BULL RIDER ‘A LUCKY MAN’
TOP COWBOY RECOVERS FROM STAMPEDE ACCIDENT
“I’m a lucky man.” Lying face down in the rodeo infield on the afternoon of July 11, his back broken and his jaw smashed in two places, Aaron Roy found himself mouthing these seemingly contradictory words while spitting out dirt.
Just 15 seconds earlier, the 26-year-old cowboy was bucked off a bull, landing in what he describes as “a very bad position” — on the back of his head and shoulders, his feet awkwardly folded in front of him.
To add insult to injury, the 860-kilogram bull named Gretsky stomped on his legs, “pulling them in a way they never should be.”
Roy, Canada’s top bull rider and the winner of the 2012 Calgary Stampede, remained conscious throughout the entire ordeal that unfolded before a standing-roomonly Grandstand crowd.
“The adrenalin was rushing through me, so I didn’t feel any pain,” he says Friday from his bed at Foothills Hospital. “But I also couldn’t feel my legs.”
As he dragged himself by his arms back into the chute — “every cowboy knows to do this by instinct,” he says of the retreat to relative safety — Roy felt sensation return to his lower extremities.
“That’s when I knew I was so, so lucky,” says the cowboy who today calls Yellowgrass, Sask., home. “My back started to hurt then, but I didn’t even know I had a broken jaw until I got to the hospital.”
For those of us present at the Stampede rodeo on that day, it was clear even from a distance that Roy was in big trouble. When the medics arrived moments later and took him away on a stretcher, many feared the worst.
Roy’s wife, Hallie, sitting in the infield bleachers beside her mother-in-law, Jan, and other relatives, was also witness to the unfolding drama.
“I was trying to stay calm and not panic,” says the 26-year-old, expecting their first child in January. “I sat there and just prayed he was OK.”
When she saw the stretcher come out, Hallie abandoned her seat and raced to the medical tent to meet her husband.
“I wanted to make sure he was all right and to let him know I was right there,” she says. “When I got there, he showed me he could wiggle his toes — we were both so happy.”
In his first extensive interview since that horrifying day, Roy and his wife talk about the bull riding life, the aftermath from the incident that brought his winning sea-
Luck was on my side that day AARON ROY, CANADA’S TOP BULL RIDER
son to an abrupt halt — and their shared hopes that he may one day compete again as a world-class bull rider.
“They told me afterward that I should have been paralyzed from the ribs down,” he says of the doctors who operated on him in the late-night hours after the incident, a complicated surgery that involved inserting eight screws and two rods into his spine to repair the fractured vertebrae. “They really couldn’t believe that a day after the operation, I was walking again.”
This isn’t the first time Roy has found himself on the wrong side of a bull. At a 2012 rodeo in Phoenix, a bull’s head smashed into his face, bending the bars on his helmet’s mask and giving him a concussion.
“I’ve broken my arm, my cheek, my nose and I’ve blown out both my knees,” he says of a five-year pro career that has earned him $800,000 to date and made him Canada’s most winning bull rider in history. “But never anything as big or scary as this last one.”
While his chosen vocation seems crazy to the average person, it’s one that was almost predestined. The second-youngest of Jan and Len Roy’s five boys, Roy watched his older brothers Matt and Stephen become competitors after the family moved from Saskatoon to the small town of Asquith, Sask. After competing in other rodeo events, he got on a bull at age 14 and never looked back.
“Every time you sit on a bull it’s a new experience,” he says. “It is such an adrenalin rush, you can’t really describe it.”
That same year, he met his future wife on the high school rodeo circuit.
“People said, ‘What do you know about love or even dating at 14 years old,’ ” says Hallie, who as a teen competed in barrel racing and goat tying. “But we both just kind of knew from the start that we’d be together.”
Love did conquer all, even Roy’s passion for bull riding. In 2010, he bowed out of a major Professional Bull Riders event — a move his friend and agent Jason Davidson told a reporter at the time was akin to missing game 6 of an NHL playoff series — to wed his longtime love.
“We’re a team,” says Hallie, who says they didn’t want to know their baby’s sex ahead of the big day, but have already decided on names if it’s a boy or a girl. “I understand the danger of what he does and his passion for it.”
The only time Hallie becomes emotional is when asked about the uncertain fate of her husband’s bull riding career.
“One of my dreams was for our kid to be able to watch him ride and know what his dad does,” she says, her voice breaking. “I hope one day that can happen still.”
Whether or not Roy will ride again is still a question mark. While he can already walk up to 70 metres without assistance, he’ll need extensive physiotherapy when he is transferred by air some time this weekend to a Regina facility.
To help him get through the financial challenges of the year ahead, two of Roy’s sisters-in-law have set up an “Aaron Roy Benefit Auction” group on Facebook. (Donations can also be made to Aaron Roy Trust Fund, c/o Tegan Douglas, Box 347, Yellowgrass, Sask., S0G 5J0.)
Doctors have also told Roy that it could be a full year before it’s determined whether or not he can have the rods and screws removed from his spine; until then, he’s been ordered not to lift anything heavier than five pounds.
Right now, though, rather than worry about the future, Roy prefers to think about what could have — but didn’t — happen.
“Every bull rider understands that the risks are real,” says Roy, who knows former world champion bull rider Jerome Davis, paralyzed from the chest down in 1998 after being thrown off a bull.
“Luck was on my side that day and I’m feeling pretty good about that.”