They came in all forms at Porangahau's Duke of Edinburgh Hotel Speedshear yesterday - a new world record holder from Te Kuiti, an Australian who recently won the world's richest speedshear, and a midwife from Hastings.
And then there were the 600 spectators, in jandals, T-shirts and boardshorts, not to mention
the two other guys in a Central and Southern Hawke's Bay derby for the major prize - a world champion and another world record holder.
The midwife, Erin Hura, grew up around the woolshed, as did her husband who lauded the positive impact of their shearing days, preparing both for their lives after they retired from the industry. "They all grew-up in the woolshed around here," he said. "If it wasn't for shearing a lot would have ended up in gangs ... There's a lot of them it's taken around the world."
The notion of winning was never in the mind of his wife, who he reckoned was doing her bit to support the local show.
She was unplaced in the Quickthrow, an event unique to Porangahau's speedshear in which first and second were partners Harvey Pairama, a shearer, and Ngahuia Thwaites, an up-and-coming national title-winning woolhandler.
World champion Cam Ferguson, of Waipawa, blasted his way through the open shearing preliminaries, including a quarterfinal elimination of world four-stand record holder Beau Guelfi, from Western Australia, who won A$7500 ($9900) at the Kangaroo Island Speedshear in South Australia.
But Central Hawke's Bay's challenge in the final was thwarted by local hero, world nine-hours ewe-shearing record and former lambs record holder Rodney Sutton, who took the $2000 prize. Among those eliminated earlier was Te Kuiti shearer Stacey Te Huia, on holiday in the Bay after setting a world eight-hour record last week.
