he bull riders bow their heads in prayer before climbing into the chutes, because when death is potentially eight seconds away, a prayer can’t hurt. Each rider knows someone who has lost his life on a bull, just as he knows that the risk of dying here—on a quiet, dusty ranch off U.S. Highway 287 in Sunset, Texas, population 586—is no different than it is in the din of a packed arena on tour with Professional Bull Riders, better known as PBR. There are no walk-throughs in bull riding, no half-assed warm-ups. Bull-riding practice brings the same deadly stakes as competition, but with no payout. Hence the prayers and protective vests splashed with sponsor decals and holy water. Helmets are crafted from industrial-strength plastic, featuring a titanium grid across the front similar to a goalie’s mask in hockey. Shirts are tucked in, to prevent fabric snagging on the bull’s horns.

Each bull rider chooses one hand to slide into a leather riding glove, to protect the skin on his palm and fingers from getting torn as he clings to the rope wrapped around the bull’s upper torso as long as possible—or at least eight seconds, the minimum time required to log a qualifying score. Once the chute opens, his other hand stays high in the air as the bull twists and thrashes, 1,800 pounds of beef attempting to shed 160 pounds of man from its back. When the bull succeeds—because the bull always succeeds—the rider’s only recourse is hoping the deity he prayed to spares him from landing on the wrong bone or the wrong spot in the animal’s path.

A scene like that occurs on cattle ranches throughout North America each day. Except the prayers here, in Sunset, are spoken in Portuguese. The men have names like Paulo, Yan, Wingson. They grip the bull rope with their hand on the same side as the rope’s tail, the opposite of the traditional American style. Between rides they sip tereré, a South American tea that infuses yerba maté with water, ice, and medicinal herbs.

That scene, then, can only play out around Decatur, where between 50 and 60 Brazilians in the surrounding area ride for PBR, many at its highest level. More world champions live here, in a town 65 miles northwest of Dallas with a hair over 8,000 people, than in any other place in the country. It is the bull-riding capital of the United States—and that has everything to do with Brazil.

ull riding traces its deepest roots to the charreadas of 16th-century Mexico, a series of ranch and horsemanship activities that would become the country’s national sport. Jaripeo, as bull riding is known, was a secondary attraction at first, bull fighting’s less exotic cousin. The sport came to prominence three centuries later, just as bull fighting’s influence began to wane for being too barbaric.

In 1852, the Lone Star Fair brought the event stateside for the first time to Corpus Christi; it succeeded well enough to make headlines as far away as New Orleans. So began the sport’s entry into the United States, first as an exhibition event, then as a professional one when the Cowboys’ Turtle Association was formed in 1936. The organization, which would eventually be renamed the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA), provided the infrastructure and standardized rules that elevated rodeo from an attraction to a business. Bull riding became the PRCA’s centerpiece event, the perfect blend of culture and danger.

By 1992 the sport had grown so popular that 20 cowboys and a businessman crammed into a motel room in Scottsdale, Arizona, to form a breakaway league. They wagered that bull riding could fly even higher untethered from the smaller PRCA events. Each man pledged $1,000 to build what would become the Professional Bull Riders. Thirty-two years later, PBR, which ran 257 events globally in 2024 across 11 tours—five domestic, six overseas—was gobbled up as the centerpiece of a $3.25 billion equity deal by TKO Holdings, the parent company of World Wrestling Entertainment and the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

No one in that motel room could have foreseen how a country with zero representation at the table would come to define their league. This year, Brazilians make up more than half of PBR’s top circuit, the Unleash the Beast series, and they boast a similar presence on the overall top-100 rankings. They’ve also won 14 of the sport’s 30 world titles. Both of the sport’s back-to-back world champions are Brazilian. So is the pair of three-time champions. And they’re only getting tougher to beat. Nine of Brazil’s world championships have come in the last decade and a half, including four in the last five years. The more the sport advances, and the more challenging it becomes, the more Brazilians dominate.

The question is why. Demographics, perhaps. A USDA report from 2024 cites Brazil as the world’s third-largest cattle producer and second-largest cattle exporter. That means plenty of cattle ranches and plenty more cowboys, along with a healthy population of bucking bulls, the sort used in rodeo competition.

