Lineages
HISTORY
Frank Zwiers, the marathon expert pigeon fancier from Breda
The city of Breda is home to 34-year-old Frank Zwiers. Together with his wife Suzan, daughter Vienna and son Kian, he lives in a terraced house in a typical housing estate built in the 1980s. Not exactly the place you would think of for this young champion. The gardens in these new houses are not big enough to keep the pigeons. Tree branches extend over the loft making it far from ideal but, of course, such details don't seem to hinder Frank.
At the beginning of the year 2000, a young Frank started to get acquainted with pigeon racing. Through his grandfather, he got to know the sport and his interest in it grew. Within a short time he built himself a loft in the back garden of his parents' house. From the beginning, Frank was focused on becoming a winner. His main interest, at that time, was speed and middle distance racing (up to 700 kilometres). This interest changed in 2005 when he became interested in the marathon as a type of discipline.
His beginnings were very good, as they still are today, when he won the first place in the long distance in the C. Club of Breda (his hometown). Not only that, but also the first eleven places were won by the Zwiers loft. During that 2005 season, he won five young bird races. But in 2009 he took the decision to say goodbye to the sport because, with the birth of his daughter and his job, he did not have enough time to devote to pigeons. Despite his retirement, Frank was always aware of how his birds were doing and followed the races on the internet, the results and the auctions. He often saw pigeons arriving at the lofts of his pigeon fancier neighbours.
It was then that his wife, Suzan, decided to encourage him to race again and gave him a series of long distance pigeons, as they were the most suitable for his new hectic lifestyle. The long distance season is the shortest, so Zwiers would not need so much time to devote to it. He bought the birds from fancier Mark van den Berg.
Golden Future and his relationship with Mark van den Berg
The contact with his soul mate Mark, from whom his wife acquired the birds, was perfect and the result was a large number of top pigeons in Breda in Zwiers' loft. All the descendants of all the Van den Berg birds are now in Frank's loft. Zwiers also bought a pigeon, the Golden Future, in Pipa, from the super fancier, Arjan Beens. When Zwiers went to collect the pigeon, Arjan rewarded Frank's talent by promising him something very special. Beens would give him, free of charge, several pairs of eggs from his best pigeons. Now, almost every one of Beens' birds can be found in Frank's loft in Breda. For example, a unique example is a son of Miss Gijsje by Snelle Jelle.
Breeding with Jelle Jellema
Owning Golden Future led to an interesting agreement with another big name in the marathon world. In the autumn of 2012, Zwiers came into contact with Jelle Jellema from Nijverdal. Jelle is known for his spartan way of training pigeons and was, unusually, interested in the Golden Future. This resulted in joint breeding in 2013 by both fanciers. The Golden Future was moved to Jelle's loft and joined all the tops from Jellema's loft and the pigeons were divided between the two lofts.
Due to the union with Jellema, Frank Zwiers has obtained a number of unique characteristics in his pigeons, because of Jelle's spartan way of training his birds, which provides endurance and power. Also, thanks to Van den Berg and Beens, Zwiers' birds have the talent to fly at night. All this gives the Zwiers birds a number of spectacular qualities.
