Hailey Kinsel and DM Sissy Hayday won the 2026 Calgary Stampede barrel racing championship Sunday, stopping the clock at 16.80 to collect $50,000 and set another bronze beside the four world titles the pair already own.

Kinsel and Sister, the 15-year-old palomino mare the sport knows simply as “Sister,” or just “Sis,” won Pool C on a 16.77 that tied for the round, banking $16,250 for the pool.

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On Championship Sunday they clocked a 16.75 to reach the four-woman Showdown seeded fourth, then came back in the final run and edged Hayle Gibson-Stillwell by a single hundredth, 16.80 to 16.81. Carlee Otero was third at 16.83, Heidi Gunderson fourth. The win ran Sis’s streak to at least one victory in each of the past 11 years, and Calgary is no small place to do it. Kinsel first conquered the Stampede in 2018, a $121,000 week that helped fuel her first world championship.

Days before she pointed the trailer north, Kinsel had already laid out why the mare was ready. What she described wasn’t a hot streak. It was a plan 11 years in the making.

“When she does it, I’m as surprised, elated as everybody, just because I never want to get to the point where I’m just expecting her to go and win,” Kinsel said. “I’m probably more surprised than everyone, because everybody else has expectations that I don’t have.”

DM Sissy Hayday (PC Frenchmans Hayday x Royal Sissy Irish x Royal Shakem) is a 2011 palomino with a résumé few horses in the sport can match. The 31-year-old Kinsel, of Cotulla, Texas, has ridden the mare to four WPRA world championships (2018, 2019, 2020, 2022) and two AQHA/WPRA Horse of the Year titles (2018 and 2025), and Sis has banked more than $3.4 million along the way. Her place in NFR lore was sealed in 2022, when her reins flipped over her neck at the second barrel and she ran a one-handed 13.34 to win Round 9, breaking her own record.

“You genuinely just have to have the right stuff go your way,” Kinsel said. “And when it doesn’t, you have to be gritty enough to know when to push and smart enough to know when to back off.”

That balance is the story of Sister’s longevity. The first year she ever went down the road, Sis placed at her first two rodeos and won her third, and Kinsel promptly parked her. “She was young and super impressionable,” Kinsel said. “We won a rodeo and we pulled the plug.” In 2017 the mare arrived for good: a win at Pecos, then the Days of ’47 in Salt Lake, the $50,000 payday that pushed Kinsel over the edge and into her first NFR. From there, the list of places she could win only grew.

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Cheyenne in 2021. Three separate wins across a single Cowboy Christmas in both 2018 and 2021. Small indoor buildings, wide-open outdoor pens, one-header shootouts, long three-day averages: Sis won at every kind.

It has not all been smooth sailing. In 2023 the draws went cold for a summer, and Kinsel started to wonder whether the mare had lost a step.

“I’ve got to believe in her, that once we just get the right job in the right place, it’s going to work,” Kinsel said. “And literally that night I told myself that and shifted that mindset, and I go run a 16.7 (on a WPRA standard pattern) at Phillipsburg.” The mare still had it.

What Kinsel took from the stretch was the discipline that now defines the program: push when it’s there, back off when it isn’t.

The restraint is deliberate, and it invites second-guessing. People come at her with the idea that she would have won more world titles if she had just run Sis harder, and Kinsel entertains it without ever conceding it.

“Maybe if I get on her five more rodeos in 2021, I win the world. Maybe if I get on her five more rodeos in 2024, I win the world. Maybe, those are big maybe’s” Kinsel said. “But I do that, and maybe I don’t still have her to win a rodeo now.”

The Calgary run was built the same patient way. Kinsel turned Sis out after RodeoHouston and let her be a horse.

“She likes her snacks,” Kinsel said of the mare who packs on pounds the moment she’s idle.

Then came the reconditioning, a job that only gets harder as a mare ages, and a careful reentry in Kinsel’s newly claimed Wilderness Circuit: a midnight slack at Dickinson, then a 3 p.m. slack at Mandan, where in only her second run since Houston Sis cracked off a 16.9 and won a rodeo she had never won.

“I know that’s my horse, and that’s what’s in her,” Kinsel said.

The remarkable part is that the field beneath her has only gotten deeper.

The depth is insane, and it’s only growing, not just in terms of numbers, but your elite horses, there’s more of them,” Kinsel said. “The fact that she’s been able to hang with every group is very cool.”

The edge, she says, is the one thing a great horse buys you. “I feel this incredible level of confidence when I get on her anywhere, because it’s the feeling of always having a chance to win first,” Kinsel said. “Getting on a horse that has a chance to win first gives you the ability to be top five, and that’s what you need to be super successful out here.”

At Calgary, that chance cashed one more time, at a rodeo that has embraced the mare as its own. “Calgary loves Sis. They’ve been so good to all of us because of Sis,” Kinsel said before the trip, laughing that the mare turns up four times in the arena’s intro video. “Super excited to go back up there and see if we can get us another one of them bronze things.”

Days later, she had it. The bronze is new.

The reason Kinsel still has a shot at them, deep into year 11, is not. “A good run where the horse is happy builds the horse’s confidence for the next run, and that’s where you win in the long run,” Kinsel said. “That has been the biggest win for me on Sis for the longest time: that horse likes what she’s doing, and she knows I’m not going to ask her to do it when she doesn’t.”