Perhaps it shouldn’t be such a surprise, given cowboys’ reputation for straight talk. Still, when heading to Amarillo’s annual Cowboy Mounted Shooting World Championship, it is difficult to shed the suspicion that there must be a caveat of some sort. Surely, one thinks, if the event were anything close to the image that “cowboy mounted shooting” brings to mind, it would be either too unsafe to be legal or too watered down to be interesting (or possibly too gimmicky to be credible).
It is therefore refreshing (and more than a bit thrilling) to realize that the event is exactly what it sounds like—cowboys and cowgirls firing guns at targets while racing around on horseback. The guns are real (although they fire blanks—more on that shortly), the horses are real, and the riders range from horse trainers to working ranchers to weekend hobbyists.
“This is the closest it gets to the western movies,” says Ezra Yoder, a horse trainer who traveled from Columbus, Ohio, for the early October event. Yoder won the men’s class 5 division at this year’s championships. Competitions are divided by gender and also ranked from classes 1 to 6, with the most skilled riders competing in class 6. Yoder’s championship win brings him one step closer to his goal of competing in class 6.
As self-explanatory as the action elements within cowboy mounted shooting are, the sport’s competitive infrastructure can be complicated. The championship in Amarillo, organized by the Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association (CMSA), is a collection of related but distinct competitions, each with a separate winner. Every competition, however, follows the same basic structure.
A rider’s final world championship score is the cumulative time it takes them to complete five runs. To begin a run, the rider enters a dirt-floored rodeo arena on horseback. In front of them are ten balloons (five red and five blue) resting on cylindrical posts at about head height, as well as at least one barrel. A green light instructs the shooter to enter the course, which covers about three-quarters of the arena ground. Once the horse passes a sensor, the clock starts and the race is on.
The rider first races toward the blue balloons, which are set up in a pattern that requires them to navigate several, often tight turns. While speeding through the course, the rider attempts to shoot each ballon as the horse passes it. Crucially (and unlike in similar sports, such as barrel racing), the path through the blue-balloon portion of the course changes after every round.
After (hopefully) destroying the blue balloons, the horse must then make a U-turn around a barrel at the opposite end of the arena while the rider switches weapons (each revolver is loaded with five rounds). Then, because the five red balloons are always placed in a straight line, the horse sprints back to the starting position as the rider attempts to shoot the remaining five targets. The run is finished when the horse passes the same sensor that started the clock.
Depending on the complexity of the blue balloons’ pattern, individual runs can take ten to twenty seconds to complete, although the best racers often finish within hundredths of a second of one another. Penalty time is added for mistakes, such as dropping a weapon or missing a turn. Each unshot balloon, for example, adds five seconds to a competitor’s time.
“You shoot two, single-action Colt .45s or replicas of .45s,” says CMSA president Mark Marley. “You load five shells in each pistol and keep it on the dead cylinder, [or] the empty cylinder. You shoot the first and then change your gun.” Concerns about live bullets showering the arena’s stands are misplaced—bullets, or any other projectile, are absent from competitors’ weapons. Instead, they fire gunpower blanks able to pierce a balloon from about fifteen feet away (as a consequence, targets are always more than fifteen feet from the course’s edge).
“We take safety very seriously,” Marley says. “You have to use match-provided ammo. We have certified ammo producers; [the blank’s gunpower] can only reach so far. We have designated loading areas [where] you can’t bring any ammo in.” He goes on to list several other safeguards the CMSA has adopted. “It has to be spectator friendly.”
To the uninitiated, attending a mounted shooting competition is akin to watching an unfamiliar sport at the Olympics—even if you enter with zero knowledge, after a few minutes you’re Monday-morning quarterbacking the previous run. “You can follow along—either [the balloon] is there or it’s not,” says Kenda Lenseigne. “It’s easy for spectators.” Lenseigne has won the women’s class 6 championship six times, although that’s not her proudest accomplishment. In addition to naming a champion in each division, the CMSA also awards an overall award to the fastest rider, regardless of class or gender.
“I’m the only woman in the history of this sport to have ever beat all the boys,” Lenseigne says. She’s actually done it twice, in 2009 and 2022. Before she was a world champion, though, Lenseigne was just another spectator trying to figure out the rules. Cowboy mounted shooting found Lenseigne by accident in the nineties, after she was selected from the crowd at an event and encouraged to try the sport as an exhibition.
“I’d never held a gun before,” Lenseigne says, although she’d grown up riding horses. “I was completely hooked.” Despite its associations with the Old West, competitive cowboy mounted shooting is relatively young—the CMSA was founded in 1994 by an Arizonan firearm enthusiast named Jim Rodgers. Lenseigne’s presence in the sport since the late nineties makes her one of CMSA’s most experienced veterans, as well as a fount of institutional knowledge.
