Hang on tight

As pop rock blasts through the stadium speakers, Lucas Divino slides farther forward over the bull’s broad shoulders and clenches his rope a little tighter—it’s all he’ll have to hold on to when the gate swings open.

In the next eight seconds, he could put himself in the running for $54,000. Or he could die.

Every one of the 42 riders at the Professional Bull Riders (PBR) competition came to Louisville, Ky., to take that chance. Tonight, more than 8,000 fans came to watch them do it.

The PBR is still a minor sport compared with professional basketball or baseball, but its televised events have maintained a promising trajectory over its first few decades on air. The PBR recently attracted 30 million unique viewers in a single season and earlier this year sold out a three-day event at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Divino won that event in front of more than 42,000 fans and 1.1 million online viewers.

Thirty-one-year-old Divino, a Brazilian known for his love of wiggling his eyebrows at the camera, has a compact build that exudes contained strength. He’s wearing chocolate brown chaps with tan fringes, a black button-down under a brown protective vest, and a black felt cowboy hat. His right palm, wrapped in the rope that’s held around the bull’s ribs only by his grip, is covered in a thick layer of tape intended to cushion the force on a hand he broke years ago.

You can hardly help but wonder if climbing on an animal with horns and hooves that weighs 10 times more than its rider is an act of faith or insanity. Is it cowboy courage or sheer stupidity?

For Divino, it started as a dare—the sort of teenage challenge that adults respond to with a shrug and a resigned “Boys will be boys.” His friend called him with an invitation: “Hey, let’s go to my house. Let’s ride some steers.”

Divino was not interested. At 16, he’d already spent five years as a full-time working cowboy in Goiás, Brazil, and he knew what cows were: animals you cared for, doctored, and sold—not rode.

He eventually went, under threat of being branded a sissy. And, despite adamant protests that his friend would have to carry him back to his family in pieces, he climbed over the old cattle chute and rode his first steer. Then another, and another. By the end of the day, he’d ridden 10. Turns out, riding cows was sort of fun.

But Divino isn’t on a ranch steer today. In the last 18 months, Workin’ Man has bucked off 88% of his riders in an average of 3.65 seconds. And he has a reputation for charging downed cowboys. When Divino nods his head for the gateman to open the gate, he will be fighting against a thousand pounds of deadly brute force.

The tip of Divino’s cowboy hat bobs almost imperceptibly.

The gate swings open, and Workin’ Man bursts out with a 6-foot leap. Above them, two huge white timers start counting to 8 seconds.

Divino needs this ride. It’s his last chance at winning the event—and at a paycheck.

PBR events consist of three rounds spread over two nights. Every rider gets one ride a night, after which the Top 12 move to the championship round where they battle for the weekend’s highest total score and cash prizes.

Divino has to stay on for 8 seconds to get a “qualified ride” and a score. If he loses his hold on the bull rope or touches himself or the bull with his free hand, his ride is disqualified. Judges are ranking him and the bull, and their combined scores will create the final score.

Ron Adar / SOPA Images / Sipa USA via AP

Last night, Divino fell off Cash Goblin in 3.36 seconds. Still, if he can pull off a high score tonight, he may have a chance to advance.

Fifteen years of riding bulls has taught him what it takes to win. Coming into tonight, he’s ranked as the eighth-best bull rider in the world. But rankings don’t mean much in this sport. To bull riders, everything changing in an instant is as much a jarring, physical reality as it is a theoretical truth.

A single jump, a hoof in the wrong place, a stuck rope—any number of mishaps could wipe out a season, a career, or in some cases, a life. And, unlike most professional athletes, only some of the riders will get paid tonight.

Ron Adar / SOPA Images / Sipa USA via AP

Divino knows how fast a season can change. Last weekend, a bull named Outcast stomped on his right knee after the ride. The impact was softened ever so slightly by the knee brace Divino wears because both his PCLs—major stabilizers that hold the knee together and stop it from overextending—have been torn for years. He was left with severe bruising and a limp he tries to mask. Before the ride, he doctored his blotchy, dark-purple knee like a true cowboy: with some tape to hold it together and some ice to make it numb.

Hurt knee or no, Divino needs to hit 8 seconds.

The timers flash—0.13. As the bull’s back hooves kick high in the air, Divino leans back and throws his free hand over his head.

