Horse and rider racing the clock

MOSES LAKE — Many hours of work came down to just seconds on Saturday.

“Each contestant is running against the clock,” said Jamie Quillan, president of the Columbia Basin Barrel Racing Club.

She points at the three blue barrels spaced far apart sitting on the dirt in a triangle inside the Kenny Ardell Pavilion at the Grant County Fairgrounds on Saturday. It’s the same course riders will run in the National Finals Rodeo.

In a year in which, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, many rodeos and equestrian events were canceled, the barrel racing club was bound and determined to stage this event, the NFR Winter Classic. It drew horses and riders from across the Pacific Northwest. But again thanks to the pandemic, the event was closed to the public.

According to Quillan, a trained horse and rider ought to be able to run this course in about 14 seconds.

“You run a cloverleaf pattern, one right and two lefts or two lefts and one right,” Quillan said. “Fastest lady wins.”

“Fastest contestant wins,” she corrected herself.

Quillan needn’t have worried. While barrel racing is a rodeo event open to both men and women, nearly all of the racers gathered at the fairgrounds on Saturday were female.

It’s an event designed to test the combined athletic abilities of horse and rider, and it takes a lot of training, a lot of working together, to become a racing team.

Most ride the course in anywhere from 14 to 19 seconds, depending on just how tightly horse and rider can round a barrel.

“It takes a lot to have a horse ready,” said Tami Deines, 28, a former Coulee City Rodeo queen who also barrel races. “They need nurture, they need exercise, they need to be trained and conditioned. You have to get yourself trained and conditioned as well, mentally and physically; you’ve gotta be in shape and they’ve got to be in shape too.”

Which is why she was not racing Saturday, Deines explained. Her horse pulled a muscle and needs time to recover.

“That could hurt them,” she said of racing with an injured horse. “And you don’t want to do that.”

Like most good athletes, these riders and their horses train nearly every day. It helps both horse and rider learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses, so they can work together.

“It takes quite a bit of training; people put in a lot of time and a lot of miles seasoning their horses,” Quillan said. “Going to clinics, getting help, being coached, there’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears put into making a performance horse.”

It also helps that most of these contestants have also been riding almost as long as they’ve been walking.

“I’ve been riding since I was two,” said Alecia Fox, 26, who came all the way to Moses Lake from Hermiston, Oregon, as she stood with her horse Icon. “We go just about every weekend, though during the winter it slows down a bit because of the weather.”

“We have seven horses at home, and it’s a full-time hobby outside of our jobs,” Fox added.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at columbiabasinherald.com.