World Champion Bull

Why it exists

In professional bull riding, half of every score belongs to the bull. The riders get the coverage, the profiles and the career retrospectives, and the animal responsible for the other half of the number mostly gets a name and a nod. For a sport that keeps this much data, that is a strange place to leave it.

This one is personal. Robert grew up watching bull riding because his mother watched it, and never stopped. So we built the reference we wanted to exist: career records for the elite bulls, a championship archive running back to Bodacious in 1995, and a record book assembled from actual ride-level data rather than anybody’s memory of a great night.

By launch that meant close to five thousand bulls, more than eighty thousand recorded outs across thirty-one seasons, and the head-to-head history between any bull and any rider who ever met in an arena.

What we decided

• The number is the argument

  There are no invented storylines. When a page says a bull was great, the stat next to that claim is the case for it, and every record traces back to ride-level data rather than a retold anecdote.

• Independent, and say so plainly

  The data comes from the publicly accessible PBR Data API, and the site is not an official PBR product, a news site or a betting service. Being clear about what it is not is part of being trustworthy about what it is.

• Built for the fan who follows the bull

  Search by name, number, brand or contractor, then follow one career ride by ride. The whole site is organized around the animal, because that is the half of the sport nobody else was keeping.