The Breakdown

Each year, the top 25 tie-down ropers in the PRCA world standings vote to award the AQHA/PRCA Tie-Down Roping Horse of the Year bronze to one outstanding calf horse. On this episode of The Tie-Down Breakdown, we asked three of the best calf ropers in the world who they think deserves the title in 2026.

Riley Webb, whose Marked Up Cat, "Rudy," won the award in 2025, talks about what it means to own a Horse of the Year and to have two in the same barn. 2024 Horse of the Year owner Shad Mayfield shares his top five picks, from a horse he says works in every setup to a young gelding he thinks will only get better. Haven Meged explains how Lil Punch came back from a year off and why a great horse can make a bad calf good.

Learn to rope from the best. A Roping.com membership gets you full access to the most comprehensive tie-down video library anywhere, with instruction from World Champions Caleb Smidt and Shad Mayfield plus top hands Logan Harkey, Justin Maass and Blane Cox — plus hundreds of hours of archived tie-down livestreams. Choose anywhere from one month to a full year.

This week on The Tie-Down Breakdown, Breakaway Breakdown host Blake Ramsey sits down with Sierra and Cami Lewis. They're the daughter and wife of NFR tie-down roper Brent Lewis, and they talk about growing up in the sport, raising a calf roper and what it's like to be a woman in rodeo.

Sierra was at her first NFR at four months old and spent her childhood on the road with the iconic calf ropers of her dad's era. She talks about the family feel she says the tie-down world has lost, how a Facebook page for her dad's sale horses grew into "Tie Down Tuesday," and the old NFR runs she set to rap music that her dad couldn't stand. She also covers walking the runway at New York Fashion Week for Functional Fit Foundry and her upcoming advocacy program at Harvard.

Cami met Brent while she was teaching school, married him that May and went down the road with him most of the time. She talks about the change from rodeo wife to rodeo mom, how much more pressure you feel when it's your kid in the box, and the hard part of letting Sam go out on his own for his rookie year.

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Madison Outhier and Bradi Good both roped their way into the WPRA top 15 this season—and both run their own companies while doing it.

Outhier started Madison Lyn Jewelry as a high school freshman after a trip to New York City's fashion district with her aunt, hand making every piece in her room at night. Nine years later, she has a team running her social media and shipping, and her pieces have caught on with bull riders, too.

Good came up with her athleisure line, Goodform, in December and launched it May 21, packing orders every morning while she got her trailer ready for the summer. Her friends tested every sample, and they got to name the sets after themselves.

We talked about how each of them got started, how Outhier keeps her pieces affordable, what it took for Good to launch between rodeos and what's next for both brands on this episode of The Breakaway Breakdown.

Premier Women’s Rodeo commissioner Linsay Sumpter is collecting hardware for work she is nowhere close to finished doing.

Sumpter, who has run the organization since 2022, received the Tad Lucas Award this summer and will accept the Annie Oakley Trailblazer Award at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in November. In between, she is teaching agriculture business in her 18th year at Otero College in La Junta, Colorado, and roping toward the CPRA finals in Montrose.

She also just put 20 breakaway ropers in front of the show-horse world. The inaugural PWR showcase at The Run For A Million ran on $50,000 added, and by Sumpter’s account Hailey Jo Hall won $20,000 with a 2.5-second run and Lari Dee Guy placed second.

Next comes the Road to the Championship, a made-for-TV competition Dec. 17–20 at Cowtown Coliseum in Fort Worth with every classification represented and tickets already on sale. It feeds a 14-episode Grit series expected to start airing in February and running to the PWR Championship in May.

We talked about the awards, bringing rough stock, goat tying and pole bending back to a professional stage, how the Run For A Million showcase came together over a phone call, the storytelling behind the new series and her advice for anyone trying to break into the sport on this episode of The Breakaway Breakdown.

This episode is presented by Roping.com. Roping.com is where breakaway ropers go to get faster, with full practice sessions from the ropers winning right now and instruction that covers scoring, swing and delivery, position and the mental game.

See how Lari Dee Guy sets up in the corner, how Kelsie Domer delivers under pressure, how Taylor Munsell stays sharp and more. Real runs, real coaching.

Visit Roping.com to rope smarter and get faster.

Cole Eiguren arrived at the 2026 Cheyenne Frontier Days entered in two events and left with $11,100, an all-around championship and a buckle tied to generations of family history.

Most of Eiguren’s Cheyenne earnings came in the tie-down roping, where he won his bracket, placed second in the semifinals and finished fourth in the finals for $10,100. He did it aboard Stoner, the 8-year-old grade red roan gelding his family bought as a colt and selected specifically for Cheyenne’s walking-fresh setup.

In this episode, Eiguren walks through his bracket win, the semifinals and the added urgency behind his finals run. He also explains why Stoner excels on fresh calves, what he learned after tearing his MCL at Cheyenne in 2025 and how he kept the all-around race out of his mind with one calf left to rope.

