2011 Shearing
If Gareth Daniel had only bought a mid-week Lottery ticket for the Wednesday of this year’s show he would surely now be a millionaire, such was his unstoppable winning form on that day.
It would have been an incredible challenge to improve on what he achieved last year – winning the Champion of Wales, being the highest placed Welshman in the Open and scoring the best individual points in the Wales v New Zealand test.
After shearing in three gruelling back-to-back 20-sheep finals this year however, he did just that. After first retaining his Champion Shearer of Wales title he went on to win the Open Championship outright and then, with team mate Richard Jones, beat New Zealand in the test.
With the Royal Welsh Open being arguably the biggest and most prestigious title in the entire Northern Hemisphere, winning it confirms Gareth’s place in the elite of world shearing; a stratosphere rarely inhabited by non-New Zealanders.
The future for Welsh shearing looks brighter still with the emergence of a new star in young Richard Jones – just 23 years old. After earning his place in the Welsh team alongside Gareth on the 2011 Welsh Open Circuit, no-one would have expected great things from him in his debut test against the best in the world. Many lesser men, in fact, could have really struggled under such pressure at such a young age, with world record holder and former Golden Shears Open Champion Dion King on the stand in front of him.
The way he rose to the occasion left no-one in any doubt as to why he was there and winning the test has laid him solid foundations as one of Wales’s future shearing legends.
He says he was nervous before the start of the test, especially as the national anthems were being sung, but once he started shearing he was fine. “Once you’ve done a couple you just forget about everything else, do the best you can” he said.
A new ‘Fagan’ was added to the winners’ board as New Zealander Jack Fagan won the Senior Championship, a name that is more than likely to appear again if he takes after his father David, who has won the Open Championship no fewer than eleven times.
The Intermediate was won by another New Zealander, Linton Palmer, and the Junior by Welshman Richard Smith. It was Richard’s first ever win in a Junior competition and he said he was “Over the moon”.
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