Try as he might, Jody Turner just couldn’t get in the groove at the Calgary Stampede.
The Cochrane bull rider was unable to score on his first three rides, scored $2,500 for an 84.5-point ride July 12 on Bad To The Bone and was bucked off by Lowlife in the last-chance qualifying round July 13.
Still, $2,500 is better than nothing from his fifth career Stampede selection.
“Not as much as I was hoping for, for sure,” the 32-year-old veteran bull rider said. “There’s lots of good stock there. I’d only been to six rodeos before Stampede, so I wasn’t really in the best of riding shape. I hadn’t been on a lot to get in the groove.”
On his July 13 last-chance qualifying ride, he couldn’t hang in there for the full eight seconds aboard Lowlife.
“The bull kind of just went out and spun to the left away from my hand. I just kind of got raised up and bucked off. I should have been forward and I wasn’t.
“When you make mistakes, things happen that quick.”
And he’s been at it long enough to be able to face up to the pressure-cooker of a world-class rodeo like Stampede.
“Being kind of a home-town kid not far from there and growing up with the Stampede, the pressure was there,” Turner said. “I’ve been around rodeo lots, too. You kind of know how to deal with it.”
He’s also been hobbled by injuries serious enough to make him scale back his bull-riding appearances in Canadian Pro Rodeo Association (CPRA) events this summer. He demolished his knee before the Canadian Finals Rodeo last November and has a damaged shoulder.
He opted for arthroscopic surgery on his knee in the off-season rather than reconstructive surgery on shredded anterior-cruciate and medial-collateral ligaments. The scope procedure was a short-term fix that needs more attention.
“I actually have to get a couple of surgeries,” he said, adding that he’s also been busy with High Trail Trucking, an oilfield trucking business he recently started. “I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet. I might wait, take the summer off and get the surgeries done and then go from there. Or ride through the summer and get the surgeries in the fall.”
The injuries have definitely taken a bite out of his ability to hang on to 1,700 pounds of whirling bovine. But he’s been a pro bull rider since 2003, so it was bound to catch up to him at some point.
“I’m 32 years old and I’ve had a pretty long career at this. That’s what you deal with, these kinds of injuries.”
