By Natalie Lozano Trimble
Photography by Crystal Wise
Although Cody Lambert hasn’t been on a bull in 30 years — and wouldn’t have retired at 34 had he been able to maintain the level he reached at 33 — he’s never left the sport.
After decades as the Livestock Director for Professional Bull Riding, he is five years into a position he feels is his calling: coaching the Texas Rattlers.
The Fort Worth-based team competes in five-on-five games against nine other PBR Teams.
“It’s a really hard thing to do, but it’s the simplest sport that I can imagine,” Lambert says.
The objective is to stay on a bucking bull for eight seconds. Riders who make it that long are judged on their performance and effort, as well as the bull’s.
“Unlike individual competition, where bulls are randomly drawn just before the ride, the bulls in team games are shared in advance,” Rattlers President Chad Blankenship says. “So coaches can decide which of the ten riders will compete.”
Lambert explains that because the bull plays into the score, there can never be a perfect ride. If the rider did a great job and stayed on through a difficult bull — constant spinning, bucking — then the bull failed at his main objective, which would take the score down from 100.
“The bulls are so much tougher and so much better from what they used to be, but the job is still the same, and it will stay the same forever,” he says. “The fundamentals are balance and strength and quick reactions and a competitive desire.”
When Lambert began, bull riding was often the last event at a rodeo because of the excitement it drew, but the danger didn’t earn the athletes any additional money. Every other rodeo event is a necessary skill for cowboys and cowgirls, Blankenship says, where bull riding likely started with a bet.
It was part of the reason why Lambert helped launch PBR in the early 1990s. Riders were spending years getting good at a sport that put their life at risk but were having a hard time when age or injury pushed them into retirement.
PBR allows athletes to make money that’s worth the risk and acknowledges their limited window to compete.
After its founding, Lambert became the first Livestock Director for PBR, working with the stock contractors to bring the best bulls to every event. “The bulls that make it to the pro level are really competitive and love their job,” Lambert says.
The Rattlers’ Director of Marketing & Community Engagement, Morgan Wallace, says there are rules governing how these four-legged athletes are treated, from the number of hours they can be on the road (breaks every three hours, no more than eight in a day) to how often they can compete (only once a day, no consecutive days) and the bull’s owner is paid for every buck.
Blankenship says the thrill of the sport is the draw that sells out venues like Madison Square Garden every year.
The danger is also why Lambert worked with a manufacturer to design a safety vest used across the sport today. He says people have been getting the story wrong for years, despite his effort to correct them.
His best friend Lane Frost died in 1989 after riding Taking Care of Business, a tragedy dramatized in the film “Eight Seconds,” and everyone assumed that was Lambert’s inspiration.
The truth, he says, is his mom kept encouraging him to look at the flak jackets horse jockeys were wearing. “I was more concerned with winning a paycheck than whether I was going to get hurt or not,” he says. The catalyst came when he read an article on a plane about a young equestrian whose life was saved because of her vest.
After his mom reached out to the manufacturer, Lambert spent a year working with them to create a design that was comfortable and, with strategic Velcro placement, could come off if a bull got a hold of it or if a doctor needed to remove it in a hurry.
Lambert put a lot of thought into how it would be worn. The original prototype was supposed to go under his clothes, which wasn’t comfortable. He goes on to explain how the risks associated with wearing anything superfluous in the arena outweigh the rewards for a rider if it increases the likelihood they’ll get bucked even once. “If I break my neck because I was trying to protect my ribs, that was just stupid.”
When the vest went to market in 1994, Lambert had a broken leg. After nine months of recovery away from bull riding, safety vest sales became his income.
At the peak of his riding career, Lambert says he made it to the top 10 in the world from a pool of about 2,000, but lack of focus kept him from being elite.
“It never meant more to me than other things,” he says.
But knowledge of his shortcomings is what makes him a good coach, because his riders can learn from his mistakes — and it’s working. The Rattlers won the 2023 PBR Team Series Championship, in just the second year of its existence.
Throughout the year, the team practices on Wednesday mornings at Lambert’s ranch in Bowie, Texas, but more frequently during Teams season, which begins with a draft in May and concludes with a championship in Las Vegas in November, Blankenship says.
Although PBR Teams is only entering its fifth year, PBR’s Global Cup in the early 2000s was a kind of precursor, Blankenship continues. Nations competed against nations, and fans could cheer on their home country.
“The athletes were suddenly riding for something bigger than themselves,” he continues.
A bad outing on a bull didn’t mean his team couldn’t still win, which gave athletes a reason to cheer on teammates, too.
The creation of PBR Teams means team chemistry plays into drafting for the Rattlers. Riley Lambert is the team’s assistant general manager, a role which includes filling the roster within the team’s budget and optimizing athletic performance. He’s also Lambert’s son.
His background in team sports means he’s seen how chemistry can affect a locker room. So, anyone joining their ranks must also be their “kind of guy.” More than character, although that’s also important, the team evaluates how seriously a potential teammate takes the sport and the strength of his will to win.
In the team’s inaugural season, the Rattlers drafted Assistant Coach Brady Oleson, who joined the staff after breaking his neck in 2024.
Oleson describes how the Rattlers helped him grow as an individual, too.
“I was kind of a guy with low confidence,” he says, until Lambert told him he could win.
With 60 years of experience, Lambert has seen how cyclical confidence can be. “After a bad run, you get worried that you were never good, just lucky,” he says. “The champions find a way to manage those feelings.”
A lot of what they work on during practice concerns the mental game, with much of Lambert’s advice coming from the Bible.
Riley Lambert says his dad’s strength is simplifying details.
“He eliminates confusion, and ties every choice back to whether we’re becoming the man God wants us to be.”
If you can’t wait to see the Rattlers in person on Oct. 2–4, when they host Rattler Days at Dickies Arena, Blankenship says you can catch them in Austin or Oklahoma City in July or August.
The Scorecard
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10 | Longest consecutive game-winning streak in league history, set by the Texas Rattlers in 2024
1 | PBR Team Series Championship, won in 2023
23-12 | 2025 regular season record
Dickies Arena | Texas Rattlers’ home arena