Story and Photos by Jewel Allen
In August of 2022, I wrote this essay after shadowing my husband’s second cousin, Jasen Olsen, to research rodeos for a novel. He was then a 4-time Bareback Bronc World Champion. Nearly two years later, in July 2024, Jasen was hospitalized for serious injuries he sustained while competing in New Mexico. As he slowly recovered, he and Drew chatted about hunting together in mid-October. We heard the sad news that Jasen passed away on October 4, 2024, from complications of repeated brain trauma. Rest in peace, Jasen.
Last time I saw Jasen Olsen, his boot was hung in a stirrup off a crazed bronco dragging him across a rodeo arena. He broke both legs and six ribs, and punctured a lung.
He survived that one, just like he had a dozen other spills.
Fast forward three years later to a Saturday in July of 2022, and I was driving three hours from Utah to a rodeo in Bancroft, Idaho, to watch my husband’s second cousin compete in bareback bronc. His trademark event had earned him four world championships over the last three years. I wanted to shadow him as research for my cowboy romance novels.
It had only taken us two years to finally arrange this.
What happened was, I’d contact Jasen, he’d mention his schedule, I’d usually have a scheduling conflict, but nothing came of it. Meanwhile, I’d pretty much given up on the idea.
Until yesterday.
His event would be eight seconds long, if that. I told myself I would be driving three hours away to watch him compete for eight seconds, and what if he got injured? My husband said, then you would have an interesting inside view.
The prospect of hanging out with my husband’s second cousin without my husband (who had a previous commitment) was intimidating. Even though Jasen had been nice on the phone, he would be competing, and I felt uneasy intruding. But I knew if I didn’t do it then, I probably never would. Jasen’s other rodeos were in even farther locations.
—
On the day of the Bancroft rodeo, I planned to drive straight through. About an hour into my drive, I got a phone call from an unfamiliar female voice. She cut out a bit, and then I caught the words, “better half.” Finally it registered. She was Jasen’s girlfriend, and her name was Teresa. She was calling to arrange for us to meet at Jasen’s son’s house outside of Bancroft, then I would follow them to the rodeo grounds.
The day before, Jasen and I had talked on the phone.
“I get there about an hour early and pay the fees,” he said. “I stretch out thirty minutes before. I find out which horse I’m gonna ride. I make sure my horse is standing good and slide up on its back. I want them to have as good a shot as me. We tighten the cinch. I run my hand in the rigging, put my thumb over my fingers, and that’s it. It’s time to go.” His voice rose a notch in excitement. “There’s nothing in the world like it.”
I decided, as I was driving through this southeast part of Idaho, past Malad and farmland, that there was also nothing in the world like this state. For acres and acres on end, everything was green and fertile. The occasional farmhouse sprawled into a grove of mature trees, usually flanked by a red barn. Anyone who liked to poke fun that there was nothing but potatoes worth admiring in Idaho had obviously never driven past this beautiful scenery. This place had the stamp of rodeo all over it.
I drove into Jasen’s son’s small town, population 794, and pulled up behind Teresa’s gray Colorado pick-up, its bed full of ropes and horse tack. Jasen’s grown son Porter, a solemn-faced cowboy in a button-down western shirt and hat greeted me, as did Teresa—a blonde and tanned woman in jeans, cowgirl boots and an airy white blouse. A calm, three-year-old pit bull stood beside her off-leash.
Jasen, whom I might have met in person years ago and whom I recognized from his Facebook photo, emerged from the house in a cream-colored hat, a white collared shirt with gray stripes, and jeans covering well-worn boots. He sauntered over to me, unsmiling.
“I’m Jewel,” I said.
He shook my hand slowly, his brows knit together. “Jewel who?” he asked, before breaking into a teasing smile. That was the first of many jokes he would spring on me over the next few hours.
Earlier that morning, I had resisted wearing jeans to the rodeo. It was late July, for goodness sake, and the thought of putting close-fitting fabric on my legs made me irritable. I considered wearing one of my favorite summer dresses. However, I pictured trying to get photos as I scrambled over railings and relented. The jeans won out. Tucked in my dusty boots, they actually didn’t feel too uncomfortable.
Jasen introduced me to a young girl who looked to be about five and pointed at my boots. “Do you know why she’s wearing those? Because she knows your grandpa’s full of s***.”
