SWEET SUCCESS Pozzi Tonozzi Wins Salinas for Fifth Time in 20-year Career By Ted Harbin N ow in her 20th season competing in the WPRA, Brittany Pozzi Tonozzi continues to add to her potential ProRodeo Hall of Fame resume. Her most recent fete came at the California Rodeo
Salinas, where she won the first and championship rounds and placed in the second go to win average by nearly a quarter of a second. She finished with a four-run cumulative time of 64.79 seconds, 24 hundredths of a second faster than runner-up WPRA Rookie Bayleigh Choate of Fort Worth, Texas. Better yet, her run through the skinny pen in western California – a stone’s throw from Monterey Bay – marked the fifth time in Pozzi Tonozzi’s established career that she’d won the title in Salinas. “This win has been super special just because we lost Duke this year, and he’s just been such a huge staple in our program,” she said of Yeah Hes Firen, who was 18 when he died this past December. “To come out and to win it on a different horse is pretty incredible. “I love this rodeo, I love the fans and I love being at Salinas every year.” She first won Salinas in that magical 2009 season on Duke, the palomino gelding that guided her to seven of her National Finals Rodeo qualifications. She went on to win another Montana Silversmiths gold buckle, adding to the collection she started in 2007. She then won Salinas in 2012, ’13 and ’18. Now, Pozzi Tonozzi is closing in on her 16th trip to ProRodeo’s grand championship, sitting 10th in the world standings as of Aug. 24. If she can maintain her place among the top 15 by the end of September, she will enhance her chances of catching barrel racing legends Charmayne James and Sherry Cervi, who each have 19 NFR qualifications. She began her week by winning the opening go-round in 16.05 seconds, a 10th of a second ahead of Michelle Alley of Medford, Oklahoma. A 16.25 in the second round held on for a tie for fifth place.
She closed out the opening three rounds with a 16.50 and finished out of the third-round money, but the short-round is where she really showed her stuff. Riding Babe On The Chase, an 11-year-old sorrel mare she calls Birdie out of Streakin Six Babe by Chassin Firewater, Pozzi Tonozzi stopped the clock in 15.99 seconds, the fastest run of the rodeo and an event-clinching run around the cloverleaf pattern. “(It takes) a lot of luck and being consistent” to win in Salinas, she said. “One of my runs wasn’t as good. It’s a marathon; it’s not a sprint here.” That’s certainly the case any time a cowgirl has to make four runs in the same pen. It sets things up well for her and her horsepower when it’s time to ride inside the Thomas & Mack Center over 10 nights and at the richest rodeo in the world. “Bayleigh ran second out (and was 16.10 seconds), so I knew that I was going to have to be fast, so I just went for it,” Pozzi Tonozzi said. The more than $11,300 she earned that week also helped her cause to return to Las Vegas in December, and the final run was one that will make for grand memories. “Words cannot explain the emotion that came over me after this run,” Pozzi Tonozzi wrote in a post on social media that day. “I am so lucky to have all the wonderful horses and people in my life that help me accomplish my goal. Running in Salinas is something I look Brittany Pozzi Tonozzi captures her fifth California Rodeo Salinas title in 2022 to add to her fifth title at the National Western Stock Show and Rodeo from Denver that she won in January. Pozzi Tonozzi won four titles on Yeah Hes Firen “Duke” and got the fifth title aboard Babe On The Chase “Birdie.” Photo by Fernando Sam-Sin
Brittany Pozzi Tonozzi and Birdie claimed the average title in Salinas this year with a time of 64.79 seconds on four runs. Photo by Sandra Levine
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22 WPRA NEWS SEPTEMBER 2022
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