Western Shooting Horse

The Sweetest Of Victories

Chad Little makes his final circle, draws his first pistol, and points his horse at the first balloon. When he drops his hand, the horse moves, as if he had been shot out of that pistol, and the first four balloons disappear in the familiar cloud of smoke almost faster than thought.

The fifth balloon is past the barrel, and instead of the tight rollback he performed on a similar pattern in the Quarter Horse finals, the M6 cowboy from Minnesota takes the extra step or two to make certain of a clean shot.

His horse rates through the turn, puts on a burst of speed to the barrel, rates again, and then puts his head down and runs as the final five balloons are reduced to bits and pieces. The announcer’s voice can be heard calling out the time: “Fourteen three four zero!”

Everyone watching goes nuts. Chad pats his horse as they quietly leave the arena; Rock Clark meets him at the gate and congratulates him. A few more riders to go and the word is official--Chad Little has won the 2010 CMSA World Championship.

Oh, it was fast. But that run didn’t win the stage and, if you ask Chad, it didn’t win the Worlds. That happened early in the competition, and the rest was simply good strategy and a series of clean runs. The competition was particularly fierce this year, in Chad’s estimation, and he had to ride extra smart to stay in it from the beginning.

“Back in ’03 and ’05 I was winning the match going into the sixth stage and missed. This time I was smarter than that.” He brought two horses with him, his good mare Hickorys Irish Gold (“Chaser”) and the gelding he had won the Westerns on. He felt going in that this World Championship could be won by anybody.

“I thought the first stage favored the gelding a little bit more--it was longer and he does a little better starting to the left so I rode him and I believe I won the first stage,” he says. The second stage, a tight little pattern in the Bill Cody arena, would probably have been better suited for his mare, but Chad had already entered the Quarter Horse event. “Its combined on the first two stages so I had to ride the gelding again. It wasn’t by choice.”

His big gelding, GBH Stringwood Snippy, (“dang near 16 hands, not quite as handy as the mare”) ended up winning the second stage as well, much to Chad’s surprise.

“I didn’t think he’d fit that one,” Chad says. The third stage, however, was back in the coliseum and started with a long open run to the left, which the gelding excels at. At the end of three stages, Chad wasn’t sure where he stood, but he was pretty certain that he was holding on to one of the top spots going in to stage four. The fourth stage not only looked similar to stage two, it was also held in the smaller arena.

“I actually had both horses tied at the stalls,” Chad says. “I’d been back and forth for an hour, and I know Charlie had done the same thing because he was going to ride two different horses. We’re both standing there, I’ve got two tied up, he’s got two saddled, we didn’t know which one we were gonna ride.”

At the last minute, Chad made a decision he now regrets. His gelding had done so well on stage two, Chad decided to give him another shot in the small arena. “I got beat that stage by over a second. Looking back now, I should have switched them. I knew better.”

Going into his final run, however, Chad still led the field by about half a second. The trick would be to ride clean and hold his advantage, the smart final run which had eluded him twice before. Once more, he chose the gelding for that final stage, although in hindsight he thinks the mare might have done “a mite better” on stage five as well.

One might think the World Champion would just be pleased to have won. Chad is far too professional to sit on his past accomplishments, and seems to think he can learn more from his past failures, especially past Worlds that he lost because of final stage mistakes.

“There have been a couple where I missed in the first or second stage and it was over before it got started, and then I’ve had two years when I went in to the last stage with over six seconds which is just unheard of now and I blew it in the last stage.

“The last stage [at the 2010 Worlds] was not my perfect run. You know I watched the video afterwards--everybody played it like that was the winning run but it really wasn’t. The first three were the winning runs. That was just a survival run.”

According to Chad he “won those other ones way more than I won this one.” Which, if you look at the progression of competition in this sport, may not be true.

In both 2003 and 2005, Charlie was so far ahead that a single miss could still have carried him to a World Championship. Today, the competition is so tight that Championships are won on tenths and hundredths of a second, and the winning rider has to be fast and clean on all rounds.

“As a whole I think the competition’s a lot tougher,” he says. “Nobody wants to go lose, so I think everybody’s upped their game.” He says that as the sport has grown, it has attracted “more real horsemen and cowboys,” and he thinks they have played a role in upping the competition.

Chad is one of those real horsemen. He and his brother Charlie, the 2008 World Champion, currently train between 30 and 40 horses all the time. Those many, many hours in the saddle each day tell in the comfort he has with the nuances of riding different horses in different stages of each shoot.

And it tells in the fact that he no longer shoots off of Ricochet, believed by many (including Chad) to be the best horse ever to participate in the sport. Today, Chad believes that he and Charlie have six or seven horses that are nearly the same caliber, although he admits that a horse like Ricochet comes along only rarely. His training program, which he has become very serious about in the last two years, focuses on turning out winning competition horses that he can sell or ride himself.

“Not only to win these shoots, my goal is to make good horses. We take a lot of pride in sending good horses to other people to go show,” he says.
Every day on horseback is a chance to teach something. “Lots of people ride for fun. It’s to the point now that we ride them to make them better every time we get on them.”

Chad is serious enough about the sport to have worked with Cactus Saddles to create a signature shooting saddle. He has already taken several orders for the saddle, which he tested during his winning World Championship.

What’s next for Chad? A third win at Nationals? Another World Championship? Although he admits that he tries to win every time he goes out, he is actually interested in diversifying his program a bit more. He makes sure every horse he rides can be roped off of, and takes many of them to sortings and pennings. The next challenge is to show in cow horse and cuttings.

“But I’ll never stop shooting,” he admits. “Shooting is where I make my best horse, so that’s where I spend most of my time.

“One thing’s for sure--every one that I show up at, I’ll be trying to win.”