“Bull riding is a drug”: Rodeo embraces the era of sports science – in pictures | sports

Thanks to cultural phenomenons like the hit Yellowstone series and Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album and tour, rodeo and all things Western are enjoying a cultural renaissance. Attendance, streaming and streaming viewership reached all-time highs. So is the prize money, which is attracting more and more young athletes looking for an opportunity to make a name for themselves.

But while rodeo is thriving, athlete development remains antiquated.

“The sport of rodeo has been delayed for decades.” said Doug Champion, 36, founder of Optimal Performance Academy, a new rodeo school that is modernizing athlete development in a sport whose frontier roots and culture of rugged individualism has been slow to embrace modern sports science. “It’s always been a ‘cowboy’ thing, we’ve just entered the ‘rodeo athlete’ class.”

Historically, there has been very little money to support anyone outside of rodeo’s best athletes, fostering a culture that values ​​tradition and ruggedness, rather than exploring innovation in their sport.

“There’s a feeling of being an outlaw, a rebel, an individualist,” said Cody Custer, now 60, the 1992 PRCA world championship winner, an instructor at the workshop. “I’m just going to get my own thing done and win this thing, instead of focusing on organization, team sports, etc.”

Rodeo athletes traditionally come from ranching and farming families, which have always been medically underserved. Champion says these communities rarely go to the doctor and take pride in “cowboying” despite injuries or health problems. Young riders coming from these communities did not expect or receive much medical or performance-oriented care.

“It was just a different mindset, there’s no preparation, no taking care of your body, and if you’re injured or sick or tired, it doesn’t matter because being a cowboy is about being strong,” Champion said.

Rodeo athletes are largely freelancers, traveling on their own to competitions, hoping to secure a high enough spot to fund their next trip and entry fees. The vast majority of rodeo athletes still have day jobs.

“Bull riding is dope,” said Gabe Martin, 22, of Felton, Delaware, who works servicing public and residential ponds during the week and hunts bull riding on the weekends. “It’s the most addictive thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.” “It has invaded my life, and I can’t seem to get away from it.”

The Optimal Performance Academy attracts young athletes from all over the country to their week-long training camps. The workshops are a combination of theory and practice. The theory includes guidance on nutrition, attracting sponsors through social media, personal finance lessons, goal setting and visualization. The training portion of the workshop includes an audition, rodeo-specific drills, practice on wrestling machines and two days of live bull riding.

For its seventh ever workshop in Decanter, Texas, Champion brought in an Australian pioneer in VALD, a type of performance testing that uses force plates, dynamometers, motion capture, and eye and vestibular testing to measure a wide range of key metrics. The idea is to understand each athlete’s strengths and weaknesses, and then build personalized training programs based on that data.

This test is ubiquitous in most professional and college-level sports, but this is the first time it has been used for amateur bull riders.

“The most important thing we realized is that rodeo that happens physically is not natural or natural to the body. In no way can through regular exercise patterns or daily living improve your ability to perform in the arena,” Champion said.

Champion, who was a promising young racer in his own right, broke his back in 2010 after falling from a bronco. His long and painful road to recovery led him to realize how much rodeo athletes can do to increase their strength and technique while riding, and build resilience to bounce back from injuries.

“It was just about riding as many horses as possible, because if you ride more horses, you’ll find out sooner,” Champion said. “Well, I rode 300 horses, got my dick in the dirt every time, and didn’t learn anything.”

The champion hopes to reduce training time for young riders trying to break into the professional circuit, giving them healthier years to compete and earn a living. Rodeo is known to be hard on the body, with most riders forced to retire due to injuries in their late 20s or early 30s.

“It’s just a very different approach than the trial by fire that was the history of how you learn at rodeo,” Champion said.