Charles Sudduth is sitting inside the Black-owned restaurant AKÂDI PDX in Portland when the general manager, Robyn Harris, tells Sudduth that she has to hurry up and buy tickets for 8 Seconds Rodeo. The urgency is brought on because there are hardly any tickets left.
“Charles, there are only seats at the top left,” Harris tells him.
8 Seconds Rodeo, or the Black Rodeo (as everyone calls it in Portland), is still over two months away. Nearly 5,000 tickets have already been sold. In just three years, 8 Seconds Rodeo has become a must-attend event in Portland. 3,000 people attended the first year in 2023. The crowd more than doubled in 2024 to 7,500, prompting organizers to find a larger space for 2025. At the rate the rodeo is growing, Veterans Memorial Coliseum is another venue that may not last long.
“We didn’t know where this was going to go,” Sudduth, director of athlete relations and partnerships, tells Travel Noire. “Traditionally in Oregon, you don’t see big Black events that bring everyone together in a wholesome space. There’s so much positivity. It feels like a family reunion. We are the only Black rodeo in the Pacific Northwest.”
Bringing A Black Rodeo To Portland
Ivan McClellan, the founder of 8 Seconds Rodeo, brought a Black rodeo to Portland several years after his first experience. He has always been a fan of Western movies and country music. He vividly remembers riding horses after church in dress slacks in his younger years. But up until 2015, he associated cowboy and cowgirl culture as white. Roy LeBlanc Okmulgee Invitational Rodeo and Festival in Oklahoma, the nation’s oldest African American rodeo, changed his perspective.
McClellan saw Black men riding horses in Jordans, basketball shorts, and gold chains. Black women were riding around barrels with long acrylic nails and their braids blowing behind them. The crowds were filled with the “growing up while Black” collective experiences. People went from dancing to the “Cupid Shuffle” one minute, to singing along to Kirk Franklin’s “Melodies From Heaven” the next. Every rodeo plays the National Anthem, but at the Roy LeBlanc Okmulgee Invitational Rodeo, the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” was played, and some riders carried the Pan-African flag around the arena.
“It felt familiar but completely foreign,” says McClellan. “At the same time, it was the things that I had seen in movies blended with Black culture that I was familiar with.”
Watching Black cowboys and cowgirls (or athletes, as McClellan likes to call them) ride horses, compete in barrel racing, ride bulls, and wrestle steers was life-changing.
“There’s something extraordinary about a Black body in motion. It’s just a little bit different. Black riders have a flavor that you won’t see anywhere else in the world. All of those cultural moments at play in the rodeo space were something that I was obsessed with. It was a place that I never wanted to leave,” McClellan says.
So, he didn’t.
After his first Black rodeo, McClellan started documenting Black western culture through photographs. He created the Eight Seconds project, authored a photobook of Black rodeo culture, then produced the first 8 Seconds Rodeo in 2023 in Portland with the help of Charles Sudduth and Vince Jones-Dixon.
The name of the rodeo pays homage to the eight seconds that athletes have to ride a Bull or Bronco to get a qualified score. It doesn’t seem like that much time, but when you’re on an angry two-ton animal, it can seem like years. It’s a time that athletes live and die by because it determines if athletes will have money to put food on the table and pay bills. The stakes couldn’t be higher in that interval of time.
How 8 Seconds Rodeo Addresses Barriers For Black Cowboys and Cowgirls
While the sport has a lot of passion and energy, there are few resources for Black rodeo athletes. McClellan has witnessed them walking down the street with their horse to get to the rodeo because they don’t have a truck or trailer. He’s seen athletes show up to the rodeo without a horse and borrow someone else’s to compete. As McClellan puts it, they do it by any means because they “have a hoof print on their heart,” and there’s nothing else they would rather be doing.
In mainstream rodeos, pro athletes are predominantly white, and it’s not uncommon for them to appear with multiple horses to compete on, especially if they come from ranching families. Many riders also have sponsors.
The most significant disparity is the pay. The amount of money infused into mainstream rodeos equates to prize money in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range.
“With Black rodeos, you typically see $5,000 to $25,000 in prize money across nine events. Our bid is three events, and we pay $60,000 in prize money,” says McClellan. “We want to infuse this culture with capital, so we can see Black athletes rolling in with seven horses at those pro rodeos and taking home hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time. That’s my vision.”
What To Expect at 8 Seconds Rodeo
While it’s a rodeo, organizers say the vibe is more of a “show-deo.” People planning to attend shouldn’t expect a moment of downtime during the roughly two-hour show with more than 30 athletes. Every moment is accounted for. 8 Seconds Rodeo has hired the Black-owned production team Black Ops to ensure the event runs smoothly. There are three events for athletes this year, and in between each, rodeo-goers can expect a dance competition, a Black Card Trivia contest, and so much more.
The Portland event is just the beginning of what McClellan and his team envision. They don’t want it to be considered “the best Black rodeo” but one of the best live performances and a world-class event.
McClellan says his team’s vision starts with training camps. 8 Seconds Rodeo has a bull riding camp at no cost to the athletes. For 2025, 8 Seconds Rodeo can sponsor eight athletes, up from six the previous year. This gives athletes a chance to train on some of the best bulls and receive instruction from skilled riders who walked in their boots before.
“The vision is that they’ll start to perform better at our rodeo, and they’ll take those skills and start to perform in pro rodeo, and we’ll start to see a lot more Black faces at the top level of rodeo that are coming out of the 8 Seconds Rodeo,” McClellan adds.
2025 marks a first for 8 Seconds Rodeo: The team is taking Black rodeo culture to more cities. Philadelphia is next, come October.
