Una Cameron may not be an Olympian, but this week she achieved a feat of athleticism to rival anything accomplished by Team GB in Paris – and requiring just as much intensive training and support.
On Wednesday, Cameron, 51, shattered a world sheep-shearing record at a farm in Cornwall, cropping a remarkable 517 sheep in nine hours – an effort described by one expert as the equivalent of running two marathons back to back.
Speaking the morning after, Cameron said she, unsurprisingly, felt “like I’ve been run over by a tank … I am sore. My body hurts in places I didn’t know I had.”
After fuelling herself throughout the day with overnight oats and rice puddings, she had celebrated the event’s conclusion with a couple of treats that had been banned for months as part of her strict training regime: “A beer and a Curly Wurly [chocolate bar] – that was my request, and that’s what I got.”
Securing a sheep-shearing world record is no small feat. Cameron, from Saint Boswells, near Kelso, in the Scottish Borders, has been a professional shearer for almost three decades, but even with her skill and experience she trained for a year for the record attempt, rising at 5am to work on cardio, weight-training and mobility exercises – “and then you go and shear sheep for eight hours”.
Sheep, she pointed out, “are not small, and they’re not cooperative”. To be sheared, each animal is pulled backwards from its pen and laid on its back, while the shearer, bent over it, attempts to keep it still while removing its fleece, each of which can weigh 5kg alone. “Once you’ve done that 517 times, by the time the 517th one you’re like: ‘OK, I’m done,’” said Cameron.
Among her 40-strong support team – filling the pens with hundreds of sheep, keeping them warm, taking the fleeces away and keeping her hydrated – was a masseuse, who worked on Cameron intensively in each of her four breaks in the nine-hour period.
“The last break is a half-hour break, and then you’re back on for the big finale. That felt like a very short half an hour.” By that stage, she said, she knew she was on course to break the existing solo women’s nine-hour strong wool ewe record, eventually surpassing it by 59 sheep. Each sheared animal was carefully scrutinised by four world record judges to ensure it had been properly clipped – only four, less than 1%, failed to meet the standard.
Cameron got into shearing while studying agriculture as a school leaver, and found it was the part of the course she most enjoyed. At the time there were few female shearers, but today there may be more young women than men coming into the industry. With her as a role model? “Well I haven’t really thought of it like that, but apparently I am,” she said.
It’s not a full-time job, however – while Cameron makes most of her annual income from shearing, the season only lasts for two to three months in the UK. “Other times I’m helping with lambing or other sheep work, or we do plant trees sometimes in the winter,” Cameron said. Last year she spent three months shearing in New Zealand.
The connection is an important one. Cameron’s world record attempt took place on the farm of Matt Smith, a New Zealander who now farms with his wife, Pip, near Launceston, in Cornwall. He is also the men’s nine-hour world record-holder, at 713 sheep.
Smith said Cameron’s record would help put UK sheep and sheep farmers on the map: “When you’ve got New Zealanders [saying] you’ve got to go to the UK to find sheep for shearing records, to me, that’s an achievement in itself, because New Zealand’s been renowned for years as being the shearing capital.”
Chalk it up as another sporting win for the UK.