For a fifty-one year old man, heralded as one of the older competitors in his event, Jasen looked to be in good health, like he could still haul hay bales all day on his ranch in unincorporated Tooele County. But he walked with that slightly uneven gait that also indicated he’d been thrown off one too many bucking horses in his lifetime.
In my sedan, I followed their truck as it sped through the highways past Lava Hot Springs’s pool, crowded for the weekend, to Bancroft. We arrived about half an hour later to a dirt lot full of vehicles where our convoy was allowed into the competitor area.
I parked next to their truck and got out. Teresa took her pit bull out of the truck and waited with me. Jasen had gone over to stand beside a truck, his back turned to us.
“Is that his truck?” I asked.
And then it dawned on me what he was doing, just as she shook her head. His back was turned to us but his belt was unbuckled and his jeans slightly loose around the waist. I quickly averted my gaze.
—
Jasen made me feel like a minor celebrity, showing me around and introducing me to people. He had cleared with the contractor earlier about my going behind the scenes. The reply had been, “She won’t get run over by horses, will she?” Jasen said I had my own and that I was a relative so of course I was also into horses. The part about being a relative made me chuckle because obviously, with me being Asian and he being white, it wasn’t by blood.
The contractor was a no-nonsense guy who still managed to smile, even though it was obvious he had a million other things on his mind other than accommodating an author doing book research.
“Feel free to take photos wherever you want,” he said, pumping my hand with vigor, adding with pride in his voice that this was the oldest consecutive rodeo in Idaho, at 112 years. He and Jasen took me upstairs to the broadcaster stand and I took a photo of sheep in a chute, where they’d be starting the mutton bustin’ soon. But I couldn’t see past that chute to the others, so I decided where I really wanted to be was down below.
Jasen led me past five or six chutes with wood platforms next to them. Across from a narrow walkway, bulls milled around in small pens, their longhorns poking out between the bars. I scoped spots where I could take photos from, briefly considering sitting up there on the bull pen’s rail, but nixing that as I imagined myself falling in accidentally.
Three kids who ranged from pre-teen to a few years older gazed at Jasen in hero worship as he opened his duffle bag and started getting his stuff out. I shot photos until I realized he had taken his pants off to change into a different pair of jeans, his shirt hem falling to his hips. I turned my lens the opposite direction until he was done changing.
The area behind the chutes was taken up predominantly by boys and men. A girlfriend or two in short shorts accompanied some competitors briefly, but the contractor announced that unless you were competing, to clear out the area as it was getting crowded. I stayed.
Jasen held up his rigging which consisted of a little triangle that would go on the withers of the horse, a sturdy leather loop that looked like a suitcase handle where he’d insert his gloved hand so he could give it a good grip, and long maple-colored leather latigos. He coated the girth two or three times generously with baby powder, which he explained made everything slick. I quipped, “I thought it was so that you would smell good,” and that made him and a bull-riding friend nearby laugh.
This whole time, there was a lot of bantering and teasing. Someone came up to me (at Jasen’s instigation I was sure) asking me for a bull. A man in his eighties with a smart-looking western scarf around his neck pointed at my camera saying my lens cap was on. Jasen cracked jokes until the mutton busting started and the bareback riders were asked to prepare. Then his demeanor sobered.
He unbuttoned his shirt and shrugged off his right sleeve. With his back turned to me, he wrapped his bicep and forearm with white athletic tape. “It’s to keep my arm from hyperextending,” he explained. He dressed again, stretched his arms and legs, and attached thin spurs to his boots. Minutes later, he was kneeling along the bull pen, eyes closed, his hat off his head in silent prayer.
—
As Jasen warned, once the competition got underway, the wood platforms filled with people and activity. The horses, penned next to the bulls, were prodded down this caged alley, a gate shutting between each chute. Jasen’s was a tall and handsome bay horse.
Luckily, Jasen’s chute was the one at the end, so I was able to position myself with the camera alternating with my cell phone to capture footage. He, along with a half a dozen people including his grown sons Cole and Porter, crowded his chute to get the horse ready. This was when I was most grateful that I had worn jeans, as I had to wide-straddle the chute rails to maintain my balance for a good photo angle. I imagined the horse busting out of the chute with Jasen, rocking me out of my perch and onto the ground below.
