Anneliese McCurry won the St. Paul Rodeo in 17.16 on Blazin Summer Shandy, banking $13,459 in the biggest week of her young career.
She is 20, from Nampa, Idaho, in just her second season of pro rodeo, and it was the first time she or the mare had ever set foot in the St. Paul, Ore., arena.
McCurry entered six rodeos over the Fourth of July and made it to three. St. Paul was the one that paid. She and her traveling partner, Sierra Telford, turned out of Eugene to reach St. Paul a morning early and walk its notoriously tricky setup, the dark run-in and the blind corner that makes a horse think it is running into a wall.
Her parents made the drive to watch.
“I come out of that alley and my dad gave me a high five and the tears just started flowing,” McCurry said.
The horse under her is the whole story, as far as McCurry is concerned. Shandy, registered Blazin Summer Shandy (Blazin Jetolena x Zacalo x Tres Seis), is a 2015 mare McCurry owns with her parents, Dennis and Paula. She is bred to run on both sides, Blazin Jetolena up top and Tres Seis underneath, and in McCurry’s telling she is freakishly fast.
“When I run Shandy, she’s so smooth. It feels like you’re floating,” McCurry said. “She doesn’t have any of those big jerky moves. She’s like a four-wheel-drive horse all the time.”
Ask her about the win and she turns the conversation back to the mare every time.
“It’s honestly more about Shandy for me,” McCurry said. “I just want everyone to know how incredible that horse is. It makes me emotional even just talking about her.”
The St. Paul check was the headline, but it was not McCurry’s only money of the run. She placed earlier at Sedro-Woolley, Wash., for $647, aboard a different mare, an Eddie Stinson she calls Spanx (registered SBC Eddie Set Go) that she only got this spring. The Fourth had its lows, too. She tipped the third barrel at Toppenish, Wash., in Shandy’s first run back from a little time off, and she never made it to Molalla, Ore., after a backup horse caught a leg in the trailer divider while unloading. The injuries were external, and the horse is expected to be fine.
The two checks pushed McCurry to $14,106 for the week, second only to Michelle Alley among all barrel racers over the Fourth of July.
The Shandy Story
McCurry got Shandy in 2022 while she was still winning on another mare she loved, and the two took a long time to click. Shandy is high-strung and needs constant reassurance.
“Her mind’s super busy, and I’m her person. She doesn’t really like when other people are handling her,” McCurry said. “I’m probably a little overboard with it, but I’m extremely protective of her. Once we start making a run, she’s confident. It’s just the stuff surrounding the run.”
The reassurance has paid off. McCurry rodeos for Montana State, in Bozeman, where she walked on with no scholarship money and earned her way to a full ride. Running Shandy, she won the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association’s Big Sky Region title as a freshman and, last month, made the short round at the College National Finals Rodeo in Casper, Wyo. The scholarship came on the back of the same mare she is so protective of, which is how McCurry would want the story told.
She is a first-generation rodeo kid; her family always had horses, but nobody competed. She started in seventh grade and picked up every event she could work. She made the National High School Finals Rodeo three of her four years, then cut her events down over time until it was barrels and breakaway. In the summer of 2025 she bought her WPRA card and got her start, then chose the Columbia River Circuit for 2026 so she could rodeo closer to family. This fall she starts nursing school, which is the reason she cannot just point the rig down the road, even as the mare keeps telling her she should.
“There’s always that little voice that’s like, you should just take her,” McCurry said.
She credits her faith with the rest of it. “It’s been a bumpy road, I’m not going to lie,” McCurry said. “But I feel like God’s hand has been in all of it.”
“I used to watch that rodeo and only dream of running there,” McCurry said. “Let alone winning it.”
“I used to watch that rodeo and only dream of running there, so winning it is incredible.”
Anneliese Mccurry