“Guys are out there doing nothing, so what do they do to entertain themselves? Bull riding,” says Adriano Moraes, the first rider to win three PBR world titles. “We’ve got guys that when they show up [on tour], they’re already riding extremely good because they ride two or three times a week at their own ranch.”

Were that the only factor, Australia and Canada, the distant third- and fourth-most represented nations on tour, with cowboy cultures that date back generations, would have more than one combined world title to show for it.

Economics, then. According to a World Bank report from 2023, more than 21 percent of Brazilians live in poverty. Even a middling year on tour in America makes for a good life back home. A great year could set a rider’s family up for generations.

JJ Gottsch is the CEO of the Austin Gamblers, one of 10 teams that compete on PBR’s team circuit. “When it means that much,” he says, “and it can make that much of a change in their life and their family’s life just holding on for that extra half second or second and making a 6.9-second or a 7.2-second ride into an 8-second ride—even though they know by hanging on for that second they’re probably going to have a better chance of getting knocked out or getting hurt?” He points to PBR’s reigning world champion, 23-year-old Cassio Dias, who was hospitalized midway through last year’s World Finals after being stepped on by a bull, only to return to competition days later. “No human should come back to ride, and he did.” Now Dias is an American millionaire, which makes him a millionaire more than five times over back home in São Francisco de Sales, a farm town eight hours from São Paulo.

“When we get here, we don’t have a plan B,” says Paulo Crimber, a PBR Hall of Famer from Olímpia, a municipality in the state of São Paolo. “[Bull riding] is it. Either that one’s gonna work, or we’re going home. And we’re going to have to go back to work, and we’re hungry.”

Except, if economics is the motivator, then Mexico—the country that effectively invented the sport, with a poverty rate considerably higher than Brazil’s—should also be a contender. But the country features barely any riders on tour and none on the Unleash the Beast series.

Maybe it’s as simple as professionalism. PBR CEO Sean Gleason points out that Brazil’s dominance correlates with its riders’ discipline. When they started working on their bodies as much as their craft, they demonstrated how bull riders must become athletes as much as cowboys. But he’s also quick to clarify that the United States—and Australia and Canada—took note and “are doing the same thing and taking it to a new level in terms of professionalism, training, fitness.”

And, still, none of them are closer to solving the South American riddle.

They probably won’t, either, because the secret to how Brazilians lord over the ultimate American rodeo sport is bigger than livestock and GDPs and biometrics. It’s about a place and the way of life that’s been built there.

ecatur was a rodeo town long before the first Brazilian arrived. A world champion cowboy named Gus Pickett brought the sport to Decatur more than a century ago, and local institutions such as the Wise County Youth Fair Rodeo have been operational since the 1960s. Roy Cooper, a legendary PRCA cowboy whose roping prowess earned him the nickname Super Looper, settled in Decatur and raised three sons who followed in his footsteps. Trevor Brazile, who married Cooper’s stepdaughter, topped all of them by winning 26 world titles, eight more than any other cowboy. Both Cooper and Brazile remain in Decatur, where Roy Cooper Roping has held junior calf roping events for 41 years.

Paulo Crimber didn’t know all of that when he came to town in 2005. He learned about Decatur while attending a cowboy church in nearby Justin with his friend and mentor, Adriano Moraes. It was Moraes, who was born in Quintana, a municipality in the state of São Paolo, who started the migration of Brazilian bull riders when he was invited to join the inaugural season of PBR. He figured he’d try it for a while, then go back to Brazil, where he was the reigning two-time national champion and the economic gap was far smaller than it is today. Instead, he won PBR’s first world championship in 1994 and stuck around. He and his wife made a home in Keller, where they became a port in the storm for Brazilians hoping to replicate Moraes’ journey. Anyone was welcome to stay with him, travel alongside him, learn how to be less of a stranger in a strange land. For the first four years after that initial world title, no one lasted long enough to soak up his wisdom.

Then, in 1998, Paulo showed up. He was 18 years old and fearless, having grown up with a sixth-grade education and without a father. When he began competing at 14 and a half, he owned a single pair of jeans. Paulo won his first professional event at 16. The prize was a motorcycle, a common practice on the Brazilian circuit at the time. Over the next two years, he’d win a dozen more, along with nine cars. Shortly after his 18th birthday, he took home $20,000 at a national event and funneled the winnings toward a buy-in at that year’s PBR World Finals. He boarded a plane without knowing a bit of English or what awaited him when it touched down.

