Barrel racing champ was born to ride

When barrel racing champion Angela Festervan was 7-years-old, she found her calling in life.

“As soon as I could talk and ask for things, I wanted a horse. My parents thought I would grow out of it, but I never did. I kept begging,” Festervan said.

Eventually, her father gave in with the caveat that the horse would be shared with the rest of her siblings. “Thank goodness no one wanted to ride him!” she said.

The more time she spent with her horse, the more she wanted to learn more about riding.

“I started to take lessons. The more I was exposed to the horse world, I realized it’s not just riding – there’s competition involved. I thought about it all the time, dreamed about it when I should be studying. It wasn’t something I just picked. I was either going to give into it or be a miserable person,” she said.

By college, Festervan realized how lucky she was to know what she wanted to do with her life. “So many of my friends had no idea what they wanted to do. I was so fortunate to have a direction at such a young age, and one that was easy for me to stick to,” she said.

Even though she had always been interested in barrel racing, she didn’t start participating in events until 1996. “I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew the barrel pattern. It turned out [the horse] was pretty good, but I wasn’t. I would go to shows and forget about my job, which is to stay on,” she said. “It’s not one of those things you figure out all by yourself. It takes a team of people like in any sporting event, and you have to be open-minded and ask questions to know how your body is going to adapt to compete at a high level. I had really good trainers that donated to me at no cost.”

At the same time, she got into breaking colts and began training horses. “I started racing, and then I stopped. I realized there were so many important things that I needed and wanted to learn about horses before I stepped back into the competitive arena,” she said.

In 1997, she stopped competing and spent 11 years in a college-type environment living and studying on ranches in an apprenticeship until she felt comfortable going out on her own. After those 11 years, she trained a horse for another competitor, and out of 470 riders that horse came in second.

“At the same time, I had been training another horse and I had decided to run him. It was kind of my fledgling flight and entered my first rodeo,” she said. “I didn’t expect to win it, but I was going to try my best. Out of 180 people give or take, I ran with the first five.”

A few hours after making that run, she heard her name called. “I thought, ‘Oh, I placed!’ and I won it,” she said. “After I won that first rodeo, I knew I could do it. There were some girls there that I had only ever read about in magazines. That first win is my most proud win. I’ve won races where I was No. 1 out of four or 500 people, but I worked so hard for that one.”

Barrel racing is unique in that outside of the rodeo circuit, both genders race against each other. “I like going to barrel races because gender doesn’t matter. It only matters how good you are at your sport,” she said. “I want to compete against men.

“If I win a race, and it’s not pretty, it doesn’t matter because it’s the clock,” she said. “No judges can come out there and say, ‘You were faster, but this guy over here ran better than you, so we’re going to give him first place.’ You’ve got one judge, and it’s a timer. Nobody can come in there and take anything away from you because of gender or politics. It eliminates gender and judgment.”

Festervan will stay busy this year.

She is currently competing in the National Barrel Horse Association circuit, and later this year starts up with the Women’s Pro Rodeo Association and the Barrel Futurities of America. She has many event wins under her champion-buckled belt but remains humble about her successes.

“I hate to say I did it because it is a partnership,” she said.

“Horses don’t understand winning.

All they do is try to do what I’ve asked them to do. When they do, I’ve set up the barrel race as such a fun and easy game for them to play, that they essentially accidentally win.”

–Mandy Byrd