The buckle itself carries even more meaning. Eiguren’s grandfather won five Cheyenne buckles, including an all-around buckle that Eiguren’s mother now wears. With his first child due in October, Eiguren’s new buckle may one day become part of that same family tradition.

Beau Peterson has been fighting the waves of rodeo this summer—but a Days of 47 win might change that.

The two-time NFBR qualifier walked away from Salt Lake City with $20,697 won and a hope for a turn of luck. Riding "Richard," her new horse purchased from Payden Bray back in June, she and traveling partner, Madison Outhier, have been rodeoing hard.

We discussed the win, picking rodeos, making all night drives and staying mentally strong when things aren't going your way on this episode of The Breakaway Breakdown.

This episode is presented by Fast Back Ropes. A longtime supporter of The Breakaway Roping Journal, Fast Back takes pride in building quality ropes that offer the durability, performance, and consistency ropers can rely on.

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Shad Mayfield had one week left before he was going to load up and go home for the summer. But then he won the California Rodeo Salinas.

The two-time PRCA World Champion tied three calves in 30.3 seconds to win the Salinas average on Popular Snow Resort "Tootsie Pop," banking $13,576 for the first win of his comeback from double hip surgery—exactly 40 years after his father, Sylvester, won the same buckle. It capped a $28,076 week that also included a second-place finish worth $14,500 at the NFR Open in Colorado Springs, and he joins The Tie-Down Breakdown to talk about it.

Learn to rope from the best. A Roping.com membership gets you full access to the most comprehensive tie-down video library anywhere, with instruction from World Champions Caleb Smidt and Shad Mayfield plus top hands Logan Harkey, Justin Maass and Blane Cox — plus hundreds of hours of archived tie-down livestreams. Choose anywhere from one month to a full year.

Riley Webb has spent the last two years rewriting the tie-down roping record book. Instead of asking the world No. 1 to explain himself again, we called one of the sharpest students of the game to do it for us.

This week on The Tie-Down Breakdown, eight-time NFR qualifier, million-dollar cowboy and horseman Justin Maass joins the show to break down exactly what separates Riley from the field. Maass points to the things most fans never notice: the way Webb reads the barrier better than anyone he's ever watched, the move he makes to bring the calf's hip to his right leg so the flank happens faster than the competition, and his ability to run wide open on every calf without ever getting his horse in trouble.

From there, Maass digs into the bigger picture—the rise of South Louisiana as one of calf roping's hotbeds and the coaching that's fueled it, where Webb stacks up against the legends Maass grew up watching, from Dean Oliver to Fred Whitfield, Cody Ohl and Caleb Smidt, and just how high the ceiling really is for an athlete this humble, this talented and this hard to beat.

Get unlimited access to roping.com‘s comprehensive tie-down, breakaway, and team roping video library and learn from World Champions Caleb Smidt and Shad Mayfield as well as top trainers Logan Harkey and Justin Maass. Rope with legendary breakaway ropers like Lari Dee Guy, Hope Thompson, and 2024 NFBR World Champion Kelsie Domer. Plus, binge hundreds of hours of live and archived ropings including the Cinch Timed Event Championship, The Patriot Events, and more.

Cheyanne McCartney joins this episode of The Breakaway Breakdown fresh off a two-for-two week at Old West's Heber City Futurity, where she won the 4-&-Under Pre-Futurity Breakaway on Thiccthirty and the 6-&-Under Futurity Breakaway on Hez Talkin Smack—with a runner-up finish thrown in on Dont Quote Me, “Muffin.” She talks through what it actually takes to keep four horses straight over two days of competition, why she builds “a little routine” with each one instead of treating the string as one job, and how reading fresh calves changes as the barrier shortens round to round.

She also gets into the bigger picture: Reyzin Royals' run at Old West's $1 million Road to the Million bonus after the mare's $40,000 side-pot win at Guthrie, the trade-offs of chasing both a WPRA Top 15 run and a full futurity calendar—including skipping Nampa to make this week's short round—and the family storyline that made Heber City extra sweet. Hez Talkin Smack carried her to an $8,933 futurity check, then turned around and carried husband Cody to a split win at the Pleasant Grove Rodeo days later.

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Four-time WPRA World Champion Hope Thompson joins The Breakaway Breakdown to talk about how life looks as she steps back from full-time rodeoing and steps into the futurity and training world and what it takes to build great rope horses from the ground up.

Thompson talks through the wins that shaped her career, from the college finals to WPRA world titles and all-around championships, and how adding more events only fueled her love for roping.

The conversation dives into the shift from hauling hard to the rodeos to focusing more on young horses, futurities and creating a long-term business. Thompson breaks down why the futurity world has become such an important part of her program, how she defines success now and why she still has no plans to step away from rodeo completely.

She also gets into the technical side of training rope horses, from scoring and tracking cattle to letting each horse tell her when they are ready. Thompson shares what she looks for in a prospect, why a good mind matters as much as talent and how horses like Ink and Gucci have helped shape the way she trains.

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