Shears champ retires, and tackles sport's longest day

November 9, 2011

Shears champ retires, and tackles sport's longest day

Taranaki shearer Paul Avery has given up the chance of another World shearing title to tackle the World Multisport Championship in the Coast-to-Coast one-day endurance event.

The 44-year-old Avery, who won his title in Norway in 2008, is not among the entries for this season’s New Zealand shearing team selection series starting at the Canterbury Show on Friday, and has confirmed: “I’m retired. I haven’t shorn a sheep this season.”

But he does plan a trip to Christchurch, by kayak, cycling and running from Kumara on the West Coast on February 11, coincidentally the day of the last of seven rounds in the shearing series before the top 12 are chosen for the finals in Gore a week later.

Avery is more than serious about the big day out across the South Island, after winning the veterans section and finishing third overall in the Coast-to-Coast’s two-day classification last February, a week after winning the North Island Open shearing championship final in Marton.

“If I make the top 20 I’ll be really stoked,” Avery said from his farm at Toko, inland from Stratford.

He’s yet to determine how shearing compares with not shearing, saying: “It’s tough. One half’s lost interest, and the other half says you can still compete.”

Thus he will shear at Stratford in the local competition on November 26 and the Taranaki Shears next March – “because I help organise them.”

In a dedicated feature in Shear History - 50 Years of Golden Shears in New Zealand, Shearing Magazine editor Des Willams wrote that Avery completed the “most rapid of rises through the ranks” when going from his first victory in the Manawatu junior final in the Spring of 1985, to reaching the Golden Shears Open semi-final in 1989, en route winning the Shears’ 1987 Intermediate final and finishing second in the Senior grade in 1988.

He shore in 16 of the 20 Golden Shears Open finals in Masterton from 1990 to 2009, winning in 2005 and 2007 and finishing runner-up four times.

He also won three New Zealand Open finals and five North Island Shearer of the Year titles, all in Te Kuiti where his second placing in the Open in 1998 took him to first World Championships in Ireland, where he was second in the final to King Country icon David Fagan, with whom he won the first of three World titles, in the teams event.

A decade later another second placing in Te Kuiti paired him with winner and Napier shearer John Kirkpatrick, whom he then beat in the World Championships final and shared another teams title.

He won Shearing Sports New Zealand’s Bowen Trophy as the country’s top-ranking Open-class shearer in the 1999-2000 and 2005-06 seasons, while outside of the sport he was named Taranaki Sportsperson of the Year in 2007, recognising that year’s wins in Masterton and Taranaki.

Despite his absence, about 16 shearers will contest the opening two rounds of the shearing series, on Friday in Christchurch and at the Central Hawke's Bay Show in Waipukurau on Saturday. Further points-scoring rounds will be held at Lumsden and Winto on successive days in January, later that month at Taihape, and at Marton and Balclutha in February.

Kirkpatrick is a warm favourite to be one of the two to win selection from the series final on February 18. The reigning Golden Shears Open champion won at six of the venues last season, and has already won three finals this season.

ENDS

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