Provincial and national victories brought the Van Loon colony international interest. Superior pigeon game for which he was ‘shown the door’ in several clubs… was simply excluded from the racing environment… for being too ‘strong’, too ‘dominant’… too ‘superior’ for the competitors. Nearly everybody knows the name Louis Van Loon… simply because the man has raced extremely well in the middle distance and the extreme middle distance races in Belgium for years. Volumes have already been written over the famous ‘brothers’ from Arendonk… let us then write about the, for us, ‘just as important’ link in this network of top pigeons, the Louis Van Loon-pigeons. This was often combined with a dose of ‘Tournier-pigeons’… to keep the necessary speed in these ‘overnighters’! For the ‘middle distance’ and the ‘1-day long distance’ the majority of the current top colonies are still based on the not unimportant input of pigeons from ‘Janssen Arendonk’, and Louis Van Loon from the Belgian Poppel! In the long distance and especially the ‘extreme overnight long distance’ one inevitably comes across the time-honoured ‘Jan Aarden’-pigeons, and the old ‘Steenbergs pedigree’… mainly jointly created by the master hand of the late Piet De Weerd. yet when we take a closer look at the stock building of many top lofts by our northern neighbours, the same names crop up time and again. Naming names would be too risky… just because there would be the chance of forgetting a few important ones. Many of these reports or books published… were indirectly the cause of other fanciers going to obtain reinforcements by these ‘top fanciers’… as a result of which the ‘dominant characteristics’ of their pigeons started forming the basis to top successes in the pigeon sport, also in other lofts. Call it on our part ‘dominant breeding pigeons’ (cock or hen)… or a ‘dominant breeding couple’ that lie (lies) at the basis of years of top successes in the pigeon sport! In the history books or in various reports about prominent lofts reference is easily made to a superior ‘pigeon pedigree’… although on closer inspection the entire happenings revolve around that one specific ‘top couple’, or around 1 or a few superior stock pigeons… and their direct family. Specific pedigrees… although we prefer to speak of ‘specific stock pigeons’… always turn up in pedigrees of ‘new crack pigeons’ in a later generation.

Pipa crack