Hopkins is a program manager and certified athletic trainer for the Justin Boots Sportsmedicine Team, which provides service to more than 120 Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association events annually and teams up each year with Billings Clinic to provide free medical support to athletes at the Northern International Livestock Exposition Rodeo, which took place last week at the MetraPark’s Rimrock Auto Arena.
The partnership between the team and Billings Clinic - specifically the Occupational Health Services and Orthopedics and Sports Medicine departments - has been ongoing for the past 12 years. The clinic provides medical personnel, including physicians and physician assistants, while a handful of trainers and staff come from the Justin team.
“There’s no way we could cover all these events without organizations like Billings Clinic,” Hopkins said. “They donate their time, expertise and service to come out and do this.”
Every rodeo brings its share of spills and when a rider hits the dirt, the team of medical professionals - usually seven or eight people - is waiting in the wings. They wait just off the main floor and are ready to rush to the floor if anything happens.
“It’s basically on-scene coverage at the rodeo,” said Dr. Guy Schmidt, a physician with the Billings Clinic Department of Orthopedics and Sports Medicine.
Schmidt worked at the NILE for the first time this year, but has provided medical assistance at rodeos for years and has seen his fair share of rodeo-related injuries. He said facial and head injuries are by far the most common, a statement backed up by statistics compiled by the Justin team from events it covered from 1981 to 2005.
During that time, more than 2,000 rodeo athletes received facial or head injuries, totaling about 15 percent of all injuries tallied. Of those 2,000-plus head or face injuries, 859 resulted in concussions. The second most common type is knee injuries, with about 1,500.
Injuries are not the only thing the team deals with. At the southeast corner of the arena in a small room equipped with medical supplies and a small bed, people like Ron Handlos, a physician assistant with the clinic’s Occupational Health Services department, helped the cowboys with everything from plantar warts, broken bones and bumps and bruises, to simply taping up their knees or ankles.
“It is a job these cowboys have,” Handlos said of the rodeo. “This is just one of the things we do as medical providers.”
Rehabilitation is also a vital part of what the medical team does. Hopkins said every injury is carefully assessed by members of the team and they are in regular communication with doctors around the country because many of the cowboys are on a circuit or tour and don’t stay in one place long.
“Rodeo cowboys are a unique athlete because they’re literally here today, gone tomorrow,” he said.
If a cowboy is injured on the road, a program manager from the Justin team will give him a series of rehab exercises and a training regimen that can be completed while on tour. If the injury is serious or requires surgery, a program manager will work with doctors and physical therapists around the country to ensure the cowboy gets treatment on the road and close to home, if needed.
“It’s almost the same as if he were here in Billings rehabbing for three months,” Hopkins said.
Over the past five to 10 years, rodeo medics have noticed more riders wearing safety equipment, an encouraging trend among cowboys - and especially bull riders - that could cut down on the number of serious injuries.
Schmidt said riders have slowly been adopting helmets and bull vests over the past few years.
Hopkins agreed and cited an incident at a rodeo in Reno, Nev., last June. A rider wearing a helmet was tossed from a bull, he said, and after he hit the ground, both of the bull’s rear feet crashed onto his head. The helmet was shattered into six pieces, but the rider suffered only a broken jaw.
“Compare that to what it would do to your skull,” Hopkins said. “Education from things like that is one of the reasons we’re seeing a lot more helmet use.”
Hopkins, who fought bulls professionally for 25 years, has watched the sport of rodeo change and move since he was young. He said the attitude toward medical care in the industry is changing, and that’s a good thing - especially for the cowboys.
“For a lot of years, the cowboy mentality was just 'Rub some dirt in it and you’ll be OK in a few days,’ ” he said. “But we do whatever we can to keep the cowboys safe while competing. If he’s not out in the arena, he might not be feeding his family.”
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