Sheep shearing is a job but also a sport. The best shearers enter competitions to see who is the fastest and best. The Golden Shears is the final. The six best shearers compete in this final. They have 20 lambs each. Judges check that the shearer has done a good job of shearing the wool off the lamb without cutting the skin.
This year was the 50th anniversary of the start of the Golden Shears competition. A crowd of 2,000 watched the final in Masterton last weekend. All the tickets were sold a long time ago.
The winner of this year’s Golden Shears was Cam Ferguson. He took 16 minutes, 36.4 seconds to shear 20 lambs. This was about 12 seconds faster than the next competitor.
This was a very exciting finish because he was competing against David Fagan who has won 15 times. The other competitors were also more experienced than Cam Ferguson.
Cam is 26 years old. This is young for a champion shearer. He is a full-time shearer who works in Hawkes Bay. He has won other shearing competitions before but this is the first time he has been in the Golden Shears. He is very fit and trains hard. During this season, he was in another competition. In nine hours he managed to shear 856 lambs.
Next he will compete in Australia and in June he will go to Wales to compete in the World Shearing competition.