12/05/2026
John Quintana didn’t ride bulls to survive. He rode them to conquer them.
Quiet, fearless, and intensely competitive, Quintana became one of the rankest bull riders of rodeo’s golden era — a cowboy whose rides were so explosive they rewrote the record books.
In the early 1970s, while competing against legends like Larry Mahan and Phil Lyne, Quintana rose to the very top of professional rodeo by capturing the 1972 World Championship in bull riding.
But championships alone don’t fully tell his story.
John Quintana chased greatness every time he nodded his head.
In 1971, he stunned the rodeo world in Gladewater, Texas, with a then world-record 94-point ride aboard Billy Minick Rodeo Company’s V61. Just three years later, he shattered the mark again with an electrifying 96-point ride at the famous Helldorado Days Rodeo in Las Vegas. And back then, scores like that felt almost mythical.
Quintana qualified for six consecutive National Finals Rodeos from 1969 through 1974 and collected checks in 18 separate rounds. Yet despite all the success, he remained famously quiet and intensely driven.
His philosophy was simple: If the bull wasn’t good enough to win first, he wasn’t interested in second or third. That attitude made him dangerous every single night. But John Quintana’s story didn’t end in the rodeo arena.
In the 1980s, he headed to Australia and built something even larger than his rodeo reputation — a massive cattle empire spanning more than 2.5 million acres in the Northern Territory with roughly 80,000 head of cattle.
Cowboy. Champion. Cattleman. Adventurer. He lived large because ordinary was never going to fit a man like John Quintana.
His remarkable life came to a tragic end in 2013 when the plane he was piloting crashed shortly after takeoff in Queensland, Australia. But long before that final flight, John Quintana had already secured his place among rodeo’s most unforgettable legends.
SOURCE: PRORODEO HALL OF FAME
PHOTO: PRORODEO HALL OF FAME
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