It’s the biggest ride of her career.

Older cowboys have taught her how to handle these intense situations.

She focuses on her breathing.

Her heartbeat slows.

The crowd disappears.

“I an’t hear anyone. Everything leaves my mind, like it’s just nothing in there.”

Finally, she gets her left hand under the bull rope, and signals that she’s ready.

The gate opens.

Ruby is launched over the animal and crumples on the ground like a ragdoll.

By bull riding standards, this might look like a normal fall.

But when she hits the ground, Ruby immediately loses consciousness.

Before paramedics can carry her out on a stretcher she is having seizures in the dirt.

Her brain is bleeding.

For Ruby to have gotten on that bull, all she needed was approval from her parents and clearance from a doctor.

And it’s her seventh major concussion in three years.

Riding bulls ‘like dancing’:

Ruby was only 10 when she first took up one of the world’s most dangerous sports.

In a year or two, she was one of the best female riders for her age group in the country.

The rules of bull riding are simple.

Judges award points to the rider and the bull for things like style, control and ride difficulty.

But there’s a catch: to get the points, riders have to stay on the bull for eight seconds.

For Ruby, the trick is to think of it like dancing.

“You want to be in time with it and you want to be in its rhythm.

“If you’re trying to go against it, you’re going to fall off.

“So if you’re going with it, you’re going to stay on.”

A 75% chance of death in the arena:

Courtney Commisso looks like she could be Ruby’s sister.

She’s her mother, and has been on hand for all Ruby’s bull-riding injuries.

“She’s dislocated her shoulder quite a few times. She’s fractured a shoulder. She’s broken ribs numerous times,” Courtney explains.

For most of Ruby’s career, these bumps and bruises and broken bones never really bothered Courtney.

But the head injuries — things like the brain bleed in Texas — are a different story.

“It’s not nice seeing your daughter knocked out.”

As the concussions added up, Courtney started noticing signs that Ruby’s brain wasn’t well.

Her short term memory was playing up. She was forgetting to feed the horses, getting lost while telling stories.

She also started getting concussed really easily.

One time, at a birthday party, she bumped her head gently on her friend’s shoulder, and then collapsed, unconscious, to the floor.

Courtney says hospital doctors have always been vague about how she should handle Ruby’s concussions.

“Like, you go in, you’ve broken your leg. They say ‘what we’re going to do is put screws and plates into your leg, and then you’re going to come back in six weeks time’.

“They can’t do that with the brain.

“No one can say ‘you’re going to be fine, there’s absolutely going to be nothing wrong with you in six years’ time, or 10 years’ time, or next week.’

“They just can’t give you answers.”

So, Ruby kept riding, but they started seeing a brain specialist. 

Then, at the end of 2023, there was yet another concussion at a rodeo, this time on the South Coast of NSW.

Courtney remembers the brain specialist calling her shortly afterwards.

She recalls how the doctor explained that Ruby’s prognosis was not looking good, and she needed to stop bull riding.

″‘If she doesn’t stop and she cops another knock to the head, there’s a 75% chance she does not come out of the arena alive,’” Courtney recalls him saying.

″‘If she does come out of the arena alive, she’ll end up in a vegetative state.’”

It was the first time Courtney heard it put so bluntly.

She sat Ruby down — No more bull riding.

Ruby says the decision made her feel terrible.

“I get it. I just don’t like it. I hate when I can’t do things,” Ruby says.

As a consolation, Ruby is still allowed to compete in barrel racing, a rodeo sport where horses are raced around three barrels.

The sharper the horse turns, the more time is saved, and the fastest time wins.

Ruby thinks it’s a step down from riding bulls.

“The adrenaline is not the same,” she laments.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE:

At the Australian Sports Brain Bank in Camperdown, Sydney, associate professor Michael Buckland is holding out a piece of frozen brain.

“We snap freeze it and slice it up and keep it stored at minus 80 degrees,” he says.

“They will last for years and be used in multiple research projects in the future.”

There are hundreds of dissected brains here, most donated by the families of athletes who were concerned about a disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

CTE is a complicated brain disorder, which is increasingly on the radar of extreme sports, including bull riding.

It’s not fully understood but it causes the death of nerve cells. Some of its symptoms are memory loss, anger, and suicidality.

Dr Buckland says it’s likely caused by repeated exposure to events that force the brain to move inside the skull, not individual head injuries. 

“It’s not the number of concussions you’ve had that’s the primary driver of your CTE risk,” he explains.

“It’s not that dissimilar to cigarettes in that your main risk for lung cancer is not if you have a cigar once a year on your birthday or a few cigars a year. But it’s the pack a day, every day for 30 years, that low-level exposure over a long period of time.”

CTE can only be diagnosed after someone dies, so he can’t say if someone with Ruby’s medical history is likely to develop it later in life.

But he does find her list of injuries — eight concussions and four brain bleeds — shocking.

He says if it was his child, he’d ban them from riding.

“You wouldn’t stand around and watch someone punch your kid in the head every Saturday morning,” he says.

Dr Buckland says that bull riders should be aware that general concussions can also lead to troubling thoughts.

“Concussion in and of itself, it seems to double your risk of suicide, at least for the next year, if not the next several years.”

Original Story By | Tynan King