Mix chosen for World Shearing Championships
AUCKLAND: A mixture of title and selection series winners will make up the sixstrong New Zealand team for the 2023 World Shearing and Woolhandling Championships in Scotland.
The processes were decided recently by Shearing Sports New Zealand’s national committee, on recommendations from its North and South island delegates’ meetings.
The winners of the Golden Shears open championship in Masterton on March 4 and the New Zealand Shears open in Te Kuiti on April 1 will be automatic selections for the two machineshearing berths.
However, if the same shearer wins both events, the second position will go to the NZ Shears runnerup.
The two woolhandlers chosen will also be the first and second placegetters from the Golden Shears — the final of an eightshow national selection series, comprising four rounds in the North Island and four in the South Island.
Rounds will be held in Waimate, Poverty Bay, Hawke’s Bay, Central Hawke’s Bay, Lumsden, Balclutha, Gore and Masterton.
The two blades shearers will be the top two in an eightshow series with events at the Waimate Shears and the Rangiora, Ashburton, Christchurch, Reefton, Mayfield, Oxford and MacKenzie Shows.
The World Championships will be held from June 22 to 25 next year during the Royal Highland Show at Ingliston, Edinburgh.
This will be the 19th World Championships, the first having been for machineshearing only in England in 1977.
A feature of this year’s championships will be New Zealand’s attempt to regain supremacy in the machine shearing and the defence of its new No 1 acclaim in the blades events.
New Zealand has won the machineshearing individual and teams events double 10 times but missed out on both titles at the last championships three years ago in France.
However, in France New Zealand won the bladeshearing double for the first time, new international Geraldine’s Allan Oldfield’s breaking a South African stranglehold on the individual title.
While Sheree Alabaster, of Taihape, and Pagan Rimene, of Alexandra, won the woolhandling teams event in 2019, it was the third time in a row that New Zealand had not won the individual title at a World Championships abroad since Alabaster won in Norway in 2008.
Some big competition is expected in Scotland, especially in the machine shearing, with UK nations teams chosen during the current northern hemisphere season, including defending individual champion Richard Jones, for Wales.
New Zealand gun and world ninehour eweshearing recordholder Matt Smith is also in the England team.
The nowestablished and awardwinning Cornwall farmer won the England championship final in June and will be out to emulate brother and Hawke’s Bay shearer Rowland Smith’s winning of the title, in Ireland in 2014.
But 2012 individual champion, twotime teams champion and New Zealandbased Scottish shearer Gavin Mutch, recently missed selection, for what would otherwise have been his eighth championship representing Scotland in a row, dating back to 2005.
Mutch won major titles in the Royal Highland Open and the Scottish Blackface Championships in June, but was just third in Scotland’s team selection event in the Scottish National Championship.
He did not enter the Scottish National Circuit, which decided the second machineshearing position.