KariAnn Cross won the barrel racing gold medal at the Days of ’47 Rodeo in Salt Lake City on July 25, riding DK Star Biankus to $18,000 in the finals and the biggest win of a ProRodeo career that is only in its second season.
She did it on a mare she raised, foaled out, broke and trained herself, out of a backyard breeding program she never set out to build.
Cross, 55, of Blackfoot, Idaho, won her semifinal round to advance into the eight-horse Gold Medal Round, the Saturday finale of a tournament-format rodeo that hands out gold, silver and bronze medals like the Olympics. In the final she ran a 16.96 to edge Hayle Gibson-Stillwell by one-hundredth of a second, in a round stacked with some of the WPRA’s best. She did not know she had won until they were pushing her toward the podium.
“I just could see when I cleared the clock that she was a 16-something, but I didn’t catch the last two numbers,” Cross recalled. “Even when I was celebrating in the alley, I didn’t know I had won it. I just knew I had at least won second, and I was so excited.” Her husband, Dan, had led her into the arena on one of their other colts and could not see the board either. As Cross told it, he knew only that it must have been good, because the crowd was going wild.
It was not until they rushed her through the gates to the podium that she learned she had actually won, and not just placed. Standing up there for the gold medal, the nerves caught up with her. “My knees were shaking,” Cross said. “I was so nervous.”
If most of the arena counted her out, Cross did not. “I have a lot of cheerleaders, don’t get me wrong, but I’m sure most of them didn’t believe it was possible,” she reflected. “It was just me and Star that believed it, and that’s all that mattered.” It was the biggest check she had ever won and her first week of that monetary stature. She won $22,193 in the ProRodeo.com numbers in total, thanks to an additional placing in Rock Springs, Wyoming.
“You work so hard, and when those moments happen, they’re so special,” Cross said of the weekend. “Everyone else forgets about it. It’ll just be you that has the memory 10 years from now, but it’s amazing.”
DK Star Biankus (A French Shawne Bug x Friday Girl Biankus x Sox Em Biankus) is a 7-year-old palomino mare, and her story starts with a horse Cross was not looking for.
Cross had run Star’s dam, Friday Girl Biankus, years earlier. When the mare came up crippled and Cross went shopping for a stud to breed her to, she drove home from Oklahoma with a yellow colt instead. A friend, long-time breeder Jim Kane of Hyattville, Wyoming, told her to breed the colt to the mare and geld him after.
She bred him. She never gelded him.
“He kept saying, ‘Don’t cut that stud. I think you’re going to be sorry if you do,’” Cross recalled. “We kept saying we’re not really set up, we don’t really want a stud. But we listened, thank goodness, and here we are.” Here is 20-some head of horses and a stallion Cross keeps to herself. The program is old school and deliberately simple: four brood mares, the stud turned out in the spring and gathered in the fall, no outside mares and no collections.
“I’ve had lots of people want to breed to him, and I just won’t,” she said. The sire line traces to Frenchmans Guy through Frenchmans Got Perks; the bottom side carries Dash For Cash through Romeo With Cash.
Cross grew up in Oregon around horses, then picked up team roping alongside husband Dan Cross, who won the tie-down roping at Calgary in his day, until she broke her kneecap and spent eight months non-weight-bearing.
When she came back, her right leg was too weak to rope on, so she stayed home and rode colts and, in her own telling, accidentally made a barrel horse.
Through the ups and downs, Dan has been the one in her corner. When the hard weeks stacked up last year and Cross was ready to give up on the pro side, he would not let her.
“He’d say, ‘Oh no, you’re not. You’re so close to making it to the circuit finals. You’re going to stay out there,’” Cross recalled. “To have someone who’s been there and done that in your corner is so important. He’s been through it all and understands it all.”
She bought her PRCA permit at 53, filled it, earned her card in 2024 and made the Wilderness Circuit Finals as a rookie in 2025.
“I’ve never felt behind the eight ball. I’ve always felt I’m right where God intended me to be,” Cross said. “It was God’s will, because it was all by chance. It was nothing I was striving for. But she drove me to buy a permit and see what would happen.”
Cross also credits much of the ride to trainer, NFR qualifier and neighbor Sue Smith, who lives, as Cross puts it, a potato field away. The two became friends, and as Cross moved from the roping pen to the barrels she rode with Smith and leaned on her, staying hooked on the sport rather than drifting back to team roping. When Cross first talked about trying for the circuit finals, it was Smith who told her what a big goal that really was. And it was Smith who gave her the line she carried to Utah. “Her words to me were, ‘I don’t worry about you, KariAnn. You always figure out a way to win,’” Cross recalled. “Those words stuck with me when I came down that alley at Utah. I told Star, ‘Sue believes in us, so we can believe in ourselves. We always find a way to win.’”
There is a deeper reason the horses have mattered as much as they have. Cross lost her son to suicide 11 years ago, and she buried herself in her colts and in the panel-and-barn business she runs with Dan while she got her daughter through it. Good horses, she said, and good people who understand the life made the grieving a little easier to carry.
“I can’t thank God enough for the things He’s done in my life. If you truly lay your life to Him, He will bring you to where you need to be.”
-Kariann Cross
Star’s edge, Cross believes, is not raw speed. It is nerve. “I don’t know that she can outrun the horses that are out there, and I don’t know that she can outturn them,” Cross said. “But she is so confident in herself, and I think that’s what makes her who she is.”
She’s a fireball outside the arena, too.
“She’s not afraid to bite you, she’s not afraid to kick at you,” Cross said. “I’ve had bruises from her biting me. She’s just confident enough to keep disrespecting whatever you’re trying to tell her. I don’t let her get away with it, but she doesn’t really care.”
In the Gold Medal Round, Gibson-Stillwell was second in 16.97 for $13,000, McKenna Coronado third in 17.03 for $8,000 and Gracen Harman fourth in 17.07 for $4,000. Lisa Lockhart placed fifth (17.15, $2,500), ahead of Carlee Otero ($2,000), Megan McLeod-Sprague ($1,500) and Whitley Sharp ($1,000). Cross had punched her ticket by winning her semifinal at 17.22, worth another $3,147, ahead of Sharp (17.27, $2,360), Emily Beisel (17.29, $1,573) and Katelyn Scott (17.34, $787).
Cross is in no hurry about the rest of it. She would love to make the Wilderness Circuit Finals again, a feat she pulled off in her rookie season, and she is just as content to point at the young horses she thinks are about to turn the corner and to stay close to home, where she rides 10 to 12 head a day. She is not sure she has advice for anyone who reaches a big stage later than most. Pressed on it, she kept it simple.
“Later in life or early in life,” Cross said, “it’s never too late to start again.”