Hello!! My name is Mario Azzopardi, I am 32 years old and a disabled person. Because of my disability I need help everyday to walk and to do thing like normal people do. Due to my disability I do not work, so I have much free time at home and usually I spend my time taking care of pigeons. I am a pigeon fancer which means I have a loft and train pigeons for races. My mum helps me a lot in my hobby; she helps me clean the loft and feeding the pigeons. In this sports my disability doesn’t effect me, in fact in the season of 1993/1994 I finished 6th in the short distance race, at that time I was a member of the Sliema Racing Pigeon Club. Nowadays I am a member of another club which is the Northern District Homing Club and I am also a member of the committee.

The pigeons are part of my life, they are my best friends, and they help me live. I hope that this website serves as courage to people with a disability. If you want to do something, do it, no matter what. Where there is will, the is always a way.

Racing pigeons—more accurately described as racing doves—are, in fact, one of man's oldest feathered companions. Pigeons date to antiquity! Far from being a lowly servant, the racing pigeon was the special prerogative of kings, princes, and nobles of all kinds. During these past times it was contrary to law for a common man to own pigeons.

The great empires of Carthage, Egypt, and Rome made full use of them in many ways including the production of squabs (a great delicacy) as well as high-grade nitrogen (droppings) for their fields. The aforementioned civilizations also used pigeons in a great network of advanced communication. They kept emperors in touch with the most remote areas of their lands during a time when horse and riders or caravans would have taken weeks to deliver the same information. Caesar made formidable use of them during his conquest of Gaul.

It is now extremely difficult to imagine that our feathered companions were at one time the ultimate communication tool used in the greatest of all communication networks! It is further difficult to comprehend that these little warriors of the airways made possible both great empires as well as great fortunes. As already mentioned the Egyptians and Persians trained rock doves to carry messages. They were an exceptionally reliable method of communication hitherto unheard of. As these empires spread across the then known civilized world capturing country after country they discovered that these other countries had also trained rock doves. These countries included China, Greece, Italy as well as India. Among these many countries China had in fact organized a postal system based upon the use of messenger pigeons. Knowledge is power, and at one time the surest and swiftest way to deliver this knowledge was with racing pigeons.

One would, at first glance, believe it difficult to draw a connection between racing pigeons and the Rothschild banking dynasty. However it seems that they increased enormously their fortune in 1815 with the exceptional help of what was then called a carrier pigeon. When Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, Count Rothschild knew of his defeat long before any other persons in England. He had received this critical information via carrier pigeon. This advance knowledge allowed him to make critical decisions that made an enormous fortune possible. Here is a prime example of the reality that, knowledge and its timely use, in fact, are the ultimate in power!

In the 19th Century Julius Reuter founded the news service that globally still caries his name 150 years later. The Reuters news service was actually founded as a line of pigeon posts. The Reuters pigeons helped the banks of Aachen make fortunes and avoid bankruptcy.

Today, as in the past, speed and endurance and the ability of our racing pigeons to orient quickly are the key to success. Pigeon fanciers today are as enthralled with this exceptional bundle of courage speed endurance and intelligence as were the originators of those couriers countless centuries ago.

Even today, as the unbridled power of technology creates new communication frontiers, one can imagine, given certain circumstances, that the racing pigeon can again be a powerful communication tool. Several countries, even as we enter the 21st Century, make use of this remarkable bird in military communication and rescue applications. It was recently reported in The Globe Daily that future communication could be literally for the birds! Claire Wolfe, the author of I'm Not A Number, comments that in the near future pigeons could actually be used to ensure the secrecy of messages. She indicates that safe communication modes could replace—for some freedom seekers—unsafe communication modes like the internet and telephone. Well, we would then have come full circle—low-tech replaces high-tech for reasons of security Is she right? Time will tell, but certainly an interesting twist!

Currently all over the world, racing pigeons are cultivated for their beauty, their will to survive, their tenacity, their incredible speed, and their legendary endurance—in short, the marvelous ability to race to their individual homes at breakneck speeds. From the deserts of the Middle East, to the plains of South Africa, to the industrial towns of Europe, to the ancient cities of China, and finally, to the skyscrapers of America, there exists a bond that goes beyond color, creed, origin, class, and politics. Lovers of racing pigeons are part of a worldwide fraternity that has been with us from the dawn of time itself!

The modern racing pigeon has been developed over the past 150 years to fly farther and faster and more often than any performances hitherto imaginable. Now, if memory serves me correctly, the racing pigeon is the product of the mixing together of several different breeds of pigeons including Horseman, Dragoon, Smerle, the carrier pigeon, and others. In different countries, different pigeon breeds formed the base from which the fanciers worked to develop their homing pigeons too lesser or greater degrees of perfection-usually lesser. The modern racing pigeon is therefore a hybrid and therefore not a pure breed at all.