Australia's tallest Shire horse, Cedars Stormy George, from Kangaroo Valley, is in his last few weeks of preparation for this year's Sydney Royal Easter Show.
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Owned by Helene Scarf, of The Cedars Shire Horse Stud at Barranca in Kangaroo Valley, Stormy, as he is affectionately known, is undergoing final preparations with top level horse trainer Scott Brodie at his equine centre, Horses From Courses at Helensburgh.
"Stormy is looking really good and will be in great shape for Sydney," Ms Scarf said.
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"At the moment he's been undergoing lots of work with Scott.
"He's being ridden regularly by Scott and we've also been doing lots of leading work."
Stormy will be competing in two classes at Sydney - the gelding led class (from 8.30am, Sunday, April 10) and the ridden class (1.30pm the same day).
Helene and Scott are hoping the "big gentle giant" can perform at his best and perhaps walk away with Sydney Royal blue ribbon.
"That would be nice," Helene said.
"But we know it's not going to be easy. The competition will be pretty stiff."
He has previously grabbed a second placing at Sydney, but Helene is confident Stormy, despite not having competed at Sydney over the past two years is "now fully mature" and will be "up to the task".
"We missed two years ago, as did everyone due to COVID, and then last year, where a number of competitions were also disrupted or cancelled due to COVID again, we weren't able to get his performance history to qualify for Sydney," she said.
"This year has also been a bit of the same case, however they [RAS] have waived the qualifying performances.
"It was disappointing also that we weren't able to have our own Kangaroo Valley Show where Stormy was going to compete and also the Moss Vale Show at the weekend which also had an abridged program.
"We really wanted to firstly show him off at our local shows and also get a couple of hit outs before Sydney."
Helene said despite the big wet that struck the South Coast recently Stormy has been "spoilt".
"He's been brought inside and looked after by the girls up there," she said.
"He's even been having hot water wash offs and absolutely loves it."
Unfortunately though it might be a different case when he makes it home from Sydney.
"We will have quite a journey to get him home, with all the road damage and closures etc after the recent big rains," Helene said.
"We also had a bit of damage to roads around our property, in fact one is down to a single lane and there is no way we can get big trucks in there.
"We might have to unload him at Bunkers Hill Road and then walk the best part of four kilometres into the property.
"If that's the case I hope there's plenty of grass on the side of the road."
Cedars Stormy George, an eight-year-old gelding, who will turn nine on October 23, stands an imposing 19.1 hands - six foot five inches in the old scale or around 196 centimetres to the wither and i Australia's tallest Shire horse.
A horse's size is measured in hands (around four inches) - originally a man's hand was used with the base of the palm to the fingers on top of each other from the ground, just beside and behind a foreleg to the top of the withers (shoulders).
Tipping the scale at just over a tonne, he took over the mantle as the country's tallest horse after his cousin Luscombe Nodram "Noddy" recently passed away, aged 19.