My name is Grace McDonald and I have qualified to represent Australia in pole bending in Lincoln Nebraska
Bit of tough luck in the first round with a knocked pole and then on the way back up Wowzer decided it would be a good idea to jump the pole and popped me out of my seat but at least I didn’t hit the dirt. Hopefully we will have more luck in the second round which isn’t until Saturday
19/07/2026
Just a heads up that I have my first round of pole bending tonight for the national high school finals. A little nervous but mostly excited! This will be live streamed on the cowboy channel if you are interested in watching the high school finals. It’s kicks off 7:00pm Sunday night which is Monday around 12:00pm.
18/07/2026
Horses are settling down nicely, got them out of there stalls today to stretch the legs and give them a whirl around the arena.
17/07/2026
We arrived at Lincoln Nebraska today and checked in for the national high school rodeo. Can’t wait for it to begin
15/07/2026
I just wanted to take a chance to list and thank all my sponsors once again! Wore my sponsor T-shirt last night whilst I was competing at the jackpot thanks to Sign City!
- territory logistics
- ESS - electrical supply solutions
- Sign city
- barnyard trading
- outback helicopter
- delaneys darwin
- ntlink
- Gerald Maley
- Andrew Mackey
Just a little bad luck in our barrel race last night, hitting the drum with my toe by the looks of it but honestly I have no idea what happened there 😂
Wowzer didn’t feel quite right after he turned his second drum so I decided to pull him up and take it steady to finish our run. Sadly bad runs and these things are just bound to happen in the rodeo world but I’m glad we got these runs out of the way before finals.
We had our last jackpot last night before we head off to finals. Was not the night we were hoping for but not every run can be perfect. Personally I was not feeling too well last night and my riding was affected by that but on the bright side we still had some positives out of our run that we have been working on so I was happy with that. We are leaving that run in the arena and moving on to the next
13/07/2026
We have just been so busy I have forgotten to post for the past three days… so flashback to Saturday mum and I took a drive up to Yellowstone National Park as it has always been on our bucket list and the horses needed a day to rest. I have nothing else to say except for the scenery is just absolutely breath taking.
Wowzer was ready to run and got a bit excited and decided to grow a pair of wings but we ended up making a really clean and smooth run with 22.3 to run second in the open poles and fourth in the senior poles.
Wowzer doing his best to look after me last night at Gillette jackpot. Nice clean run with some improvements to make but can’t really ask for anything more. We got a 16.5 to sit 2nd in the 3D for open barrels and just missed out on money in the senior barrels with a 5th placing. Not sure how we are going to cash these cheques but we will figure it out 😂