Breeders Grand Champion for All European Online Koi Show 2025
Last year I wrote about this Kohaku when I first saw her at the European Koi Show in Oldenzaal. She missed a significant award by a hair, or rather, by a carp poke. You can re-read the story about this missed award here. This year the Raymond managed to convince the judges of her beauty when she finished strong to win the Mature Champion in a bold field of competitors in Oldenzaal. This fish’s prelude to a higher title did not require another year of preparation. It was at the online European Koi Show 2025 that Raymond Woerts submitted his 81 cm Kohaku for gold! The breeder jury rated his Koi with the highest possible rating and crowned the Koi; Breeders Grand Champion of the Online All European Koi Show.
Where the Koi, delivered to the hobbyist by Interkoi, really excels is in skin quality. By this we mean not only gloss and pigmentation, but also the quality of the sashi and kiwi which is actually the most important expression of the former. Ceel Kohaku are big and have a nice sheen, but that still makes a show fish alone. We want Koi to be finished and that means as tightly defined patterns both on the front (Sashi) and on the back (Kiwa) of the pattern. The thicker the white skin, the less transparent it is and the less glassy the shiroji and beautiful creamy white that the fish becomes. Because you can’t see through it as well, there is a small margin to see the deeper scales of the red pattern through the cuticle.
The pattern of a Koi grows from front to back, which means that the scales overlap. So a pattern (pigment-filled cells) that you see on the surface actually starts a little further forward. By the time you see the pigment on the surface, there is already a white or two scales over it. In young koi, that white skin is still thin and translucent and so you always see a red blur of a few scales wide through the white scales in front of the red pattern. For the Koi Show this is opaque as much as possible and therefore the outlines of the pattern as strong as possible. Kiwa is the same phenomenon, but at the back where the red scales lie over the white ones. A better quality of beni, provides a tighter outline where it either follows the abrasive, which we call maruzome Kiwa, or cuts through it, which is also called kamisori Kiwa. A combination of both phenomena on one Koi is called Konzai Kiwa.
Breeders know how difficult this phenomenon is to master and if you want to do it right, you have to combine all these technical aspects into the development of a Koi with a good firm physique and ditto skin quality. Competing with fish is more than just letting them grow up; preparing a Koi for the show is an equally intensive activity that requires a lot of careful planning and careful approach as we have already heard many times from hobbyists as Filip Poppe and Rob van der Hulst; a list of top hobbyists where Raymond Woerts with this victory as Grand Champion can join. Congratulations Raymond!
