Rowland Smith gets down to work at the Great Raihania Shears on Friday in his first shearing competition, final and win in 17 months. Photo / SSNZ
Rowland Smith gets down to work at the Great Raihania Shears on Friday in his first shearing competition, final and win in 17 months. Photo / SSNZ
Champion shearer Rowland Smith sounded a loud warning that he’ll be the man to catch in New Zealand’s 2023 World Championship hopes when he won the Great Raihania Shears open final at the Hawke’s Bay Show on Friday.
The Maraekakaho farmer and agricultural contractor hadn’t competed since winning the New Zealand Shears open final in Te Kuiti in April 2021.
Smith is now in his 16th season at the top level and is the winner of at least 167 open finals, including the 2014 World Championship in Ireland. He also won the Great Raihania title three times in a row from 2015-2017.
Often a late starter each season due to his other commitments, Smith reckoned he’d hardly shorn a sheep this season, other than a couple while showing students the way at the Shears’ schools competition the previous day in the same Tomoana Showgrounds.
However, he soon showed he had the quality to beat all comers, after finishing second off the board and 42 seconds after Te Kuiti shearer Jack Fagan, who shore the four-man final of 20 full-wooled sheep in 16min 24sec - an average of 49.2 seconds a sheep caught, shorn and penned.
It was the aftermath that counted most, as Smith needed almost all of his 2.45pts advantage from the judging of the sheep in the pens, to win by 0.35pts from Fagan, who thought he’d struck it really lucky on the day, with the combing and settling of the sheep.
“They were … succulent,” he said.
Southern Hawke’s Bay shearer, Scotland international and 2012 World Champion Gavin Mutch came third, and fourth was Eketahuna’s Hemi Braddick, after his maiden open win a week earlier at the Poverty Bay A and P Show’s Gisborne Shearing and Woolhandling Championships.
Open woolhandling finalists on the tables at the Great Raihania Shears in Hastings on Friday, October 21, 2022. Fomr left Maryanne Baty (winner), Chelsea Collier (fourth), Jasmin Tipoki (third) and Monica Potae. Photo / SSNZ
Smith didn’t expect to be doing many more competitions before Christmas but will step into top gear in the New Year, as he recognised he still had to do the miles to be ready for the Golden Shears in Masterton in March and the New Zealand Shears in April.
The Golden Shears winner will be an automatic selection for the Wools of New Zealand Shearing Sports New Zealand team for the 2023 Golden Shears World Shearing and Woolhandling Championships at the Royal Highland Show in Scotland on June 22-25, as will be the winner at the NZ Shears in Te Kuiti.
If one shearer wins both titles, as Smith has won the last six times he has tried, the teammate will be the New Zealand Shears runner-up.
Meanwhile, Gisborne woolhandler Maryanne Baty, a world teams champion in 2017, returned to the scene of her first open competition win to score a second Great Raihania Shears open woolhandling title.
Baty had had just three previous open victories, due to fellow Gisborne woolhandler Joel Henare dominating open finals in recent years, with 126 wins including three of the four earlier finals this season.
Baty’s first win was at Hastings in 2015, her second at Dannevirke just before the world championships success in 2017, and the third was at her home Poverty Bay show later that year.
She’d missed a deadline to enter a selection series to find a team for next year’s world championships.
Series leader Monica Potae, of Kennedy Bay, Coromandel, was runner-up in Friday’s final, former national No 1-ranked senior and Napier-based Jasmin Tipoki, from Martinborough was third, with Chelsea Collier, of Hamilton, fourth.
Multiple former junior and intermediate final winner Adam Gordon, of Masterton, won the senior shearing final, the intermediate final was won by Gisborne shearer Richmond Ngarangione, beating Tokomaru Bay shearer Dylan Young, who had won when both were in the Gisborne final, and the junior final was a first-up triumph for Cheyden Winiana, of Nuhaka.
Flaxmere mum Nohokainga Maraki won the senior woolhandling final, in only her second competition, and the junior final was won by Te Whetu Brown, from Wairoa.
Despite cold conditions and the event being on a Friday, a public holiday in Hawke’s Bay but a normal work day everywhere else, entries for the Great Raihania Shears were the greatest in at least six years, with 119 competitors.
The 67 shearers included 19 in each of the open and senior grades and six in the novice event won by Shania Mackey, of Hastings, and the 52 woolhandlers included 30 in the open grade.
Rookie competitor and Great Raihania Shears senior woolhandling winner Nohokainga Maraki and baby Lylah Maraki-Sciascia. Photo / SSNZ
Results from the Great Raihania Shears at the Hawke’s Bay A and P Show on October 21, 2022
Shearing
Open final (20 sheep): Rowland Smith (Maraekakaho) 17min 6sec, 58.25pts, 1; Jack Fagan (Te Kuiti) 16min 24sec, 58.6pts, 2; Gavin Mutch (Scotland/Dannevirke) 17min 13sec, 60.8pts, 3; Hemi Braddick (Eketahuna) 17min 15sec, 61.4pts, 4.
Senior final (five sheep): Adam Gordon (Masterton) 6min 40sec, 28.4pts, 1; Paul Swann (Wairoa) 6min 56sec, 29pts, 2; Te Ua Wilcox (Gisborne) 6min 44sec, 33.6pts, 3; Joseph Gordon (Masterton) 7min 25sec, 35.45pts, 4.
