THEY’RE the mother and daughter barrel racing team that hopes after three grim years they can take on the best on the rodeo circuit with a home-ground advantage.
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Chiltern is hoping it’s fourth time lucky for the popular Labour Day long weekend rodeo after flash flooding washed out two of the past three years, and a Sunday afternoon deluge put a dampener on the crowd in 2011.
Certainly rodeo vice-president Debbie Atkins hopes so.
Yesterday she was nursing the hangover of a 3am return from the Narrandera rodeo where her daughter Rylie, 17, finished fifth in the junior barrel racing.
“Most days we are out practising in our own yards or down at the rodeo,” she said.
“Most weekends we are away competing.
“I’m just coming back from injury — I broke my leg, up near my hip, when the horse and me went one way around a post in a roping event but my leg got left behind.
“But the rodeo gets in your blood — the kids are third generation cowboys, my son is now in Texas on a rodeo scholarship.”
Fellow co-founder of the Chiltern Rodeo and president Kelvin Duke says the rodeo was due for a good year.
Being part of a triangular series with rodeos at Kyabram and Merrijig Chiltern could get more than 350 contestants and a crowd somewhere between 2000 and 3000, he said.
Events will start from about 1pm on Sunday, March 10 with the main rodeo program kicking off at 5pm.
