Professional bull rider earned $595 in competition where he was killed
For the final bull ride of his life, Amadeu Campos Silva earned $595.20.
That is the risk of riding a bull.
Watching the professional bull riders successfully negotiate an 8-second ride on these giants you can easily forget that it takes so little for something to go so tragically wrong.
The entire sport is back in the impossible spot of acknowledging that reality while trying to move on to both promote, and run, the next bull riding competition.
On Sunday in Fresno, Calif., Silva was killed at the PBR Velocity Tour event when he was stomped by a bull. He suffered chest injuries, and was pronounced dead after being transported to a local hospital.
“I didn’t know him, but I know a 1,000 kids just like him,” PBR president and CEO Sean Gleason said Tuesday at Dickies Arena where the PBR announced it will relocate its world finals to Fort Worth in May of 2022.
Gleason and the event planners had a moment of silence for Silva before the tour announcement.
“Amadeu rode bulls and he did that to buy his family a ranch in Brazil,” Gleason said. “His family was so excited. They moved to Texas to help him be a world champion bull rider.”
Silva, 22, was born and raised in Brazil before his family moved to Texas.
The bull he rode, “Classic Man,” will not be removed from future competitions. The accident is simply being called a “freak occurrence.”
Gleason said removing the bull was discussed, but “Classic Man” did nothing out of the ordinary during that fateful ride.
As Silva fell off the bull, his spur got tangled. He turned upside down, just under the back leg of the animal.
“It was not the animal’s fault,” said PBR rider Cooper Davis, who lives in Waxahachie. “He just continued to buck. That’s the animal’s job. It was not out of a sense that he wanted to hurt the rider. The rider just ended up in a terrible spot.
“I knew Amadeu, not on a personal level yet because he was new, but we shared the same locker room together and he was a super nice guy,” Davis said. “This is the second friend of mine I’ve lost in an accident, and it hits you hard.”
Rider Mason Lowe was killed in an accident during the PBR’s Chute Out at the National Western Stock Show in Denver in January of 2019.
Both Lowe and Silva were victims of horrible circumstances, not a horrible animal.
When Gleason learned that Silva died, it made him wonder if he wanted to remain in the profession.
“It’s the worst part of my job,” said Gleason, who openly acknowledged the commitment of the sport’s bull riders. ”Their choice, to a man, is to soldier on and keep going because that is what they are doing for a living. I don’t know if I could do it, but they can.”
They can. And they will continue to do so.
“It takes a minute to really grasp how short life can be, and it hits us all deep because it could have been any one of us,” Davis said.
To Davis and the rest of his colleagues, they all know the risk. They all know the danger.
For them, it’s worth $595.20 as the final ride of your life.
This story was originally published August 31, 2021 at 4:51 PM.
