BELGIANS' BIRDS ARE BUSTED FOR GETTING HIGH

In Belgium, the home of pigeon racing, a police raid has discovered suspicious materials that indicate some birds are ingesting more than top-quality feed.

For several years it has been rumoured that breeders, feed and Medicine suppliers through-out Belgium.

Large quantities of medicines and other suspicious products were confiscated but no arrests were made, prosecutor Louis Denecker said. He refused to elaborate but said the raid followed an investigation in which analysts found traces of what could be banned chemicals in racing birds.

Associated Press Thursday April 19th 2001

Flugelmann was out on the ledge. He'd been there for the longest time. There were statues below but today he didn't feel like defacing them. The business had turned ugly fast. Faster than a chicken in a blender.

Word on the street was bad. People were saying that Marcel wasn't coming home. Word had it that the greatest homer of all time had taken a one-way ticket, the bird for whom they wrote the words "he's coming home, he's coming home, Marcel's coming home". Well that bird was pate now, lots of pate. Damn. Marcel had been as big as a basketball last time Flugelmann had seen him.

How had it come to this, thought Flugelmann as he looked down on the town square below. Three years ago Marcel had come to him, an ageing racer pigeon who still had stars in his eyes. He asked to be taken under Flugelmann's wing, which was difficult because Flugelmann kept his sandwiches there but they'd worked something out. Soon Marcel was with the "special methods" programme and he was winning everything. He was the posterbird for a generation of pigeons whose motto was death or glory.

What days! He changed the life of a generation. Not only did a generation of birds realise that e-mail was the final sign that pigeon post wasn't coming back but they saw that being fancied was demeaning. Pigeon fancier became a dirty phrase.

Marcel. He just got bigger and stronger. The kids went crazy for the new pigeonchested look, they worked out with pigeon-specific weights and when Marcel signed the deal with Le Coq Sportif things got crazy. He won the classics, led gray pride marches, kids tuned in turned on and flew off. Doves went out of fashion. 3,000 pigeons were released at the start of the Olympics. Every one of them, doped to the gills, remembered Flugelmann with a thin smile.

It was a glorious time. Other pigeons train hard, Marcel told the world, we train smart. There were the ads (Flyin' the Friendly skies) the publicity stunts (worrying sheep, sending a derisive e-mail to Donald Duck) and of course there were the chicks.

Marcel had influence. It was frightening. They'd polled young racing pigeons, asked them with anonymity guaranteed whether they'd like to take steroids and win it all even though they would be dead within the year or whether they would like to race clean and be killed by a cat. Eighty-four per cent had gone for the drugs.

Flugelmann had been the brains behind it all. He'd set up the supply lines, tested the dosages, kept one step ahead of the random stool samplers. He organised the cartel, brought in new products all the time. Pigeon Chorionic Gonadotropine. Pigeon Growth Hormones. The works.

It hadn't all been smooth sailing. The Dutch, typically, had gone too far and when a family in Eindhoven looked out their window and saw what appeared to be five ostriches weighing down their telegraph wires, a shotgun had been used.

SOME early users had felt so strong that they failed to come home at all and just kept flying. There were questions of course. How could pigeons suddenly be beating FedEx for parcel rates? The excuses held firm though. Too much sex and drink in the coop the night before the random test! It's all a conspiracy against pigeons! Food supplements! We all have asthma from hanging around downtown parks! It was just cough mixture!

There was complacency. Some had gone too far preening themselves and their physiques and entering body-building contests until the baby oil massacre. One carelessly discarded match and a bodybuilding contest turned into a party bucket.

There were minor busts of course but the pigeons defaced them just as they did with full size statues. Some pigeons got picked up occasionally, got offers of new lives far away from here pretending to be parrots if they'd just sing like canaries. Flugelmann had been rounded up once himself, but he played the language difficulties to his advantage, effecting to speak only pigeon English. Nobody sang. The movement was ruffled but not plucked.

Now they were busting birds all over the place, cutting great holes in the supply line. The shitehawks in the press were all over the story. Flugelmann hadn't heard a dickie bird from Marcel for weeks. Now more then 80 raids. He didn't like to even think the words but it was unavoidable. Marcel wasn't pate. He wasn't even nuggets. The greatest racer of all time had turned fink. His friend was a goddamn stool pigeon.

Jeez, one day you're on top, the next you're just giblets thought Flugelmann. He flew off briskly, defecating bitterly on the populace below. An old comfort that was going to have to get him through some tough times.