. 720 8/6 09.42 1127.05
8. 1488 8/5 10.47 1064.81
As can be seen from the above list his fancied pigeon was his 4th pigeon, his least fancied was his second pigeon. His 1st and 2nd and last pigeon to arrive were Hens, the others were Cocks. He was 86th 121st and 470th in the Hens’ result from 5550 pigeons. The real big question and one that is not contained in the result is: will this family of pigeons do well in a similar long distance race in the UK under the conditions that apply flying from France to England or Ireland? The course into the UK is certainly different and more difficult and the number of pigeons flying is different and much reduced. There is certainly a difference between 21,000 pigeons flying where 15,000 of them may well be on a course flying through Belgium and on to the Netherlands than say 3,000 pigeons flying from the south of France to all parts of England. The fact that NFC pigeons have to cross the sea to get home makes the flight different, and to my mind better. We in the UK should begin to appreciate the affect our difficult conditions have on the pigeons we breed. When it comes to extreme distance pigeons, ours are more individual and generally better that those from the continent. Not many people know that.
It is not a automatic ‘given’ that pigeons that do well flying over 700 miles from Barcelona to the Northern parts of the Netherlands will do equally well flying a similar distance from Tarbes to the North of England into sections ‘K’ and ‘L’ of the NFC. Nevertheless the performance of Mr Shermer clocking eight from eight is remarkable in any language and he should be rightly praised for achieving it. As a team this was the team performance of this year’s International Barcelona and as a team this performance will be hard to better in any year and at any time. Nevertheless the real winner is race itself. Barcelona has established itself as the ‘Big Race’ of Europe due largely to how the result being in book form is presented and how many are included in the full result. These result books have become reference documents. They are constantly being referred to and have now become treasured artefacts in pigeon households throughout europe or even the world.
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Elimar - Septemmber 2014
