You can’t make your reputation on what you’re going to do is surely one of the great truisms of life, backed up by history, reality and personal observation.
The great figures from our past, Christ, Gandhi, Luther-King, Nightingale, Wollstonecraft, only made real differences to society because their actions backed up their words.
We all understand that “talk is cheap, and actions speak louder than words” and maybe that is why this bunch of amazing young women shearer’s have recently captivated the imagination of our culture, because they are stretching the boundary of what was thought to be achievable by doing buggar all talking – but a hell of a lot of doing!
Just try telling Sacha Bond, Megan Whitehead, Hannah McColl, Amy Silcock and Catherine Mullooly what they can and can’t do (I dare you) as they render preconceived glass ceilings broken and irrelevant.
What they have achieved this year has been exceptional and they have all quite rightly secured their places in history.
But…. the year ain’t over yet.
Fortune doesn’t just favor the brave, but beckons them, and on Friday 9th February at CentreHill Station just out of Mossburn, New Zealand, Sacha Bond will once again heed the call and lace up the moccasins for the second time this season as she takes on the biggest, toughest, and most respected of them all – the 9 hour Strongwool Ewe Shearing record.
A couple of months ago Sacha became the first women in history to shear over 700 lambs (she shore 720) and if she can shear more than 462 ewes, she will become the first person (man or woman) under the current rules that were put in place around 1983, to hold both the ewe and lamb record at the same time.
It is an amazing feat to see male shearers who weigh 70kgs plus wrestling sheep that weigh 50 to 60 kg out onto a shearing board and clipping the wool off them for nine hours, yet to see Sacha (who probably wouldn’t weighs much more than about 50kgs soaking wet) do it is a feat that seems very nearly superhuman.
If she achieves this it will go down as quite simply one of the greatest sporting achievements in New Zealand’s history and she will rightly cement her place as one of our greatest sportswomen.
But, as this article stated at the very beginning, you can’t make your reputation on what you’re gunna do.
Sacha has already proven she’s got grunt, style, determination, courage, and attitude in spades – that’s not up for debate.
The only question now is: Can she make history and do what has never been done before?
We will all know the answer on Friday 9th February.
Go Sacha. Give ‘em hell!