The beady-eyed athletes scan an unfamiliar wind-swept prairie from behind the starting gate.

They’ve prepared for this day since birth.

Pricey high-nutrient meals, early-morning training sessions, weekly competitions across the state — all of it intended to give them a chance at glory in the Grain Belt Classic.

Suddenly, the gate cranks open, unleashing a flurry of feathers and talons as 336 pigeons take flight.

Quickly catching their bearings, the birds form a cloud-like cluster and flutter out of view toward the rising Nebraska sun.

The 350-mile race to crown Omaha’s fastest young pigeon is the culmination of a year’s work for devotees of a local subculture that has flown under the radar for the last century.

Pigeon racing’s popularity peaked in the U.S. when most of Saturday’s middle-aged competitors were kids. But breeding, raising and competing with the birds remains a beloved hobby for the 20 members of the Omaha Racing Pigeon Association.

It’s also serious business: The champion of the 57th annual Grain Belt race brought home a $20,000 top prize.

Every racer is chasing the adrenaline rush of watching their bird deliver a winning performance, said club member Peter Tudor. That feeling, he said, “fuels hours and weeks and months of training and hard work.”

But sharing the niche sport with the tight-knit fraternity of pigeon people — locally and across the globe — is the real payoff, said club president Carter Mayotte.

“That’s the total appeal to me,” Mayotte said, “keeping the bonds of friendship.”

Lofty Achievements

As he cut through a backyard on his morning paper route, the soft sound of cooing drew Mayotte to a small building. The curious 10-year-old peeked in a window to find dozens of pigeons flying around.

Then, a sharp voice broke the predawn peace: “Hey, kid!”

Mayotte ran off scared.

The owner of the voice and the pigeons later called the Omaha World-Herald and invited the paperboy to come back if he was interested in the birds.

Soon enough, the child of a single mother had “30 dads,” all of them pigeon racers at the local club.

Mayotte said they raised him in the sport and stuck with him as he joined the Army and got married. In turn, their passion for pigeons became his lifelong obsession.

Humans originally domesticated rock doves more than 4,000 years ago for food, not racing. But pigeons’ innate sense of direction later cast them as carriers of messages in societies throughout the ancient world.

In the early 1800s, Belgian pigeon enthusiasts crossed several breeds to produce the modern racing homer and created competitions to test their mettle. Though smaller in size than Nebraska’s Panhandle, Belgium remains the epicenter of pigeon racing.

With radio technology still unreliable, combatants in both world wars leaned heavily on pigeons to pass memos across the frontlines, and many G.I.s returned from the battlefields with an appreciation for the birds, Mayotte said.

The sport took off locally after a handful of American Railway Express employees created the Omaha Flying Club in 1925.

Founder Arthur Glasebrook touted competitions as “the cleanest racing of all” and offered a free pair of pigeons to the first 25 people who joined the club, according to an Omaha Daily News article.

The rival Omaha Racing Pigeon Association popped up amid the pastime’s midcentury zenith, eventually absorbing the city’s original club.

The sport has always been based on racing pigeons’ ability to navigate home from far away — a skill sharpened through selective breeding and training.

But since pigeons from different lofts fly different distances during races, winners are determined by average speed rather than finishing time.

Modern technology has added the kind of precision that didn’t exist when Mayotte joined the Omaha club in 1972. Ankle bands electronically record when each pigeon enters its home loft down to a tenth of a second, allowing handlers to keep statistics on their birds’ performances.

Mayotte changed with the times and became a nationally regarded handler of young birds. Sixty-two pigeons from his loft competed Saturday, and all but two came from other breeders who entrusted him to raise and train their homers.

His birds have claimed top places in prestigious contests from Indiana to South Africa. Race winnings paid for physician assistant school and put a candy apple red 1967 Pontiac GTO in his driveway.

He never forgot about his hometown and the club that reared him, he said. Mayotte returned home from spells in Florida and west-central Nebraska in 2006 and helped rebuild Omaha’s racing club from single-digit membership.

“If it’s in your blood, it’s not coming out,” Mayotte said. “And it’s in my blood.”

Importing The Future

A three-word mantra propelled Peter Tudor through transatlantic immigration to the U.S., long hours of truck driving and two nursing degrees.

“Land and pigeons.”

It came from childhood joy smashed in an instant. While growing up in Romania, Tudor cared for dozens of pigeons in the attic of his grandmother’s house.

