Growing up, Sacha Bond couldn’t stand going to the shearing sheds with her parents. But now aged 29, the mother-of-one is
a total convert, at the top of the industry and vying to set a sheep shearing world record.
“As a kid I hated it. I hated the smell and the sheep,” recalls Sacha, laughing at the memory.
Instead, she aspired to be a vet, but as a teen the family trade came calling when Sacha got an opportunity to move to Australia and join her parents, who had already been living there for several years. The one condition was she would work in the shearing sheds with them.
Struggling with life and heading down a bad path, Sacha saw it as an opportunity to turn things around. “I was in with a pretty bad crowd,” she tells.
Click go the shears! Sacha’s about to tackle the world record title.
“I was young, only 16, but drinking alcohol and doing drugs. Shearing got me out of that. I started off as a wool handler, then moved to shearing four years after that.”
Now Sacha lives and breathes shearing as she prepares to tackle the world record title in February. The plan is to shear more than 510 lambs in eight hours at the Fairlight Station Women’s 8-Hour Strong Wool Lamb competition. Sacha explains, “It’s almost like you’re dancing with the sheep so they feel comfortable and distracted enough for however many seconds you’re holding them to let you shear them.”
But her impressive efforts don’t come without sacrifice. When the Weekly speaks to Sacha, she hasn’t had a day off in three weeks and admits it can be hard to prioritise quality time with her daughter Ember, one, and partner Coel L-Huillier, 36.
“I feel guilty at times when I miss out on stuff with Ember because I’ve had to work or do something to do with the record,” admits Sacha, who moved home to the small Waikato town of Piopio in 2018. “That’s probably the hardest thing about it.
“All the fastest shearers come from Aotearoa, so I thought, ‘If it’s working for everyone else, it will work for me.’ So I decided to come back home and learn how to shear faster.”
Most recently, her world championship bid has seen Sacha shearing and training in the South Island away from her family. The days start at 4am, and Sacha desperately misses Coel and Ember. She’s found meditation and a positive mindset are invaluable when the physical strain of hours shearing back to back kicks in.
Time with Coel and baby Ember is precious.
“You have to be prepared mentally more than physically because your body should be able to handle it from all the training,” tells Sacha, who properly returned to training three months after Ember was born. Initially, the new mum was shocked when she tried to go for a run one week after leaving the hospital and realised her body wasn’t ready for exercise.
Lots of research and preparation followed so she could return to her sport safely. These days, when home in the Waikato, Sacha tries to squeeze in training while Ember sleeps. That means running and strength training late at night and early in the morning, but it’s worth it to catch a few precious moments with her baby.
“I get up, do a workout, eat breakfast and get ready for work. We drive an hour to work and do an eight-hour day shearing, then come home to bathe and feed Ember.”
It’s not for the faint-hearted, but Sacha insists she has learned valuable lessons from the sport and after overcoming hardship in her youth, she hopes to inspire other young people to follow in her footsteps.
“I’m working with a couple of young girls who are 15 and 16, and they’ve been brought up in a pretty hard way around gangs, drugs and alcohol,” tells Sacha. “I can say to them, ‘I grew up like you and I was in the same boat as you when I was younger. I could have gone down a certain path, but I didn’t and now my life is like this.'”
