Una Cameron may not be an Olympian, but this week she achieved a sporting feat that rivals anything Team GB achieved in Paris – and requires just as much training and support.
On Wednesday, Cameron, 51, broke a world sheep shearing record on a farm in Cornwall by shearing a remarkable 517 sheep in nine hours – a feat one expert described as equivalent to running two marathons in a row.
The next morning, Cameron said she felt, not surprisingly, “like I had been run over by a tank… I’m in pain. My body hurts in places I didn’t know I had.”
After fueling herself with overnight-soaked oatmeal and rice pudding during the day, she celebrated the end of the event with a few treats that had been forbidden to her for months as part of her rigorous training program: “A beer and a Curly Wurly (candy bar) – that was my wish, and that’s what I got.”
Setting a world record for sheep shearing is no small feat. Cameron, from Saint Boswells, near Kelso in the Scottish Borders, has been a professional shearer for nearly 30 years, but despite her skill and experience, she spent a year training for the record attempt, getting up at 5am to do cardio, strength and flexibility exercises – “and then you go shear sheep for eight hours”.
Sheep, she stressed, “are not small and they don’t cooperate.” To be sheared, each animal is pulled backwards out of its pen and placed on its back while the shearer, leaning over the animal, tries to keep it still while stripping its wool, which alone can weigh 5kg. “When you’ve done that 517 times, by the 517th time you think, ‘OK, I’m done,'” Cameron said.
Her 40-person support team – which filled the pens with hundreds of sheep, kept them warm, de-furred them and made sure Cameron drank enough fluids – included a masseuse who cared for Cameron intensively during each of her four breaks during the nine-hour period.
“The final break is half an hour, and then it’s off again for the grand finale. That felt like a very short half hour.” At that point, she said, she knew she was on track to break the existing solo record for a strong-wool sheep in nine hours, eventually beating it by 59 sheep. Each animal sheared was carefully inspected by four world record judges to ensure it had been sheared correctly – only four, less than 1%, failed to meet the standard.
Cameron first got involved in sheep shearing when she studied agriculture after school and found it was the part of the course she enjoyed the most. Back then there were very few female shearers but today there are perhaps more young women than men entering the industry. With her as a role model? “Well, I haven’t really thought of it that way but apparently I do,” she said.
It’s not a full-time job though – although Cameron earns most of her annual income from shearing sheep, the season in the UK only lasts two to three months. “Sometimes I help with lambing or other sheep work, or we sometimes plant trees in the winter,” says Cameron. Last year she spent three months shearing sheep in New Zealand.
This connection is important. Cameron’s world record attempt took place on the farm of Matt Smith, a New Zealander who now farms near Launceston in Cornwall with his wife Pip. He is also the men’s nine-hour world record holder with 713 sheep.
Smith said Cameron’s record would help put sheep and sheep farmers in the UK on the map: “When New Zealanders say you have to go to the UK to set sheep shearing records, that’s an achievement in itself for me because New Zealand has been known as the sheep shearing capital for years.”
This can be seen as another sporting victory for Great Britain.