The Run at the Rose futurity and derby ran June 5-7 in Montrose, Colorado, and the headline out of the derby was a homegrown 1-2: Taylor Langdon won it and finished second on two horses she raised out of two of her own mares.
Taylor Langdon ran 1-2 in Saturday’s Run at the Rose Derby on two horses she raised herself, winning in Montrose, Colorado, on the gelding she calls Skeeter, registered Hes Got The Sting, in 15.245, and placing second on her own stud, Kissmybuttgoodbye, in 15.350, for $5,236 between them.
Both horses cashed again in the Saturday Open’s 1D, where Hes Got The Sting was third and Kissmybuttgoodbye fifth, running Langdon’s weekend to $7,617. The 2020 gelding earned $4,414 across the derby and the open; the 2021 stallion added $3,203.
“Skeeter just wins. It’s just what he does,” Langdon said. “He has that feel about him that he knows he’s a winner, and he steps up every single time.”
Hes Got The Sting (Feel The Sting x Luna Epica x Epic Leader) is a 2020 gelding bred by Langdon who’s climbing toward $300,000 in QData earnings. He had an incredible futurity season, Langdon said, placing at every futurity she hauled him to.
Langdon grew up in Aubrey, Texas, showing cutting horses, picked up barrels as a teenager and rodeoed at Texas Tech, where she helped the team to their first college national team championship in 2012 before committing to barrels for good. Fast forward to 2026, and her name’s showing up more than ever on the paysheet.
“It was basically seven years trying to get these colts to the arena from start to finish and to prove our breeding program and what we’ve worked so hard on,” Langdon said. “Sometimes you think you’re crazy and this is never going to work and you’re never going to get there.”
In the derby, Hes Got The Sting won in 15.245 for $2,926 and Kissmybuttgoodbye was reserve in 15.350 for $2,310. Lora Nichols and Blissful Version split them from the rest of the field in third, running 15.509 for $1,848. In the Saturday Open’s 1D, Hes Got The Sting placed third for another $1,488 and Kissmybuttgoodbye fifth for $893.
The win was built at home. Langdon and Ty Wallace raised both horses; Wallace starts the colts and ropes on Kissmybuttgoodbye, a $122,000 earner by QData who has won better than $30,000 of it heading, Langdon said.
The deeper story sits with the mares on the bottom half of the boys’ papers, however. Langdon’s father bought her Vegas Firefighter as a weanling, a Christmas present, and after Joy Wargo trained and futuritied the mare, Langdon rodeoed her for a year and a half before an injury ended her career.
Vegas Firefighter, the dam of Kissmybuttgoodbye, now lives at home as what Langdon calls the queen of the place, even as the stud colt out of her has already passed her on-paper lifetime earnings.
Hes Got The Sting is out of Luna Epica, an Epic Leader mare out of Mulberry Canyon Moon who got hurt as a 3-year-old and never ran, but had all the right pieces. Each horse is its dam’s first foal to reach the arena.
“We never really intended on having a stud, but as beautiful as he is and good-minded as he is, how do you cut him?” Langdon said of Kissmybuttgoodbye, the buckskin she and Wallace call Strutter. “Everything you show him, he shows up to do it.”
The two horses are turned out together at home. “They’re buds,” she said, “so it makes it just that much more special that they could go first and second.”
Langdon plans to point both at the Colorado Classic and the Ruby Buckle in South Jordan, Utah, and to keep them on the derby trail this year. Next season she wants to take the stud to rodeos. “They know he can win in the futurities, they know he can win at the derbies,” she said. “But now I think we have to prove that he can win at the rodeo scene.”
For Langdon, the proof is in the mares she believed in. “There’ll never be another one like her,” she said of Vegas Firefighter. “A lot of people breed to (Strutter) just because of her, because they remember her. She was just truly incredible. And that is so neat for us, for people to want to breed to him solely because of that mare.”