Rural sports award to Hawke's Bay shearer Rowland Smith

Rowland Smith.

Golden Shears, New Zealand and former world champion Hawke's Bay shearer Rowland Smith is the inaugural New Zealand Rural Sportsman of the Year.

Based on performances in 2016, the award was presented in Palmerston North on Friday at the first Norwood New Zealand Rural Sports Awards, held in conjunction with the Hilux Rural Games.

During the year, Smith had 23 competition wins including the 20-sheep Open finals at the Golden Shears and the New Zealand Championships, and the Royal Welsh Show, in which he competed last July while on a Shearing Sports New Zealand team tour in the UK with fellow Hawke's Bay shearer John Kirkpatrick.

He also represented New Zealand in a transtasman series test in Australia and won the 2016 Rural Games Speedshear final in Queenstown.

Smith was one of several Hawke's Bay finalists among the four categories, the Sportsman of the Year finalists including world champion farm fencer Shane Bouskill, an instructor at the Smedley Cadet farm near Tikokino.

Angela Stevens, of Napier, was a finalist in the Young Sportsperson of the Year Award, won by Taranaki axeman Jack Jordan, winner of three Junior World titles.

Stevens had been Shearing Sports NZ's top-ranked Junior woolhandler for the 2015-2016 season which included winning the 2016 New Zealand Championships Junior woolhandling title in Te Kuiti, as well as secretary for the SSNZ North Island electronic points-scoring team.

Among those supporting her at the awards was father John Kirkpatrick, who won the individual title at last month's World Shearing and Woolhandling Championships in Invercargill and has become an early favourite for the 2017 Rural Sportsman of the Year title.

Porangahau farmer and former World and multiple Golden Pliers farm fencing champion Paul Van Beers was a nominee in the Contribution to Rural Sports category It was won by shearing competitions official and machinery supplier Lance Waddell, of Whangarei.

Van Beers helped establish New Zealand Fencing Competitions and a more formal structure for farm fencing events throughout the country.

The first Rural Sportswoman of the Year is tree climbing champion Chrissy Spence, of Gisborne.

Former Hawke's Bay shearer Dion King, now farming and shearing in Wairarapa, won the Rural Games Speedshear on Sunday in the Palmerston North square, while his son Tony won a speed fencing competition on Saturday.

Games guests and Olympic and world champions Mahe Drysdale and Valerie Adams were among those who took part in a range of events which included gumboot throwing, cow-pat tossing and olive-stone spitting