A couple of Hawke's Bay shearing veterans have scooped the big money amid a bit of a showing of the hands of the new young guns at the end of a big first month of the 2019-2020 shearing sports season.
The way was led by John Kirkpatrick who at the
Shearing: Veterans beat the young guns
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Napier shearer Paraki Puna at the Wairarapa show on Saturday, his first open final.
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In the midst of all this was the emergence of Napier shearer Paraki Puna in the open ranks, along with first-year open-class shearer David Gordon of Masterton, each making the Wairarapa final after the semifinal elimination of much-more favoured David Buick, of Pongaroa, and Cam Ferguson, of Waipawa.
Gordon, the 2019 New Zealand Shears Senior champion, was runner-up and Puna, the No 1 ranked senior in New Zealand in 2016-2017, was fourth.
While Gordon had reached the final of the Warrnambool event seven days earlier, it was the first open final in New Zealand for each of the two younger shearers, neither of whom had been born when Kirkpatrick first won at the top level in October 1994.
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Kirkpatrick, and Gordon, had been in Warrnambool as part of a New Zealand Shears Te Kuiti team in the first leg of an annual exchange with the Warrnambool show, which included the NZ team's win in a transtasman match.
The Wairarapa show, at Clareville, near Carterton provided a return to winning form for Puna's sister, Ataneta, who won the senior woolhandling final in one of her rare competition appearances since 2013 when she added the Golden Shears Senior title to the Shears' Junior title she won two years earlier.
