Meet the Braidwood cowboy chasing his dreams all the way to Texas

David Chidgey talks about being on the back of a thrashing bull as though it’s a place of calm and quiet.

“I call it being in my flow state,” David says.

“You’re in your subconscious mind. It’s awesome. There are no other words that can describe it. You just feel like in that state, you can do anything. And without thinking about it.”

When he’s in flow, David feels untouchable. He’s one of the nation’s top bull riders – a sport which involves attempting to ride a bucking bull for eight seconds while holding with one hand a braided rope wrapped around the animal’s chest.

Bull riding is usually the main event in a traditional rodeo, with other events including cattle roping, steer wrestling and bareback riding.

David, 23, trains daily on his physical strength – “your whole body needs to be strong; you use your legs a lot, but it’s pretty much your whole posterior chain” – but his mental training is just as critical.

“I invest heavily in my mental training and work with some of the best bull riding coaches in the world,” he says.

“At this stage in my career, I’ve been on enough bulls to know how to ride them.

“I just need to stay out of my own way and let my body do what it knows how to do.”

Earlier this year, David was chosen for a short scholarship to Texas’s Odessa University. In the same way you can be a football, basketball or golf scholar in the United States, you can also be a bull riding scholar, and compete on behalf of your college at rodeos nationally.

Rodeo is a way of life in Texas, and cowboys can – and do – make a living competing in bull riding. Although he’s in Australia at the moment, recovering from injury, David will move back to the United States in early 2025.

The world’s number one bull rider and rodeo superstar, Josh Frost, has agreed to take David under his wing for further training and to compete alongside Josh.

Not bad for a kid who’d never even ridden a horse – let alone a bull – despite growing up on a farm called Doughboy Downs between Bungendore and Braidwood.

“I just rode motorbikes,” he laughs.

“But I had some friends at school who were bull riding. I’d seen their first rides and they’d done pretty good. They made it look pretty easy and I thought I could do better.

“I got straight on a steer at a rodeo in Harden. I wasn’t very good, and I wasn’t very good for a long time.

“But it was exciting, there was something in me that wanted to be really good at it. It was the challenge of trying to do something that you probably shouldn’t be able to do.”

From then on, David “got on bulls wherever I could, we travelled heaps.” And he started to understand the physical toll of riding an adrenaline-filled beast.

His injuries over the seven years since he started riding have included a broken collarbone (twice), which now has a plate and eight screws, a broken wrist, a fractured shoulder requiring five anchors and a torn groin.

Are the injuries worth it?

“For sure,” Dave says.

“I’ve found something that drives me and gives me purpose at a really young age. That’s pretty special.”

View properties for sale in the Bungendore and Braidwood region, where David grew up.

Original Article published by Bree Element on Zango.