The crowd packed into a large marquee at the 2019 Golden Shears World Shearing and Woolhandling Championships in Le Drat, France. Photo / SSNZ
The crowd packed into a large marquee at the 2019 Golden Shears World Shearing and Woolhandling Championships in Le Drat, France. Photo / SSNZ
The 2023 Golden Shears World Shearing and Woolhandling Championships in Scotland this week seem certain to reignite a regular debate about whether shearing and woolhandling competition should be an Olympic Games sport.
But it’s an open question for Wools of New Zealand Shearing Sports New Zealand team manager and New Zealand Golden-Shears vice-president Ronny King, who rather than try to manage 500 Olympic Games sheep into Paris next year and Los Angeles in 2028, takes stock of the notion of the Olympics being held around greater numbers of cities and centres in the host country.
Among them is the 2032 Brisbane Olympics, with venues also south on the Gold Coast and north on the Sunshine Coast.
“The shearing could be held at another venue like they do with other sports. It would be difficult but not impossible,” said King soon after arriving in the UK for the 19th Golden Shears World Shearing Championships at the Royal Highland Show in Edinburgh on Thursday-Sunday, where his Wools of New Zealand Shearing Sports New Zealand team is one of 28 from different countries around the World.
Venues for shearing competitions over the years have ranged from working woolsheds to open-sided stands at country shows, and the trays of trucks, to such stadium environments as town halls and Masterton’s War Memorial Stadium, and greenfields sites such as the huge marquee erected in Le Dorat, France, for the 2019 World championships.
The championships invariably spark debate over whether sheep shearing is a sport, Shearing Sports New Zealand maintaining the competition of shearing and woolhandling is a sport.
It says like many other sports it was developed to both formalise the challenges of what goes on in the workplace (the woolshed) and provide a platform for enhancing the skills need for a quality wool harvest, once the backbone of the New Zealand economy.
The first known blade shearing competitions in New Zealand are thought to have been held in the 1860s, with a published record of an event in 1868 at Waipukurau, in Hawke’s Bay.
The world’s first machine shearing competition is believed to have been held at the Hawke’s Bay A and P Show in 1902, a competition now known as the Great Raihania Shears in memory of the first winner Rimitiriu Raihania.
Wools of New Zealand Shearing Sports New Zealand Golden Shears World Sheep Shearing and Woolhandling Championships team manager Ronny King. Photo / SSNZ
The Golden Shears International Shearing Championships was established in Masterton in 1961 with quick global recognition, and has been held in court-sports venue the Masterton War Memorial Stadium annually ever since, apart from Covid cancellations in 2021 and 2022.
Long regarded as the “Wimbledon of Shearing”, it spawned the Golden Shears of Great Britain in 1963 at the Royal Bath and West Show Shepton Mallet, Somerset, which also hosted the first Golden Shears World Championships in 1977.
Shearing Sports New Zealand has been recognised by government sports agency Sport New Zealand for 30 years as the national organisation for the sport.
King, who farms on the outskirts of Pahiatua, in Northern Wairarapa, is used to handling large numbers of sheep, with the Golden Shears in Masterton needing 5000 sheep and attracting over 300 competitors, or 600 in the peak when the New Zealand sheep population was over 70 million, almost three times that of the 2023 flock.
The World championships, held every 2-4 years, have been hosted at the Masterton Golden Shears four times, in 1980, 1988, 1996 and 2012, and the championships have been held in nine countries.
A test of what makes a sport might be the array of World championships over the next five months, from the likes of rugby, women’s football, one-day cricket, basketball, athletics, cycling and swimming championships, to the mountainbike bog-snorkelling championships in Wales, skyrunning championships in Italy, and “Kids” golf champs – ages 5-12 years - in the US.