As the team put on his rigging and cinched the horse up, the announcer played up Jasen’s presence in glowing terms: he was a four-time world champion, and, could you believe he was fifty? Could all that pressure mess a little with one’s head?
With a neck brace tied down with a thin rope around his upper body and his cowboy hat snug on his head, Jasen lowered himself onto the horse’s back. There wasn’t a lot of extra room in the chute. In this extremely restricted space, the animal was a coiled spring waiting to explode. Jasen’s gloved hand got into the rigging, and, like he had described to me earlier, he lowered his thumb over his fingers. He leaned back into position, nodded his head, and two handlers swung open the gate.
It all happened so fast, I took a video and might have blinked once, and then four seconds or so later, it was over with a no-score. Jasen was on the ground, spinning to his feet and looking back at the horse that was bucking his way close to the stands, two pickup men flanking it. Turning at his heel and tapping his hat low on his brow, Jasen made his way back to the chutes, his face hidden by the brim of his hat.
I looked at my video later and this is how I reconstructed what happened.
Jasen’s body arched backwards, his legs scissoring up in one fluid motion. With his hand in the rigging, he stayed on as the horse bucked high and kicked, flicking him into the air twice like a rag doll. One more buck, and then his seat started to pivot on the horse’s back. There were no stirrups, no saddle to keep him on, and by the time he was sideways, it only took the horse one more buck before launching Jasen into a somersault. Jasen slammed hard, face down into the dirt. Somehow through all that, his hat stayed on. He got up and stared at the horse before marching back to the chutes.
Jasen and his sons
One of his sons, Porter, was next. He and Jasen were the only bareback bronc riders; the others had scratched. Jasen walked up to his son’s chute and said, “Whatever you do, son, don’t do it like I did.” He also said, “Keep your mind in the middle, you got this.” Unfortunately, his son suffered the same fate. After a few seconds short of eight, he fell off, earning a no-score.
I was still standing on my platform when Jasen returned to his now-empty chute to collect his duffle bag, giving me a bemused smile. “That was embarrassing,” he said.
“You don’t get to do a do-over?” I asked, hoping on his behalf, but he shook his head.
“We’ll go to Malad next,” he said resolutely. When I asked if he meant he and his sons, he pointed at me. “No, you’re going to.” I told him I hoped to be able to come.
—
By the time we made our way out of the competitor’s area, Jasen’s girlfriend Teresa had left to go to a birthday party for her son. Earlier, I had told her I’d love to chat and get a rodeo partner’s perspective. I lowered my voice, but Jasen had heard me tease, “How do you put up with it?”
Before Jasen competed, Teresa and I exchanged a few words. “It’s hard for me to watch,” she said. “Sometimes, I have to cover my eyes with my hand, and other people have to tell me what happened.”
I wondered if, after his spill today, she was as blasé as Jasen was acting. She’d seen worse falls, like the time he got hung up by the stirrup. At least, this time, he wasn’t injured. Well, he admitted, his pride was.
“When I’ve won, I sign autographs,” he said. “Not today. It’s humbling.” He glanced back at the chutes. “I was humbled, right there.”
But his dimples flashed, and even his sons, piling into a car with him, didn’t seem too bummed over the outcome. The competition was over and they dug eagerly into fast food, passing a cold slushy drink to their father.
Jasen gives a young mutton busting competitor some advice.
—
To generations of horsemen like Jasen’s family, competing in the rodeo is a badge of honor, a rite of passage. As a young man, Jasen competed despite his fear. He was more scared of disappointing his father than of what a bucking animal could do to him.
In Bancroft he was carrying on a long tradition in a sport he and his ancestors have loved and known for forever. It’s a brotherhood and sisterhood that knows no blood bounds. I caught a glimpse of this as Jasen gave someone else’s mutton bustin’ kid advice, and as he gave adult riders a pep talk at the chutes.
As we parted ways, Jasen wished me a safe drive. He and his family planned to do some R&R in Flaming Gorge, after which they would be prepping for, what else, the next rodeo.
—
Jewel Allen is an award-winning journalist and author. The novel she wrote and dedicated to Jasen Olsen after shadowing him is A Cowboy for All-Seasons.
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