Which, as it turns out, was success. Paulo quickly befriended Moraes and began touring with both PBR and PRCA. Life off the bull was hard, particularly during the weeks when Moraes wasn’t on the road with him and he could order food only from restaurants with picture menus. But on the bull, Paulo thrived. He was an entertainer, someone who would pop and lock after a strong ride, of which there were many. His breakthrough came in 2004, when he won the PRCA’s signature event, the National Finals Rodeo, and finished fourth in PBR’s World Finals while riding with a broken hand. The windfall would enable him and his wife, Maria, to move from Keller, where they lived near Moraes and his family, to somewhere less suburban. The only other requirement was that he needed a short drive to DFW Airport. A real estate agent pointed him to a tract of land in Decatur, and he fell in love.

Nothing about the town suggested a future hub for some of the best bull-riding talent in the world. Decatur became what it did because the Crimbers made it that way. By the time they had bought the land, Gleason says, “the floodgates opened” for Brazilian riders joining PBR. What was once a pair had become a handful, which became a contingent. And increasingly, they were turning to Paulo, especially once Moraes retired from PBR in 2008 and moved back to Brazil. Not only did Paulo know the lay of the land, but, after forcing himself to travel with Americans to polish his English, he began speaking the language so naturally that he now has an accent as Southern as fiddle strings.

A ritual emerged. A rider would stay with the Crimbers to get his feet wet on tour, and then Paulo would set him up with an apartment in town. Some would later buy property of their own in Decatur or neighboring areas such as Bowie or Sunset, where the Crimbers live today. The rest remained renters, choosing instead to buy property in Brazil. But they never ventured far, and they never stopped leaning on the couple who helped them find a home in America.

A village was forming, and the Crimbers were becoming its elders. When riders went home to Brazil during the offseason, they added Paulo’s name to their bank accounts so that he could wire them money. If one needed an automobile, Paulo would buy it and take their payments. “At one time, I had like 10 trucks in my name,” he says.

In 2021, a 22-year-old rider named Amadeu Campos Silva died at a PBR event in California after getting trampled by a bull. Paulo knew the kid; he rode bulls with his father, Flavio, back in Brazil. Paulo drove out to the family home in Sunset to deliver the news to Silva’s parents and to honor Flavio’s request to dress his son’s body, because he couldn’t bear the thought of doing it himself. “The only person I trust to do it is you,” the elder Silva told Paulo. So he chose a casket, dressed Amadeu in clothes his mother picked out, and made transport arrangements.

Just as her husband took care of the riders, Maria Crimber began looking after their wives. She attends so many OB-GYN appointments and births at Medical City Decatur that “everybody at the hospital knows me.” About 10 babies have her handwriting on their birth certificates. Plenty more adults have had their visas arranged by her, too, a side service that became a career through a sports agency that she and Paulo operate for Brazilian riders. In 2023, PBR honored her with the Sharon Shoulders Award, given to women “whose work, partnership, and faith have been as integral to the sport as the athletes themselves.”

So it has gone for two decades, from Paulo’s riding career (which ended prematurely at age 28 after he broke his neck twice in one season) through a series of jobs in and around PBR, including contest judge, chute boss, translator, agent, and his latest gig, head coach of the Florida Freedom on PBR’s team circuit. Along the way, the Crimbers have compiled enough institutional knowledge that, Maria Crimber says, “when guys come here now, they have everything set up.”

Need gear? National Roper’s Supply has you covered. Dr. Joe Ables will take care of your animals, and the Dry Clean Supercenter will launder every speck of dirt out of your riding clothes. You can get a passable steak at Chili’s and a great one at Sweetie Pie’s Ribeyes, where Paulo’s picture hangs on a wall. Go to Top Tier Performance to work out. Keep your money at First State Bank; you can trust Debra Meador and Connie Redwine.

There are times when Paulo wonders if they’ve made it too easy. He estimates that no more than 10 of the Brazilian riders in Decatur speak English, because long-standing relationships and translation apps insulate them from ever needing to. It’s why Moraes resisted the pull to join his compatriots and chose to stay in Keller until his move back to Brazil. He felt it was the only way to guarantee he and his family would learn from people who aren’t like them, and vice versa. “They are in America, but they don’t learn about the culture,” Moraes says. “They have no idea what the American way of living is. … It’s not just about being there for a period of time and harvesting as much as you can and then going home.”

