Austin Meier Announces he is Coming Out of Retirement
By: Justin Felisko
PUEBLO, Colo. – Last Friday, Austin Meier looked at his wife, Kora, and could not contain himself.
“I’ve still got it,” Meier said with a grin as he walked over to her after riding a second practice bull at Allan Brantley’s Oklahoma ranch.
Kora, of course, laughed at her husband and said she knew what he meant.
The bull ride itself?
Well, Meier admits he knows he has a ton of rust to knock off if he wants to return to the same form that helped the now-34-year-old qualify for eight PBR World Finals, record 291 rides on the premier series and win the prestigious Iron Cowboy title in 2013.
“You watch the video, and somebody that doesn’t know what that means is going to go, ‘Ehhhh, I don’t know. You might be a little excited there,’” Meier told PBR.com with a laugh on Tuesday morning. “I told Kora; it wasn’t like because I (rode) so good or anything. It was just I felt it inside. It is that realistic. I have a lot of work to do to get even close to the talent level I was at before retiring, but it is there.
“It hasn’t disappeared or went away. I just have to re-sharpen that knife.”
Meier announced publicly on social media Tuesday that he is un-retiring and returning to competition as a professional bull rider. Meier will be competing at this coming weekend’s Mustache Bash in Prague, Oklahoma.
Meier has been training under the radar for the last few months and was originally not going to address his comeback until potentially as late as August. That changed this week when he decided he felt good enough to attempt to ride at the open bull riding event.
“I went and got on some of Thad Newell’s bulls the other day, and it was great,” Meier said. “My back didn’t hurt at all. That was the biggest thing I was nervous about. I have had three back surgeries right after retiring, basically. The second-to-last one, they fused my L3-L5, and then I had nerve abrasions done that actually you could say gave me life back.
“Before then, I was in a lot of pain and really, really crippled.”
Meier began to seriously contemplate a return to bull riding last October.
He and Kora train horses and start colts through their ranch, Bar XIX Ranch. The couple has a Western show horse team, and they specialize in hunter-jumper horses. A client of theirs wound up getting hurt before a competition in the fall, and she asked Austin to fill in for her at a show finale. Austin decided to accept the offer, “throw caution to the wind.”
He did not just take her place, though.
Meier won the event.
“Whenever I did that, I wanted to do that more, but it just reignited how good it felt to compete for something,” Meier said. “At that point, it is just that ember that kept smoldering and kept getting a little brighter and brighter. As it built, I got more anxious about talking to my wife about it. Obviously, she knew me right after some really big chaos in my life and right after getting off the drug use. She has watched how much I have trained and healed.
“I have had the itch (to return to bull riding), but I had to get everything else right. People have seen my (social media) posts and stuff about addiction. So we had been setting up a real firm foundation with that. As far as that goes, it has been great. I get a lot of people talk about it being a struggle, but in all reality for me, heck, it has been blessing after blessing. It really hasn’t been a struggle.”
Meier broke through his drug addiction a few years ago, but he more recently had to address his alcohol abuse.
“My friend, and now he is my sponsor, told me I needed to watch out for the alcohol when I was getting past the drug addictions, and I really didn’t believe him because it never really had been a problem before,” he said. “Man, it got ahold of me really quick. That is just something I had to learn and accept about my body and what others said before me. Alcohol to someone who has an addictive nature is no different than whether it would be to heroin, meth, coke, or whatever their drug is.”
Meier distinctly remembers a conversation with a doctor who told him his drinking habits were going to kill him.
That struck a chord.
“For me, it went from being able to have a beer here if you are out to all of a sudden I was waking up with the shakes, sick all the time, and it just grabbed ahold of me in a really severe way,” Meier said. “Then we started being hardheaded and trying to hide it and everything. I finally dealt with it and made a choice to save myself and my family. I started praying about it and trying to get it right. I was like, ‘We aren’t playing that game anymore.’”
Meier has now been sober for more than 10 months, beginning his dedication to sobriety on July 13 of last year.
The Kinta, Oklahoma native wants to be a resource for other rodeo athletes struggling with addiction. Meier knows firsthand how hard it can be to work towards recovery when the sport demands you living on the road for most of the year. Meier and Kora are in the ground stages of potentially launching a business tailored to creating a recovery program specialized for Western sports athletes, as well as athletes of all sports.
“The more that I dove into knowing recovery and what has helped me heal, I have seen where the holes are in a program of recovery for athletes,” Meier said. “I have talked to some guys that are going through it, and everybody has that same setback. Their lives are tied up to being on the road. That is how they support their whole family. If they get off the road to go get help, then they lose all income. I want to build a program that fills some of those holes. How do we get the program out there? How do we show that just because you went through an issue does not mean it cancels out your abilities and what you can do for the future?”
Meier was once one of the top bull riders in the world, posting four consecutive Top-6 finishes in the world standings from 2009-12. Meier’s path to success was via guts, determination, and the kind of grit you find in the oil fields or deep underground in coal mines.
Meier led the 2010 premier series with five victories and 11 Top-5 finishes. He also posted 14 Top-10 finishes and began the World Finals sitting No. 1 in the world only to finish runner-up to eventual World Champion Renato Nunes.
2010 may have been the best season of his career, but it was also the same year in which his career ultimately began to end. Meier rode Moebandy.com for 89.25 points during the PBR World Cup in Las Vegas that spring. However, he was struck in the back on his dismount and felt a tremendous pain rush through his back.
Meier began to develop chronic back pain, but he would always try to ignore and not address it. Four years later, doctors informed him that he likely had sustained a compression fracture that never healed correctly.
Now Meier believes his back can withstand the rigors of the sport following his three surgeries in retirement.
“The ultimate test was getting on those bulls the other day because you don’t know,” Meier said. “You kind of have to go for it. With the horse training and stuff, I have had some colts buck with me, and I have been bucked off a few times since getting my back fixed, and I never have had any issues with any of that. This wasn’t a completely blind decision.”
Meier is not going to push things too fast, either. Fans will not see him just stepping foot inside a PBR arena cold turkey. Instead, it will be a slow, methodical approach as Meier continues to ensure he is physically ready for the rankest bulls in the world.
So, when could fans potentially see Meier once again at a PBR-sanctioned event?
“Being realistic about it, it would probably be more of like 2022 for bigger events,” Meier said. “Right now, my main focus is getting the rust knocked off. I want to take it and go as far as I can. A lot of that depends on staying healthy and seeing how fast the rust gets knocked off. I am going to try and work it out and start getting on bulls hopefully every week to knock that rust off.
“My wife and I have kind of set a three-month plan. If after three months it is not going anywhere, then we need to get back to doing what we are doing outside of the arena.”
Follow Justin Felisko on Twitter @jfelisko
Photo courtesy of Andy Watson/Bull Stock Media
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