“It started with single-action shooting,” Lenseigne explains, referring to the type of pistol still used in CMSA competition—single-action revolvers require the person shooting to cock back the hammer between shots, whereas double-action revolvers allow the shooter to discharge the weapon multiple times simply by squeezing the trigger. Single-action revolvers, like the Colt .45, are particularly associated with nineteenth-century cowboy culture.
“They’d dress up in old-timey clothes and shoot from the ground,” Lenseigne continues. “That’s what everybody was doing at the time. Well, Jim Rodgers is a horseman, and he was part of the founding members of that single-action shooting society. And so he was like, ‘Why don’t we do this on horseback?’ They were running through the desert shooting balloons out of cactus and trees, and then all the sudden this sport became a thing.”
The CMSA’s early years reflected the sport’s improvised origins. “It was so raw and wild then,” Lenseigne says. “It was weird when I started. We didn’t really have a rulebook. It was the Wild West.” Lenseigne mimes a punch as she recalls how fights would break out over “that shot counted/no it didn’t” debates in the nineties. The sport has evolved considerably since then.
The innovation that best reflects cowboy mounted shooting’s growth as a sport is the device that replaces exploded balloons with new ones at the end of each run. By the time the arena barker announces the last rider’s time and a new cowboy enters the arena, the next run’s balloons are already in place, inflated and ready to serve as targets. “There’s an air compressor at the bottom [of the post],” says Axel Thurner, the championship’s resident balloon-post guru and a CMSA rider himself. “[The staff] got a remote, and when they push the remote, the balloons come up. There are two hundred balloons in each [post].” When those balloons have been used, the posts are restocked with what look like Pancho Villa–style bandoliers outfitted with balloons in lieu of bullets.
“Actually, that’s where the idea that came from,” Thurner chuckles. “Raymond Crandell, the guy that invented it, he was in the military.” That an event so niche could inspire such an innovative gadget is telling of CMSA members’ passion for the sport and the manner in which cowboy mounted shooting is growing past some of its balloon-in-the-cactus roots. Prior to Crandell’s invention, event organizers would hire kids to run out new balloons between runs. Increased participation eventually made this method a bottleneck that hindered growth.
“I think the sport would die out [without the machines],” Thurner says. “Times change—in the old days, we would have events with forty or fifty people. A month ago, we had an event with six hundred and fifty riders. You start at eight [a.m.] and finish at eleven at night.” Balloon posts solve the problem of finding individuals to staff the event for such long hours.
The sport’s domestic growth has the CMSA eyeing greater international expansion. Although Canada is well represented at the world championships, the event remains disproportionately American—athletes from Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and other countries with robust cowboy cultures (as well as presences in more mainstream rodeo sports, like bull riding) are noticeably absent. That’s because the prize money available at the world championship isn’t great enough to attract competitors from around the globe. “Someone could walk away from here with six thousand to eight thousand dollars,” Marley says.
There are also legal obstacles preventing cowboy mounted shooting from becoming a worldwide sport. “Europe is very interested in the American cowboy,” Marley says. “That’s one of our goals—[to figure out] what it takes to work in some of those countries. It’s a challenge because we’re using firearms and their gun laws are [more restrictive], even though we’re not shooting a modern firearm and we’re shooting blanks. The only thing we’re killing is the rubber from the balloon.”
Whether or not cowboy mounted shooting successfully spreads to other countries, the sport’s U.S. popularity remains on an upward trajectory. In addition to its inherent appeal to firearms enthusiasts and casual sport fans interested in a change of pace, the number of mounted shooters is growing, particularly among women.
“It used to be male dominated—actually, if you look at the numbers 1729714932, I think there are a lot of girls and women,” Lenseigne says. “My students are predominately women.” Additionally, it’s a sport that can be learned later in life—everyone quoted in this article began participating in cowboy mounted shooting as an adult.
Although learning a new sport as an adult takes a significant time commitment, one common refrain heard at the Amarillo competition revolves around the family friendliness of cowboy mounted shooting. “I went to a fair over in Perry, Georgia, and heard the gunfire,” says Monroe Hildebrand, a gunsmith working a kiosk at the arena and a former CSMA competitor. “I was looking for something to do with me and my boy—I already had horses—and two weeks later I had guns, and he and I went cowboy shooting.”
Marley, the CSMA president, started in 2006 when his daughter asked to try the sport. “And she wanted Dad to do it with her—her brother and mom even did it,” he says. “It was something that was great for a father and daughter to do together. It made a real connection between me and her.”
It sounds almost too good to be true—a sport that’s relatively easy to pick up later in life but is engaging for the whole family and also allows participants to live out their Wild West fantasies. At the same time, there’s no reason not to believe Lenseigne, Marley, and the other competitors in Amarillo—after all, they’re all straight shooters.