Those who do venture outside the Brazilian bubble have found a community eager to embrace them. “We love that they’re here,” says Meador, the bank’s assistant vice president and a lifelong Decatur resident. “They’re our neighbors. They’re our good friends. We send them cards when they get hurt, and when they succeed we send them congratulations.”

Ultimately, though, the Crimbers meet each rider where he’s at. For one thing, Paulo says, “When we do stuff, we’re thinking about the sport as a whole. Just making the sport better and bringing in more guys. Because the more guys that get out [here], they’re going to do better for PBR, for the sport that we love so much.” For another, says Maria, being so far from home means that “everybody is a big family,” and families take care of one another. The Crimbers have experienced the same support in return. When their son, John, who competes on tour with PBR, broke his back at an event in Houston earlier this year, another rider, Luciano de Castro, stayed with him in the hospital overnight. Of course they would. “He’s like my son,” de Castro’s wife told Maria.

Now a new generation of leaders is emerging within the community. None is more influential than José Vitor Leme, a soft-spoken former soccer player who didn’t start riding bulls until he was 18. Eight years ago he arrived in the United States from Ribas do Rio Pardo, about seven hours from the Paraguayan border, as the rarest commodity in sports: a bona fide mystery. Hardly anyone in the 2017 World Finals had heard of Leme before he successfully rode six consecutive bulls to snatch the World Finals Event title, the second-most prestigious prize on tour. Four years later, he was the most feared rider in the sport after becoming PBR’s second back-to-back world champion and recording the highest-scoring ride in history.

Leme’s ranch in Decatur is full of hard-earned spoils, from the sprawling Spanish-meets-​Tudor house to the fleet of white vehicles in the garage, all tucked behind an iron gate with “World” laser cut into one door and “Champion” into the other. But he also installed a sand volleyball pit for other riders to blow off steam. A soccer field, too, where about 30 Brazilians show up to play pickup games each Monday when the weather is warm. Leme regularly hosts young riders for breakfast and invites families over for barbecues. And on Wednesdays, anyone is welcome to practice on his bulls, in the arena that he built.

None of this is required of him. The latter, in particular, works against his best interests. The more reps a rider gets on a quality bull, the sharper he’ll be heading into competition, where he’ll compete for the same dollars as Leme. But Leme is not far removed from staying with de Castro as he struggled to acclimate to a foreign country, ordering off menus with pictures the way Paulo had before him.

“All of us know how hard it is to get here, and all of us had a hard time when we started,” he says. “We don’t want the next generation to suffer.” He would rather lose knowing he helped someone than win because he didn’t.

It’s what he was taught to do. “It’s how Brazilians are,” he says.

he next face of bull riding will come from Decatur, not to it. With his smooth cheeks and excitable drawl, John Crimber looks 19 going on 14: central casting to play a teenage Woody in a live-action prequel to Toy Story. Nothing about him is intimidating—until he hops on a bull. No one in PBR was surprised when John became the youngest rider ever to earn $1 million in prize money, nor that he finished runner-up for a world title in his first season, nor that he had already climbed to the top of the world rankings before the back injury sidelined him. “We had a really good idea that he was going to come in here and be what he is,” Gleason says.



He was never going to be anything else. John grew up in Decatur with the image of his father riding bulls, which was by design. Three years after Paulo retired from PBR, he mounted a brief comeback on the Brazilian circuit. He was a shell of the rider who was ranked No. 1 in the world at the time of his first neck injury, and the pain was so debilitating that he’d be out of commission for three days after each event. But the outcome was immaterial. “I wanted John to see me at least one time,” he says. “I did it for him, and that was worth it.”

John says, “I remember the last ride in Brazil—I remember throwing my hat and getting in the ring with everybody.” His father’s dream became his dream, right down to capturing the world championship Paulo never was healthy enough to win. “I’ve told myself that once I win my first one, it’s going be both of ours, not just mine,” John says. That makes his father proud, and concerned. Paulo has told his son about the bones he’s broken: his right hand, his left arm, his right collarbone, his sternum, his ribs, his knee, his foot (twice), his face (three times), his legs and ankles (all), and, of course, his neck. Moraes, John’s godfather, has shared similar warnings. “Paulo will never lie to him about bull riding,” he says. “I never lied to him about bull riding. I showed him all my scars, all my suffering. But the only thing he wanted to do was be a bull rider.”

