PUEBLO, Colo. – Between the PBR Camping World Team Series, Unleash The Beast, Pendleton Whisky Velocity Tour, Challenger Series, Touring Pro Division, and the organization’s ever-growing international entities in Brazil, Canada and Australia…
…there’s A LOT going on in the world of professional bull riding.
Having entertained fans with more than three decades of rank rides, brutal buckoffs and everything cowboy, PBR continues to spread its wings as the Western sports icon insists on getting bigger and badder.
Men have been climbing aboard bulls for more than a hundred years, no doubt.
But over the past 31 years, PBR has helped to evolve the sport by welcoming the best of the best. From riders to stock contractors to tour personnel to team owners and the BEST fans in sports: top-notch talent, and support, is aplenty.
PBR CEO Sean Gleason and company didn’t stumble into this successful stretch on accident.
The company has strategically ramped up efforts, exclamations and energy to put on one hell of a show as PBR welcomes the grittiest of cowboys to give their all atop the biggest stages of the business.
While creating an engaging, entertaining product will always be a big deal to Gleason and the organization’s leadership team, he shared, plain and simple, how important rewarding the tour’s riders is.
For him and PBR as a whole.
“From the day I took this job, there has been no bigger priority, then or now, than to put more money in the pockets of bull riders,” Gleason said.
With the PBR Teams circuit surging through its third season of five-on-five fun, it’s ever-apparent that both the fans and cowboys themselves have bought into the camaraderie-driven tour as the organization dipped its toes in new waters.
Those waters have quickly swelled into quite the storm.
The best way to continuously attract the best bull riders on the plant? Give them what they want.
An opportunity to compete.
A path to providing for their families.
A platform to become a star.
And a chance to exit each season with the admiration and respect of their peers.
The lore of the prized gold buckle is essentially irreplaceable, just as the title of PBR World Champion is inevitably evasive (unless you’re the best of the best.)
Throw in the new opportunity with PBR Teams to grind to greatness alongside some of your closest friends and brothers to earn the world’s largest gold buckle (with your respective team’s logo to be featured smack-dab in the middle of said buckle for the year) and – let’s be frank – TONS of cash and bragging rights, it’s easy to see why PBR is thriving in 2024.
RELATED: Luciano De Castro wins sold-out Big Sky PBR
Looking at just the last week alone, as the tour executed four top-tier Challenger Series events ( Big Sky PBR, Thunder on Hooves, Buckin’ in the Ozarks and Camping World PBR Last Cowboy Standing – Cheyenne Frontier Days), PBR awarded nearly $300,000 in prizes.
PBR awarded nearly $300,000 across a weekend of events that aren’t even considered part of its “premier series” (Unleash The Beast/PBR Teams events).
Seeing Arizona Ridge Riders standout Luciano De Castro rack up an impressive $74,562 over the elongated weekend, courtesy of his HUGE win in Big Sky, Montana, followed up by a fifth-place showing in Cheyenne, Wyoming, showcases exactly the types of opportunities riders are getting to break the bank. (Mind you, this combined purse was from a pair of Challenger Series events, the summertime’s secondary and/or development-based tour.)
RELATED: Arizona Ridge Riders make most of PBR Teams bye week via event-clinching efforts
Accruing quite the prize pool himself by out-performing each of the other 49 riders who put their name in the hat during the Cheyenne Frontier Days-hosted showdown, Ezekiel Mitchell of the Austin Gamblers took home $61,000 in winnings Tuesday night as the Last Cowboy Standing up north.
Not too bad of a “bye week” for two guys who were looking to stay loose ahead of this weekend’s upcoming PBR Teams: Duluth battle in Duluth, Georgia.
If quality talent continues to show up and occupy the ranks of Challenger Series, Velocity Tour and Touring Pro Division events, quality prizes are going to continue to follow! (And the big dawgs will find themselves up on UTB, riding for even BIGGER checks.)
Looking at the PBR Teams-based payouts, riders have several different opportunities to earn cash in each game, event and postseason culmination. With prizes awarded for qualified rides, team game wins, Shootout Rounds, overall event placement and beyond, the drama literally couldn’t be any higher, as each and every out has implications on not only the competition, but rider and team payouts in general.
Ratings are up. Drama is up. Prizes are up.
And the energy right now is truly through the roof!
With $7.2 million in winnings awarded during the 2022 season, PBR more than doubled its prize pool in 2023, eventually divvying out $13.5 million as the organization continued to raise the bar.
Awarding more than $15.5 million throughout the action-packed 2024 campaign, it’s not a surprise that athletes from Brazil, Australia, Canada, Mexico and all over the world insist on getting in on the action with the hopes of improving the lives of their families while enjoying the game they love.
That’s not always top of mind for fans and industry personnel.
But it’s 100% the reason PBR is able to increase payouts year-over-year:
These cowboys are truly giving all they’ve got.
And with classes of newcomers featuring the likes of Cassio Dias, Jose Vitor Leme and beyond regularly coming out of nowhere only to turn in gold buckle-earning efforts…
…the stories pretty much write themselves.
RELATED: Dias and Leme trade blows, renew MVP rivalry as 2024 PBR Teams season begins
A prime example of capitalizing on the tour’s ever-growing jackpots, Dias has already claimed more than $1,768,713 in winnings despite entering just his second PBR Teams campaign and with just one rookie Unlash The Beast season to his premier series resume.
Talk about seizing the day.
While Dias may be a bit of an outlier, prize allocations are up for all riders the past few years.
Over the past three seasons, riders ranked No. 40 to 100 have more than tripled their annual earnings as event-based pots go up and up.
Back in 2022, the No. 40-ranked rider earned $28,950. In 2023, this total increased to $96,482 before climbing to $106,165 in 2024.
Looking a bit farther down the season-ending totals, the 80th-ranked rider earned just $11,546 in 2022, which jumped to $39,419 in 2023 before again increasing to $40,828 for the 2024 UTB campaign.
The number of athletes earning six figures has also tripled in the last three years, improving from 15 guys hitting the mark in 2022 up to 44 in 2024. Top-tier paydays have gone up as well, with seven different men earning north of $400,000 this year compared to just one back in 2022.
All of that to say: if they’re good, they’re going to get every chance to secure some BIG payouts.
And if they’re good, the payouts are only going to increase as PBR continues to expand its footprint and place in the North American sporting community.
For now, we’re just counting 8 seconds at a time.
The most valuable 8 seconds in sports, that is.
Photo courtesy of Andy Watson/Bull Stock Media
