Top farriers battle it out at Spruce Meadows Masters Tournament this week at the Blacksmith World Championships.Supplied
When he was young, Russell Floyd developed an interest in cowboy culture. At 16, he watched a farrier shoe a horse and was intrigued.
“I thought it was badass,” Floyd says. “I decided it’s what I wanted to do.”
He sought advice from school counsellors in his small hometown of Honeymoon Bay on Vancouver Island but they had no idea what a farrier even did. “It was kind of a dead end,” Floyd says.
A while later he saw a magazine advertisement for a one-week course. He took it, and that inspired him to enter a one-year certificate program in Alberta at Olds College, which offers the most comprehensive farrier program in North America.
Two decades later Floyd shoes about 600 horses for approximately 250 clients. He works out of Prince George and at times gathers his tools and flies in a small plane to customers in remote mountain communities.
Since Wednesday, he’s been competing in Calgary at the Blacksmith World Championships. The event will be held at Spruce Meadows in conjunction with the annual Masters Tournament, one of the world’s richest show-jumping competitions with more than $2.8-million in prize money.
At the same time, 67 blacksmiths from 11 countries are vying for a prize pool of $136,000, $75,000 of which will go to the winner. Both the horse jumping and shoeing of horses conclude on Sunday.
Craig Trnka, a former world champion and organizer of the event, said a majority of the contestants come from the United States, Canada and Britain. The latter he calls “the Mecca of horseshoeing.”
“The rest of us are just colonials,” says Trnka, a farrier for 45 years who is based in New Mexico.
Considered the Olympics of blacksmithing, the world championships were first held in 1979. They were discontinued in 2014, when the Calgary Stampede, which had been the host for a number of years, excluded it from its annual celebration.
Steven Beane of Yorkshire, England, who had won five straight times leading up to 2014, will be back to defend his title. He is so highly regarded among farriers that he sells his own line of merchandise, including hammers, knives and polishing cloths.
Floyd, Iain Ritchie of Pitt Meadows, B.C., Chad Lausen of Strathmore, Alta., and Jack Ketel of Kelowna, B.C., are among the top Canadians to receive invitations to demonstrate their skills in Calgary. Each contestant participates in a variety of disciplines that include shoeing live horses, forging a shoe from scratch, making different types of shoes to specific qualifications and replicating some created by judges.
Some of the categories are timed as well.
The competition is held at anvils in portable units that Trnka transported 2,300 kilometres to Calgary. A member of a five-man farrier team that represents Canada at international events, Floyd is prepared for the world championships
“The competition is very intense,” says Floyd, 39. “The time constraints are tight so there is really no time to make a mistake. You are very tired when you are done. To be successful it takes a lot of muscle memory, artistic talent and a bit of knowing what the judges are looking for.”
Floyd, who drove the eight hours to Calgary from Prince George, was champing at the bit for the event to begin.
“There are some real world-class farriers on the entry list,” he says. ”We have never had an event as big as this with so much prize money. I think it is a major milestone.”
Ketel is the captain of Canada’s farrier team. The event in Calgary is in individual competition with the world team championships being held in October at Stoneleigh Park, Warwickshire, England.
He grew up on a cattle ranch in Manitoba where his dad taught him to shoe horses. His goal was to be a blacksmith during the week and a bareback rider and bull rider in rodeos over weekends. He gave up the rodeo after suffering a dislocated shoulder that kept recurring.
Now he is strictly a farrier and shoes about 200 horses for customers.
“Besides the competition, I like the networking and educational aspect of the world championship,” Ketel says. “It’s a place where the top guys in the industry make a name for themselves and it is something to add to your résumé.
“How else is a little nobody farrier from Kelowna ever going to get recognized?”