Lanita Peirce won the 2026 Cody Stampede on Famous Wahini, clocking 17.06 seconds for $11,308.
She is 76, and it had been 33 years since she last made a run at the Wyoming rodeo.
In the year 2026, Peirce cashed one of the biggest single checks of the Fourth of July run, and by her own accounting, her richest day at Cody by a mile.
“You have to admit, Cody did pay well,” Peirce said. “Holy moly.”
Cody was not her only check of the run. Peirce also placed seventh at the Livingston Roundup for $1,993, pushing her Fourth of July earnings to $13,301 — fifth-most of any barrel racer in the country over the week.
The last time she competed there was 1993, the year she qualified for the NFR. She thinks she either won it or finished second. The check, she remembered, was about $2,200.
The mare underneath her is the reason she struck back out on the trail. Famous Wahini, a 10-year-old owned by Vaughan and Mary Watkins of Jackson, Miss., is the newest link in a bloodline Peirce has been winning on for three decades. The horse she rode to that Cody check in the early 1990s was a full sibling to Famous Wahini’s granddam, Ms Wahini Bug.
“Mary always kept that bloodline because she loved Bugs,” Peirce said, referring to the late Bugs Alive In 75. “This is our last one, she said. And that’s fine with me.”
Peirce has ridden horses for Watkins for 40 years.
“She is the world’s greatest owner,” Peirce said.
The pedigree is not for everyone. They are fast, and they are hot, and Peirce has watched good hands ruin good ones trying to force them.
“Not everybody gets along with them, because they’re a little hot,” she said. ” Everybody has their trick, and you have to be a little patient with them.”
Getting Famous Wahini back to a rodeo run took work. The mare earned close to $150,000 as a futurity horse, but Peirce had back surgery at the end of that futurity year and spent the next two years fighting to stay with a horse that is all speed. She rebuilt her core, had the mare’s hocks and stifles injected in Greeley, Colo., for the first time since 2022, and Cody was her first run back.
“That mare’s pretty automatic,” Peirce said. “You just make your run.” She had told the mare as much before they left home: “I told her she was going to have to step it up.”
Peirce does not haul unless she can win.
“I’m not a 4D person. I’m too old for those” she said. “I might take a colt for a while, but if it didn’t get out of the 2D with me, it had to get a new home.”
“I’m not going to go out there and make my mare look like a fool. If I can’t ride her, we’ll do something else. I know I’m old, but that’s the way it is for me.”
She does not soften it, and she does not pretend the win was owed to her.
“I’m just very blessed to have this mare at this time in my life. I didn’t want to quit. If she wasn’t competitive, I was probably going to have to buy a boat, and I didn’t want to.”
Lanita Peirce
On the road, it is Peirce and her husband, Joe. They locked the house, left a couple of colts with their daughter and pointed the rig north.
“He’s my driver, my cheerleader,” she said. “Everywhere you go, the rodeo people are such a big family that you know someone.”
The comeback was as much nerve as horsepower. Two years ago, Peirce got sick to her stomach before she ran following her surgery. Her confidence was shot.
“I was like, I’m going to fall off,” she said. “But I never did, thank God. And now I’m like, bring it on. I don’t care how fast she goes.”
Her faith does the rest of the work on the fear.
“I love the Lord, and if that’s where I go, that’s the way I go,” she said.
Ask her what she would tell a rider who has been at it long enough to feel the years, and the tough old cowgirl turns into the definition of tough-love motivation. She has ridden barrel horses, as she puts it, a hundred years, and she is not interested in watching anyone talk themselves out of it.
“Don’t give into thae fear. Just stay hooked and have a horse you trust,” she said. “Either you get over what’s holding you back, or you quit. You’ve got a choice, and that’s the two choices.”
“You can’t ride once a week and get back in shape,” she added. “You have to push through it. But keep doing it. It’ll come back. It will.”
And if you ask her what made a barrel horse great in the 90’s, versus what makes one great in 2026, she’ll tell you not much has changed. And it’s not as hard as we make it.
“It’s all about speed,” Peirce said. “It sounds simple. But you’ve got to show up on the fastest horse. And this mare—she’s fast.”