No one taught him to do that. In Brazil, his only coach was experience. Teenage Divino would drive to a neighboring ranch every weekend and climb on as many steers as they had, usually 10 in a day.

Bull riding was fun, but it was more than that. It was his chance. His parents divorced when he was 9, and he and his stepmother didn’t get along. He wanted to live on his own, but his father could easily stop neighboring ranches from hiring a 16-year-old. Ranch-raised Divino wasn’t interested in living in the city with his mother. His choices were simple: Live with his mother, live with his father—or ride bulls.

So the half-ambitious, half-addicted teenager got on bull after bull in training and at competitions, forcing himself to be better at a sport that was the only shot he saw at a different life.

It wasn’t a good gamble by all accounts. Even apart from the physical risk, riders must pay their own way to events where earnings are far from guaranteed. Some riders didn’t make enough money to pay for the trip home. But others—the winners—raked in more money in a weekend than Divino earned in a month on the ranch.

“You’re never going to be able to buy one shirt with bull rider money,” his aunts warned him. His father, initially disapproving, was quiet about his son’s new interest in getting thrown around by bulls. But Divino’s rodeo friends told him he had a future.

So, Divino kept climbing on, nodding his head, taking his chances. He traveled throughout his state, got married, moved to a bigger state. Drinking, partying, swaggering—they were all part of the rodeo culture Divino embraced for years as he rode the Brazilian rodeo circuit.

Then he started chatting with a São Paulo rodeo worker named Davi who kept talking about God.

“Stop and think about it,” Davi would say. “Your breath—if you think you can do that alone, you can’t. That’s Him.”

Elsa / Getty Images

One night, Divino joined some friends for a prayer event in the woods. As he prayed in the darkness to a God he was unsure of, he saw the leaves light up all around him. He remembers holding the shining leaves in his hands.

“Who can turn on the lights [or] make leaves from the tree be a light?” he thought. “He’s alive. He’s the truth.”

Divino got baptized in 2014. He stopped drinking and partying. He stopped cursing and swaggering. He fought and stressed less. He wasn’t as afraid of injuries and started riding better.

But it didn’t last.

A few years later, he walked away from the faith and divorced his wife. He went back to his old ways. When the Holy Spirit nudged him, he drowned Him out.

The white numbers flick past—0.60. Workin’ Man hits the ground. Less than three-tenths of a second later, he rears back off again. The landing hurls Divino forward, his brown protective vest almost touching the bull’s shoulders as they rise again.

Things seemed fine without God. João Ricardo Vieira, a now-40-year-old Brazilian veteran who still rides in the PBR, began encouraging Divino to move to the United States. “You’re good enough to go there,” he kept insisting. “The big money is over there.”

But Divino didn’t speak any English and wasn’t interested in navigating the legal and personal maze of moving to America. That is, until he got a call from Vieira: “I have the lawyer. I’ve paid already.”

Divino started riding the American circuit, even winning a few events. In 2020, he married a woman named Taylor, and two years later, they had a baby boy.

Things seemed fine on paper. Normal. Maybe even good. But it was a different story under the surface.

1.26. Workin’ Man has all four feet off the ground, head low in preparation for a midair kick. Divino looks controlled, his jaw clenched and leather chaps flying up toward his waist with fringes hurtling in every direction.

That’s how bull riders are supposed to look: in control, tough as steel.

“They’re cowboys,” fans say. “They’re a different breed.” They say it with the casual confidence that suggests this simple phrase has answered all questions and misgivings.

The PBR has made an art of selling this illusion. The “toughest sport on dirt”—1.5 million pounds of trucked-in dirt, to be exact—is flawlessly packaged into a showy spectacle of fireworks and lung-rattling bass that promises raw, authentic human grit.

But despite the confident, tough cowboy he projected every weekend, Divino was struggling. A bull had stepped on his head and given him a concussion. He was battling with what doctors would later diagnose as depression. But the anger was worst of all. He’d get mad at anything, losing control of himself without real reason.

It kept getting worse. He knew it was hurting his family, his friends, and his career. But cowboys don’t admit they’re hurting, and they certainly don’t ask for help.

