PUEBLO, Colo. (September 8, 2010) - After climbing into the bucking chute for the second round at Ontario, Calif., two weeks ago, Guilherme Marchi tried to settle in on the back of Goliath.
He put his hand in his rope and took his wrap. But as he scooted forward one last time, Marchi turned back toward Ednei Caminhas, and in Portuguese said, “Não posso fazer isso. Dói demais.”
Asked to translate, Caminhas simply motioned with his hand and yelled for the gate.
What Marchi actually had said was “Can’t do this. It hurts.” His right hand and wrist were so badly inflamed that he couldn’t lift on his bull rope, much less hold on for 8 seconds. Within 2.2 he was off.
He grimaced in pain and quickly made his way to the locker room before visiting with Dr. Tandy Freeman, who injected his wrist with an anti-inflammatory and told the 2008 World Champion not to do anything that would aggravate it for seven to 10 days.
According to Freeman, Marchi “has a cartilage tear, ligament injury and mild early arthritic changes commonly seen in bull riders, as well as inflammation (synovitis).”
“He’s a big, tough guy too,” said former PRCA World Champion and Canadian World Cup captain Cody Snyder, when told of Marchi’s attempt. “It must be very, very painful.”
Snyder said that while he isn’t specifically familiar with Marchi’s injury, he has experienced firsthand the frustration and aggravation that comes with injuring a hand and wrist.
“To me, there are two very frustrating injuries in bull riding,” Snyder said. “One is a groin injury, because you feel you can ride … and you get on and it’ll just pop loose and you can’t control it. And this wrist injury is a very frustrating injury.”
Snyder’s career was cut short a few years after breaking the scaphoid bone in his wrist.
Snyder’s injury occurred at the Canadian Finals Rodeo in 1987. In Round 1, he hurt his lower back after his bull fell on him. The next day he couldn’t arch his back, so when a bull named Catfish jerked him over the top of his rope, he hyper-extended his elbow and broke his middle finger. The broken scaphoid went undetected at the time.
Snyder said that from that point on, he was only marginally successful.
“I could ride a bull one day and be 90-plus, and the next day I couldn’t ride one to be 75, because my hand would pop out of my rope,” he recalled. “The big problem with wrist injuries and any of those bones broken in your wrist is you can still ride with it.” Snyder lost as much as 75 percent of the mobility in his wrist.
“The problem with the wrist is there are so many moving parts in there. There are eight bones in there. You break your leg, it’s one bone. Once that bone heals, there are not a lot of other things around it, like a wrist has ligaments, tendons, bones, nerves.”
“I could ride, but I couldn’t ride good enough to be the best,” continued Snyder, who once infamously proclaimed that if a rider were to buck off three bulls in a row he should be made to get a job.
Marchi has covered just two of eight bulls since returning to the Built Ford Tough Series after having his wrist surgically repaired. That riding average of 25 percent has pulled his season average down to 60 percent after being just under 70 percent earlier this year. He has not qualified for a short-round appearance since finishing second in Wichita, Kan.
Freeman said that only in rare situations would an injury like Marchi’s become career-ending. There are, however, long-term considerations.
“You can think you can and you can want to, you can feel good, but it’ll keep getting worse and worse,” Snyder said. “The long-term effects of it are arthritis and other problems down the line. You have to look at the rest of your life as well.”
NEWS and NOTES
PBR Now on RFD-TV: J.W. Hart and his co-host Justin McBride will be back on RFD-TV this Thursday, beginning at 10 p.m. ET. The show is also streamed live at PBR.TV. Fans are encouraged to call 877-731-6733, or send questions by emailing pbrnowshow@pbr.com.
Live Event Center: Follow all the action from this week’s BFTS event in Greenville, in the first of five bonus rounds for the Top 10 riders, by logging on to the Event Center at www.pbr.com/live. The multimedia center provides live scoring, live blogging and event-related interviews.
