Registered nurse Eleri Bradley accepts her ribbon from Golden Shears stadium compere Tuma Mullins after winning the 2023 Golden Shears novice woolhandling championship in Masterton. Photo /Pete Nikolaison / Golden Shears Media Group
Registered nurse Eleri Bradley accepts her ribbon from Golden Shears stadium compere Tuma Mullins after winning the 2023 Golden Shears novice woolhandling championship in Masterton. Photo /Pete Nikolaison / Golden Shears Media Group
It can be said that Eleri Bradley’s family are into shearing sports hard-core.
Her twin brother Tegwyn won the Golden Shears intermediate and senior shearing titles, her sister Laura is in the books as novice woolhandling champion in 2020, and mum Helen is there too, as junior woolhandling champion in 1995.
But at 28 years old, and now also the Shears’ novice woolhanding champion, Eleri Bradley does it as a hobby, something to give her a break from her job as a registered nurse, in theatre, at Palmerston North Hospital.
After struggling to convince workmates woolhandling is a sport before she told them she was taking the day off on Thursday, she won the final and, if she chooses, might flail the “Goldies” ribbon as proof on her return on Friday.
A Goldies ribbon is the dream of the 370-plus at the three-day championships.
From the family farm at Papatawa, between Woodville and Dannevirke, Bradley said workmates wondered what she meant, and when she showed some online clips from competitions, one said: “That looks quite easy.”
But it wasn’t, with the pressure on all the way from the opening day’s 7.45 am start, Bradley finished second among the 22 in the heats, and after the semi-finals was the top qualifier among the four hopefuls chasing the win on a buzz-filled opening day in Masterton’s War Memorial Stadium as the Golden Shears returned after two years of cancellations amid the restrictions of the global pandemic.
But for her nursing studies it might never have happened, as she said she only did any regular woolhandling in summer to pay her way “through Uni”.
In 2020 she entered a competition for the first time, just for “the fun of it” and the chance to be with the family at the Shears in 2020.
Then came Covid-19, and it wasn’t until four weeks ago that she returned to the competition table at the Dannevirke A and P Show, where she thought she “might as well” as she was already there helping out.
A Golden Shears dream sprang suddenly into focus when she won the Apiti Sports Novice final last Saturday and decided: “I’ve got to enter the Goldies.”
King Country woolhandlers Crystal Newton and Bryndyll Pinkham were second and third respectively, and fourth was Ana Mason, of Masterton.
It was also all about family for 14-year-old Maaka Nikora, who won the novice shearing final, with uncles and cousins appearing from all corners to support him.
After his win, Nikora thrust his arm triumphantly in the air and gave a short speech with all the eloquence of someone who’d been doing it for years.
Maaka Nikora (14) celebrates his 2023 Golden Shears novice shearing championship win. Photo / Pete Nikolaison / Golden Shears Media Group
He was in only the first week of it, having first won at his home Taumarunui Shears last Friday, but wellwishers were soon reminding him of the Golden Shears triumph of “uncles” Rangi Nikora, who won the 1994 intermediate title, and Robert Nikora, the junior champion two years later.
His father’s shearing in Australia, but there’s some handy tutorship around Taumarunui to help guide a new prodigy, who first shore in a competition two years ago and shore 200 lambs for the first time, a week after his birthday in January.
Nikora’s enjoying the “school of shearing” right now, and said “it’s in my blood”, but he also wanted “to go back to school”, although the handpiece was still sharpened and at the ready for such events as the New Zealand Shears in Te Kuiti on March 30-April 1.
In Masterton, Nikora did it the hard way, the last of 12 semi-final qualifiers from 51 who shore in the heats, and then fifth of the six making it into the final to shear two sheep each.
Meanwhile, Central Hawke’s Bay farm training institution Smedley claimed bragging rights among the farmers of the future, by winning the first title decided at the Golden Shears this year.
Second-year cadets Scott O’Connor, 19, from Tinui, and Benazzi Ward, 18, from Pirinoa, won the six-team MKM Student Shearing Challenge, claiming the Tikokino operation’s first win in the event and the first title to be decided at this year’s championships.
Pukemiro, a training farm just east of Dannevirke and which won the first two student challenges at the Golden Shears in 2019 and 2020, was runner-up, with its pairing of Zach Hall and Renee Garrett.
Acclaimed co-educational college Feilding High School, the former campus of such All Blacks as Aaron Smith and Sam Whitelock but also a campus with a shearing competition dating back over 30 years, was third, followed in order by Napier Boys High School, Palmerston North Boys High School, and Growing Future Farmers.
O’Connor and Ward also qualified for the Golden Shears novice semi-finals but missed out on the top six for the final.
Results from day one of the 62nd Golden Shears international shearing and woolhandling championships
