LAS VEGAS, Nevada (November 4, 2009) – With the PBR World Finals set to resume with round four tomorrow, Thursday, Nov. 5, many of the riders should be looking to improve their riding percentages.
Of the 44 riders competing in three rounds last weekend – the 40 top money winners in the PBR’s 2009 season (all tours) and the top rider from Australia, Mexico, Canada and Brazil – 13 have yet to put their first qualified score on the board.
Two of those scoreless are PBR world champions, including reigning champion, Guilherme Marchi, who entered the World Finals in second place for the 2009 World Champion title.
He has now slipped to third – a more distant third but not out of the race – by last Sunday.
Two time world champion Chris Shivers is also scoreless.
Not doing much better are world champions Mike Lee and Ednei Caminhas, each of whom has one score in the books.
Only four riders – JB Mauney, Kody Lostroh, Robson Palermo and Valdiron de Oliveira – have ridden all three of their bulls for scores. Mauney has used his skills to close in on, then leapfrog Marchi, and is only a few hundred points behind Lostroh.
Lostroh is hanging in there and widened the gap between himself and Mauney ever so slightly with his second place finish on Sunday.
The key questions heading into the second weekend of the PBR World Finals are if Mauney, Lostroh or both can keep their riding consistent and if some of the other riders can get their acts together to show what got them to the World Finals in the first place.
For those bucking off – which affects each rider’s position in the draft for the following day – it has been evenly split between really close rides and really short rides. Over the first three rounds, 10 rides did not even reach the two-second mark. Another ten were 7 seconds or better.
Last Saturday’s night, when the “rank pen” was out, was an example of feast or famine. Only ten riders made qualified rides that night, and it wasn’t until the 13th rider of the night – Dustin Elliott – that the fans had anything to cheer about.
That night, the other 34 riders stayed on their bulls for a combined total of 136.5 seconds – making the average unsuccessful ride on Saturday four seconds long.
There have only been two re-rides to date, one to Mauney, who made the most of the opportunity on Sunday, and one to Shivers on Friday night that still left him scoreless.
So far, seven rides have been challenged, either by the rider or by the judges. Only one of those seven challenges went in the favor of the rider.
The top 40 riders – plus the four international qualifiers for the first weekend – made it to the World Finals, versus last year when it was the top 45 money plus the extra four.
In fact, 17 of this year’s top 40 were not in the top forty at the end of last season.
Competition resumes Thursday at 6 p.m. (Pacific time), at the Thomas and Mack Center on the campus of UNLV. Rounds also take place Friday and Saturday nights, and Sunday afternoon hosting round 7 and the championship round.
With the closest race for the world champion title in the 16 year history of the PBR – and with less than six points separating the top four in the contest for the World Finals average winner – every ride on any given night could change the outcome on championship Sunday.
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