Yet cowboy grit was clearly insufficient. One day, he got on his knees and prayed and cried for hours. The Holy Spirit spoke again, convicting him of his sin and reminding him of God’s faithfulness over the years. This time, Divino listened.

1.58. Workin’ Man lands with a neat twist that forms his bulging back into a treacherous curve. Divino slips to the right just a little.

In bull riding, it doesn’t take much to shove faith roughly into the cleansing fire. Last spring, an ordinary ride ended with a red brindle breaking seven of Divino’s ribs and puncturing his right lung.

Divino, despite his career of choice, doesn’t do well with pain. Lying in his hospital bed, suffering with internal bleeding, he thought about quitting for good.

“We’re not going to have the life that I was planning for,” he told Taylor. “But at least I’ll be with you.”

The next day, she walked in on him watching his old riding videos. Two months later, he was back on the road.

But the accident shook them. Death is never far away in this sport. While it’s not common, PBR athletes have been killed as recently as 2021.

Divino celebrates after winning the 2025 PBR Unleash the Beast event. Elsa / Getty Images

The realization that riding bulls can end badly may seem obvious, but there’s a deceptive sense of safety that creeps closer after every ride that finishes with a rider walking off and the bull strolling away. Except for moments like the one just before Divino’s ride—when a rider was hurled against the metal chutes, smacked his tailbone on the rail with a resounding clang, and slid down headfirst—the event can feel oddly predictable.

The rider gets on. The bull bucks. The rider falls off within seconds. Rider and bull walk away. The next rider gets on.

Hard falls, minor injuries, and pervasive limps are table stakes in this sport, so common they hardly register.

Predictable as it can feel, there’s no way to predict what will happen in the next moment. There’s nothing to do but trust God and take the hits.

1.78. Maybe feeling Divino slip right, Workin’ Man spins to the left, yanking his body out from under Divino’s weight. Divino’s right knee digs into the bull’s shoulder as he slides down, his hand still clenching the rope.

It might seem wiser to retire and find another field, but Divino is convinced God created him to ride bulls and, while he’s at it, be a witness in a sport where God is accepted, even proclaimed, but often not followed.

“Bullrid[ing] is a dirty place,” Divino says. But he also describes it as “the very best place to take the Lord.” Praying with his fellow riders, leading Bible studies, offering to support the younger men—the PBR isn’t just his workplace, it’s also his mission field.

Plus, his family needs income, and he only has experience in two things: ranching and bull riding.

Divino knows what returning to ranching would mean. After he moved to São Paulo, his father shared that he had ridden bucking horses as a young man. Like Divino, his skill had earned him an opportunity to move to São Paulo, but he turned it down. Now, after decades as a working cowboy, he regretted it.

“I’m just killing myself working here. You kill yourself to make just enough to put food inside the house,” he warned Divino. “If you have the opportunity, don’t lose [it]. Go.”

Divino celebrates after winning the 2025 PBR Unleash the Beast event. Elsa / Getty Images

But bull riding isn’t a very stable career either. Divino is one of the top riders in the world, and his net earnings over seven seasons is around $950,000. That’s less than the NBA’s minimum guaranteed annual salary for every rookie. He’s hardly as poor as his aunts predicted, but the relentless consistency of rent, bills, flights, hotels, Ubers, and meals out can strain irregular paychecks.

After getting stomped last weekend, he broke down in the hotel room while FaceTiming Taylor and his two young sons. “I was here trying to make things [better],” he told them. “Now things got worse.”

But riding bulls is a job that he believes he was called to. It’s a job he needs. So he keeps praying, climbing on, nodding his head.

2.68. Divino slips down until he sticks out perpendicular to Workin’ Man’s side. Finally, he throws himself away from the bull and hits the ground on all fours. The bull fighters leap into action as he runs, favoring his hurt knee, and jumps on the fence. The clocks are stopped at 3.38. The numbers are red. Not a qualified ride.

After a week of work and travel, he won’t bring home a paycheck. That’s the nature of a sport that boils down to a matter of seconds. But Divino is alive.

And at 4 a.m. tomorrow morning, he’ll be standing in line at airport security, serenely sleepy. He should be home by 10 a.m.

And there’s always the Palm Beach event next weekend.

—Abi Dunning is a graduate of the World Journalism Institute and Patrick Henry College