John rode his first live animal, a sheep, at age 4. Two years later, he was on a calf. Next up were bulls, which was around the time Paulo noticed his son making “technical moves that grown men don’t do.” Kids his age had never seen anything like it. In his first year at Decatur High, John became the first high school freshman to win state and national mini bull-riding titles. The following year, he became the first repeat national champion. By the time John turned 16, he was riding full-size bulls for Bull Teams Only, an upstart promotion that allowed him to compete against adults years before he’d be eligible to join PBR on his 18th birthday. When John did join the tour, it marked the closest thing PBR has had to a LeBron James moment, the world at last being able to watch a phenom compete at the highest level after years of anticipation. Everything he’s done since has added to the air of inevitability about him. Barring serious injury, the question isn’t whether John wins a world title; it’s how many.

Still, PBR has seen special riders. What it hasn’t had is a crossover star, someone who can “transcend the PBR brand and become bigger as an individual than we are as a business,” Gleason says. Already, there’s reason to believe John could be that. For one thing, says Gottsch, the Austin Gamblers CEO, “You just stick a quarter in him and wind him up, and he is a PR machine.” Indeed, PBR’s public relations team is well versed in how John’s brand of aw-shucks charm plays on social media, which is why you can pull up TikToks of him getting his first tattoo (“This is gosh damn real! I’m doing this!”), facing his fear of heights by visiting the Empire State Building (“All right, I’m done with this place, let’s go get me a lollipop”), and roping with Trevor Brazile, the all-time great cowboy (“I taught him everything”).

Just as Gleason hoped, John is getting noticed outside rodeo, too. The NFL’s Houston Texans recently stopped by the Crimbers’ ranch to do an activation with him. He’s becoming friendly with Travis Hunter, college football’s reigning Heisman Trophy winner, whom he wants to invite to a PBR event. But the premise of John bringing the rest of the world to bull riding only holds water if he can capture every segment of the PBR audience first. And the first second-generation star from Decatur, a full-blooded Brazilian born and raised in the United States, is uniquely equipped to do it.

Walking between worlds comes with complications. John readily admits that “I feel like I’m more Brazilian than American,” and that part of why he loves Decatur, why he never wants to leave, is that “Decatur is basically a mini Brazil.” He speaks fluent Portuguese and only addresses his parents in their native language. He calls Moraes padrinho, the Portuguese word for godfather. Other older riders in the community are tio—uncle. But he also grew up on American soil, attending American schools, even played American football.

“He’s more American than Brazilian,” says Moraes. PBR agrees; the promotion’s website lists him representing the United States. That hasn’t gone over well in Brazil. Both Paulo and Maria reference an emerging trend among Brazilian fans, who have begun to draw a line between John and Cassio Dias, the man who edged him out in last year’s world championship. It does not matter that the two are friends and occasional traveling partners, or that they were each born to Brazilian parents. One is from Southern Brazil while the other is from North Texas, and so, “Cassio, he is Brazilian, and John, he is American,” says Maria. “They’re constructing it like a fight.”

Some of this is archetypal fan behavior, the tribalism that births rivalries. LeBron James needs a Steph Curry, after all. It became something different when John found himself defending his heritage during an appearance on AGRO360, a popular Brazilian podcast. “I am Brazilian,” he insisted in Portuguese. “I have Brazilian blood. My father and my mother are Brazilian, so there’s no way I can’t be Brazilian.” He paused, before deciding to throw out one final, incredulous Brasileiro!—Brazilian—as though he were being gaslit by someone telling him the sky is red.

John won’t be the last second-generation rider from Decatur who must consider his place in his father’s world. More are coming behind him, kids who speak English in school and Portuguese at home, who will come of age riding bulls on John’s ranch the way John did on José Vitor Leme’s. But odds are he will be the first one to answer the question the interviewer asked next: which flag will he hold up when he wins his first world title? Which country will he honor? That was decided long ago. John will raise both flags together, the home his family came from and the home they chose coexisting as equal parts in his story. He’ll be a proud son of Decatur, on top of the world.

This story originally appeared in the May issue of D Magazine with the headline “8 Seconds in Portuguese.” Write to [email protected].