Belgian racing pigeon sells for world record £1.4m

Mr Gyselbrecht shows off New Kim before the auction

Credit: REUTERS/Yves Herman

She’s young, blindingly fast and has just been sold for a record fee in the sport.

‘New Kim’, a two-year-old racing pigeon, was snapped up by a Chinese buyer on Sunday for £1.4 million

Chinese enthusiasts have in recent years turned their attention — and considerable funds — to a pastime that in the UK is associated with fanciers in flatcaps. 

The interest has sent prices soaring, allowing Western breeders to feather their nests with the sale of top-flight birds to Asia.

Pigeons from Belgium, where New Kim was bred, are particularly prized, as the country is considered a home of the sport. 

The auction house that organised the sale said offers for the bird had already raised £1 million in the last week, surpassing a previous record set last year by a Belgian pigeon named Armando. 

But the price was pushed up to £1.4 million in a frantic last-minute scramble on Sunday between two anonymous Chinese buyers.

“These record prices are unbelievable, because this is a female. Armando was a male. Usually a male is worth more than a female because it can produce more offspring,” Nikolaas Gyselbrecht, the head of the high-end Pipa auction house said.

Mr Gyselbrecht said New Kim had won the title of best young bird in Belgium in 2018 and taken an early retirement. Pigeons can typically breed until 10 and can live until around 15, so the bird has many years of new chicks ahead. 

Kurt Van de Wouwer, whose family bred the bird, said that he was in “total shock” from the size of the sale. 

The family of breeders decided to sell their collection after father Gaston Van de Wouwer retired at the age of 76. All 445 birds in their coop were put on auction, and the overall sale was closing in on £4.5 million. A second part of the auction is ending on Monday, but did not include any bird that could match New Kim.

Mr Gyselbrecht said no other country had such a high concentration of pigeon enthusiasts as Belgium.

“So you have 20,000 pigeon fanciers in a very small country competing with each other on a very high level. It’s like the Champions League,” he said.

“Everybody is interested in our pigeons," agreed Pascal Bodengien, head of the Belgian pigeon federation. 

Prize pots for Chinese pigeon racing can reach tens of millions of pounds. The sport in the country often focuses on one-loft racing, where pigeons are kept together in the same coop for months before being released hundreds of miles away and finding their way back home.

Potential breeders elsewhere looking to cash in fast on Chinese custom, however, may be disappointed. Successfully breeding pigeons, with the constant mixing and mating of birds, takes years if not decades.

Pigeon racing has been declining in popularity in the UK in recent years, but the pastime hit headlines in the spring when it became the first spectator sport to return following the coronavirus lockdown.