MEDIA RELEASE

On behalf of Shearing Sports New Zealand

October 23, 2010

King regains crown as The King dips out

Napier shearer Dion King regained the Great Raihania Shears Open title at the Hawke’s Bay Show in Hastings on Friday – beating veteran reigning champion and season’s frontrunner David Fagan off the board by almost three sheep.

King, 35, whipped through 20 full-wooled sheep in 16.26sec, a remarkable 2min 39sec ahead of the 49-year-old otherwise in-form Fagan, who last off in the four-man final and unable to improve the position in the calculation of quality points.

Fagan was also beaten on both time and in the final count by new World champion and Waipawa shearer Cam Ferguson and Adam Brausch, of Dannevirke, who were second and third respectively.

While commending the outstanding effort by King, Fagan was at some loss to explain his own demise after an all-conquering fortnight in which he won the New Zealand Spring Shears at Waimate and the Poverty Bay open in Gisborne, as well as two speedshears.

“I don’t know, I just didn’t get into it,” he said. “I guess it’s just a bad day at the office.”

“It happens,” he said, recalling that in Gisborne he had won the race and beaten King off the board, while a week earlier it was King that was first-off in Waimate and Ferguson looking-on from more than a sheep-and-a-half behind.

King had won the Great Raihania Shears from 2004-2006, the first three years after the Hawke’s Bay Show title was relaunched to commemorate Rimitiriu Rainania’s win in the World’s first machine shearing event at the show in 1902.

Also the winner of a Golden Shears Open and PGG Wrightson National series double in 2006, he has since been dividing his time between New Zealand and Australia, and is currently building a home in Bribie Island on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, while shearing mainly in the Guyra area, about three hours to the south in Northern New South Wales.

With a second, a third and now a win in successive contests, he plans to shear in the Wairarapa Spring Shears in Carterton next weekend and the Manawatu A and P Show at Manfield a week later, before tackling the New Zealand Corriedale Championships in Christchurch and the Central Hawke’s Bay Show on successive days in mid-November.

He will then return to Australia, but said he would be back in New Zealand in time for the national lambshearing championships at Raglan on January 8.

World teams woolhandling champions Keryn Herbert, of Te Awamutu, and Sheree Alabaster, of Taihape, were first and third in the Open woolhandling final in Hastings, split by Dallas Mihaere, of Dannevirke.

Mihaere had scored her first Open win at Waimate, while in Gisborne Alabaster had scored her first win since returning from the World Championships in Wales where she had to settle for second in her bid to retain a World title she won two years earlier in Norway.

Masterton shearer Matene Mason successfully defended the Great Raihania Shears senior shearing title in crushing fashion. A week after winning the Povefrty Bay senior final, he beat runner-up Davy Garland, of Palmerston North, by almost seven points. Golden Shears junior champion Brett Roberts scored maintained an unbeaten intermediate class record with his third win in a fortnight, and Gisborne shearer Matt Spence won his first Junior title.

Kyle Wihongi, of Hastings, won his first senior woolhandling title, with first-time senior finalist Michelle White, also of Hastings, the runner-up, and the junior woolhandling final was won by Kiley Laris, of Masterton.

Meanwhile, the four South Island members of the New Zealand team which scored a cleansweep of three transtasman tests in Australia last week marked their return home by dominating the Northern A and P Show Shears in Rangiora on Saturday.

Grant Smith and Tony Coster, both of Rakaia, finished first and second respectively in the Open machine-shearing final, while Allen Gemmell, of Loburn, and Brian Thomson, of West Melton, were first and second in the Open blades final, beating Mike McConnell, of Cave, who had beaten both of them in the New Zealand Spring Shears final in Waimate a fortnight ago.

ENDS

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