Behind the safety technology that separates cowboys from catastrophe

Behind the safety technology that separates cowboys from catastrophe

You can take the bull rider out of danger, but you can’t take the danger out of bull riding.

“The only way to be safe riding bulls is to not do it,” says Cody Lambert, former rodeo star and current vice president of Professional Bull Riders.

Accidents are inevitable but still shocking, and none is more famous than the death of Lane Frost in 1989 at a Cheyenne, Wyoming, rodeo.

Uttering his famous, “OK boys! OK boys!” the decorated cowboy came twisting out of the shoot in Cheyenne on a squat bull called Takin’ Care of Business.

After 8 seconds he dismounted, but was still in the muck when the bull rammed his back, its horns breaking his ribs. Internal bleeding killed him that afternoon.

Lane Santos Karney, West Coast student director for the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association, believes safety gear would’ve saved him.

“If a vest had been on, he’d still be here,” he says.

Some say the tragedy catalyzed the safety movement in rodeo, but it started earlier, with VP Lambert and his family.

“My younger brother was a jockey and they started making ’em wear [protective vests],” he says. “My mother kept pestering me to get them for riding bulls.”

Lambert was recovering from injury in 1992 and made a rough-stock version that kept temperature and weight low, with Velcro straps that undid the vest if it snagged a horn. A final prototype debuted in Salinas in 1993. Soon after came the final touch: leather trim so it looked Western.

But in the beginning, vests weren’t welcomed. Some, including then-world champion cowboy Donnie Gay, saw them as wimpy. “He said he wouldn’t wear it while he was riding,” Lambert says.

Lambert was the only one wearing a vest at 1994’s NFR; a year later, 13 others joined him. He sold his own brand of vest. Gay even endorsed one.

Early vests used Kevlar, but now athletes are sporting next-gen gear. Tear-resistant fabric covers the insides, which are made of Spectra Shield, a fibrous material stronger than steel. And high-density foam spreads out impact force.

The gear is mandatory at PBR and NIRA rough stock events and popular in the Pro Rodeo Cowboy Association.

Helmets, another safety breakthrough, blossomed at the expense of the iconic symbol of rodeo: the cowboy hat.

“Individuals were ridiculed for wearing them,” says Don Andrews of the Justin Boots Sportsmedicine Team, a mobile rodeo medical unit.

That’s changed with a trickle-up effect from youth leagues like the NIRA.In Lambert’s day, you’d only wear a helmet if you had a serious injury. “Now young kids are growing up riding with them,” he says. Santos Karney estimates 75-plus percent of professional rough stock riders now wear a helmet and vest.

“When you see a hockey helmet that’s been crushed at 20 to 35 percent of its capacity, you’re thinking, what would that have done to the head if it was unprotected?” Andrews says.

Most cowboys at this year’s Rodeo won’t have to find out.