Lydia Thomson once dreamed of riding winners on the racetrack.
Having had fleeting moments with the champion galloper Winx and a Gai Waterhouse Melbourne Cup runner while helping work racehorses in New South Wales, Ms Thomson, of Rangiora, abandoned dreams of being a raceday jockey due to what was required to keep down her weight.
Two years ago, at the age of 29, she took to shearing and is now making every post a winner, a victory at the recent Inangahua A&P Show’s Reefton Shears — ironically at a racecourse — being her eighth win in 12 junior shearing finals in the 2022-23 season.
She competed at the Otago Shears, near Balclutha, last Saturday, and will compete in the Southern Shears this weekend on her way to her Golden Shears goal in Masterton on March 2-4.
"I’ll have to shear a lot better then than I did in my Juniors [in Reefton] , that’s for sure," she said.
Veteran shearer and competition organiser Sam Win encountered Thomson when he was running the Reefton competition, and observed: "She’s pretty focused."
His own son, Jason Win — competing in the Reefton event during a three-week trip home from Australia — won the Open title, a major honour, in a four-man final of 20 sheep.
Ms Thomson had travelled about 240km to find out she was in the proverbial two-horse race, with just one opponent, making it comparatively easy to add Reefton to the season’s other wins, at shows in Rangiora, Ashburton, Christchurch, Nelson, Duvauchelle, Winton and Tapawera.
They included national titles at the Corriedale championships in Christchurch and the crossbred lambs championships at Winton. She was also runner-up in the Waimate Shears’ New Zealand long-wool championship and the full-wool championships at Lumsden.
While disappointed with the turnout in her grade at Reefton — she did not reckon she "deserved" to claim another red ribbon in the circumstances — she did make the most of the trip by teaming with senior shearer Jock Fitzpatrick to win possibly the first match between a machine-shearing team and a blade-shearing team.
They shore four sheep each, and beat a team comprising former New Zealand world championships team member Allen Gemmell and Tim Hogg, both also from Canterbury.
She also won a junior and intermediate clean-shear a few hours later at the Ikamatua Hotel.
Turning her back on the horses, pre-training and spelling operation The Hermitage, at The Oaks, about 20 minutes from Camden, NSW — where, she stresses, she did not get to "personally" ride Winx — Thomson returned to North Canterbury, where she’d grown-up on a small block around Oxford, with sheep, cattle, chooks, pigs and horses.
She had been doing a jockey’s apprenticeship, and had her weight down to 50kg, but says she didn’t feel healthy doing it.
"How I got the shearing bug was I was doing some part-time shed-handing when a shearer from an outside gang was on lend for the day at one of our sheds," she said.
"He just asked me what my background of work was, I told him I rode race horses in Australia, and had done some building work and labouring in New Zealand over the years.
"After hearing I had a background in physical jobs he said you should become a shearer and I said ‘OK, haha’."
The same shearer took her "under his wing and taught me to shear from the get-go".
"I would go to sheds that he was working at and shear the last sides of some of his sheep during the runs and shear through the breaks," she said.
"We would go and do some lifestyle blocks to get practice in too, or when he wasn't rostered on to work we would set up a hungry stand in sheds the other guys from his crew were working," Ms Thomson said. "Basically any chance I had to get some practice in I took, till I was ready to get my own stand."
She is in just her second season, and said: "It was great to find shearing, because it’s the only job I've felt the same kind of passion towards as I did at the time as wanting to be a jockey."
