Things Ya Hate to See: Corruption in the Shanghai Pigeon Racing Circuit
“At the 16th Annual Shanghai Homing Pigeon Race last April, pigeons owned by a pair of trainers, surnamed Gong and Zhang, took the top four spots — all with suspiciously fast times. The competition saw hundreds of trained homing pigeons fly more than 700 kilometers, from Shangqiu, a city in the eastern part of Henan province, all the way to Shanghai.
However, it turns out that instead of Shanghai, the two men had trained their birds to fly directly to a roost near to the starting line. After the race began on April 29th, they picked up the pigeons at the roost, stuffed them inside milk cartons, and smuggled them on board a high-speed train to Shanghai, according to China’s Legal Daily.
Like most animals in China, I assumed someone had intentions of eating them. I was wrong, they were being bred to race. Essentially how Pigeon racing works is race officials take everyone’s pigeons hundreds or even thousands of kilometers outside of the city and then set them free. The first pigeon to make it back to it’s owner’s coop wins. Pretty fascinating stuff but not what I would call a spectator sport unless they decided to start attaching mini-GoPros to the pigeon’s heads. Just take it from Pigeon racing Aficionado Kevin Wang:
How hard is it to fake the death of a pigeon? Just chuck the thing against a glass window. Boom. Done. Everyone knows birds don’t see windows as barriers.
Thankfully, justice was served at the end of the day. Never try to get one by the Shanghai Pigeon Racing Association. You can’t bull shit a bird racer.
“Considering this curious behavior indeed, the Shanghai Pigeon Racing Association filed a lawsuit against the two. This week, Gong and Zhang were both found guilty of fraud by a Shanghai court. Because they declined to accept the cash prizes, their punishment was mitigated, each receiving a three-year suspended sentence. As the mastermind of the scheme, Gong was fined 30,000 yuan while Zhang was fined 20,000 yuan.”
I’d love to take a deep dive into the Shanghai pigeon racing scene for a future “Whoa That’s Weird” episode so be on the lookout for that.