But after thieves broke in to steal pigeons and frightened his grandma, Tudor’s father hastily disposed of his beloved birds, giving some away and killing others.

“It was kind of traumatic” … It was just as if your favorite toy would be thrown in the fire,” he recalled.

Through tears, a teenage Tudor vowed to his disbelieving dad that he would own a plot of land and raise pigeons when he grew up.

“Every single day, every single week, every single year, that kept being my life dream,” Tudor said.

More than two decades later, the dream came true. He bought a home in northwest Omaha and built three pigeon lofts — one for birds in their first year of life like the Grain Belt competitors, one for older birds that race in spring and a “five-star hotel” for breeders. 

At 41, Tudor is part of a younger generation that has stemmed pigeon racing’s long-declining participation in the U.S.

And like Tudor, many of the fresh faces come from abroad — Europe, Latin America and Asia — where the sport is more popular.

José Castro, who raced pigeons as a kid in Mexico, rediscovered his love for the sport in Nebraska more than three decades after coming to America. Now, the Schuyler resident presides over the Platte Valley Homing Club, which he said is mostly made up of Cuban immigrants.

“A lot of people don’t understand it,” Castro said. “They think we are crazy flying birds, but you gotta do it to understand it.”

For new racers on the circuit, the sport has a steep learning curve, Castro noted. The most successful competitors are good matchmakers who pair up birds with strong pedigrees.

It’s the decades of selective breeding for speed, endurance and homing instincts that distinguish racing pigeons from their feral cousins on the street that are derisively called “rats with wings,” said Tim Macken, a Minnesota mortician who bred a bird that competed in the Grain Belt Classic.

As the contending birds flew over the state Saturday, their handlers bid on new blood to add to their lofts.

Forty-seven pigeons sold at the Omaha club’s auction, including the prized daughter of “first-place ace pigeons” Midnight Cowboy and Knockout. She went for more than $3,200. None of the newly purchased birds will race again — they’re for breeding, Mayotte said.

In an homage to his heritage, Tudor imported most of his breeding birds from his Romanian mentor, Petrica Cocos. He speaks to his flock of about 200 birds in his native tongue.

“Just the thought that they are from Romania … it completes me,” Tudor said.

Weeks before the young bird season started, a fox broke into one of Tudor’s lofts and nabbed about a dozen pigeons. The shaken-up survivors wouldn’t return for a few days. He worried the attack had compromised their motivation to come back after races.

But the youngsters rebounded and put in a strong season, Tudor said, noting that he’s especially proud of one bird — number 55 — that finished second in a race from Loup City after breaking both legs in training.

Saturday’s race was no picnic for any of the 336 competitors. Stiff south winds kept all but 25 birds from reaching their lofts before nightfall.

Still, one handler got a fist-pump-worthy performance out of his team: Greg Warren’s pigeons collected gold, silver and bronze.

The top bird, a hen with white wingtips, flew the 356 miles from Sidney to Blair at 41 mph.

Warren’s commanding win came just a year and a half after the Arbor Day tornadoes destroyed his house and his loft, killing 90% of his pigeons and nearly wiping out the bloodline he’d spent 40 years cultivating.

The veteran racer resolved to start over with the few birds he had left, but he got a jump from fellow breeders.

Omaha club members donated birds for an auction that raised more than $5,000 for Warren, and a new member hosted his surviving pigeons last year. Some of the most famous breeders in the country sent him gift pigeons after learning of his plight, he said.

After all the rebuilding, Warren said it’s an awesome feeling to prevail in the Grain Belt Classic, a title he won many times before the tornado.

“To get this win, it makes me feel like I’m back on track — getting back to where I was.”

First-Time Flyers

Starting a pigeon racing operation isn’t as daunting as it sounds, racers say.

Newbies can find a club through the American Racing Pigeon Union, which hosts a program that pairs beginners with experienced flyers.

The hard and expensive part is building a loft, but once you have it, local pigeon people will gift you birds and teach you the sport, said Carter Mayotte, president of the Omaha Racing Pigeon Association.

“Crazy” Al Christeleit, the national union’s president, said he would personally advise and send pigeons to anyone who wants to join.

“I’ll do whatever I can to get you going,” Christeleit said. “When I first got started, everybody had secrets. In my case, there are no secrets.”

This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press, an independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories in Nebraska that matter. Read the article at: https://flatwaterfreepress.org/oma-homers-meet-the-nebraska-pigeon-racer...