Hot Spot 1
The first Hotspot race of this season was launched on December 11 when 1309 birds were liberated from the 330 km distance in Wangyai district, northeast of Bangkok. Despite the very erratic weather condition in the past several weeks that had caused severe damage to the pigeon racing community and OLR’s, nobody could complain about the condition on that morning with bright sky, 25*Celsius and strong tail wind. Starting at 6.40 am, the first flock of 29 equal firsts arrived home at 9.51 am, one hour ahead of the expected schedule. Helped by the 3o-35 km/hour northeaster wind the birds took only three hours and eleven minutes to hit the landing board, setting a record of 1,727.007 mpm. by the first clocked in pigeon. That was a speed of 103.62 km per hour! All 29 birds entered the loft within four seconds and the first 50 prizes were all filled in five minutes. One hour passed and 1,140 birds or 87% of the basketed pigeons had returned to the loft. Only 45 birds were missing in the first day. This was a successful story albeit very much helped by weather condition plus a bit of luck. Had it been a bad weather day as faced by other well managed OLR’s, a loss of 30-40% of well-trained birds was not impossible. Compared to other OLR’s worldwide, road training in Thailand as practiced by our OLR’s are much harder in terms of frequency and distance although there should be a fair trade-off between keeping the number of birds for the final events and the strength of the athletes. In our case, the birds had been trained more than twenty times from 20 km to 260 km covering about 2,000 total distance before the first Hotspot. One thousand seven hundred and four birds (1704) or 60.42% of original registered entries were qualified from the first 100 km test while 1,309 birds or 46.41 % of original entries survived to the first race.
Winner of the first hot spot race is a small mealie hen R18-63481 entered by Rai Prom Dan, a syndicate of 50 fanciers mostly local, which entered 150 birds from the start. Less than half of a second behind came the second prize winner R18-56767 of Pumiphat-Arthron. This is robust cheq cock with promising future. Clocked about one second later was the third prize winner which is a small blue hen R18-55052 entered by Boonchuay-Sant-Pichai, a strong local team to be reckoned with. Mr. Boonchauay is probably the gentleman fancier having the greatest collection of quality pigeons in Thailand who apt not to publicize about his birds.
While Hotspot one is the starting mark to collect the data for Team Championship competition, racing results for the newly created Grand Average Ace Pigeon have already been collected for the third times. The winner will be a pigeon which scores the maximum of five positions with the lowest summation of all prizes won within the first 300 birds in each race. So far, there are only 22 birds that have scored three prizes each in all three consecutive flights from 210, 260 and 330 km. As for the Team Championship, there was only one team of A Suporn-Blue blood that scored by his remaining five bird team 4 prizes within the first 15% of the birds basketed i.e., 10, 50, 60 and 132. A good start but there is a long road still to go. Pictures of the three top winners will follow.
