ACrimeTaWearNickers and Kaden Richard got their first major futurity championship together at the Gold Buckle’s Fall 2024 Event, winning the elite 4-&-Under Heading to roll into the new year with an extra $10,000 in lifetime earnings.
Dawn Goebel bred the big bay gelding by Nickster out of Envys Classic Crime by Crimewave, and he’s owned by Chelsea Driedger. The horse has already won $40,000 in just a few shows.
“A friend of mine last winter had been wanting me to take some horses for him, and it just didn’t work out,” Richard said. “And he sent me some videos of them showing this horse in Canada earlier this year, and I was like, ‘Dang, that’s a nice horse.’ So I reached out and I got the horse in June.”
Canadian-bred ACrimeTaWearNickers won second at the Old West Futurity in July, and they rolled into Abilene’s Old West Futurity to end 2024 on a high.
“He wanted to be kind, not real confident in the box when I got him, so I mean, I’ve been scoring a lot on him and just trying to build his confidence,” Richard explained. “I feel like I’ve gotten him more broke—just mostly stuff in the arena—but he’s come a long way from June to now.”
The horse lacked confidence in the box at first, Richard said, but by Abilene, he’d found his groove.
“I mean the first two runs, he was sleeping in there,” Richard said. “By the third one I could kind of feel his heart rate picking up, but he settled in, and never once I thought he was not going to score.”
ACrimeTaWearNickers survived a bobble by Richard in the third round to get the win, a nod to the work he’d done in the other three rounds to save the win.
“Fortunately, I had a good enough lead going into that third round that it didn’t kill me when I stubbed my toe, and the short round just was pretty good run. I had told myself before that third round that I was going to get there and take one more swing, and when I did that I kind of pulled the horse off the cow and so everything separated and I just kind of lost drive in my horse and made the saddle horn kind of move. But I got my dally, and he did everything I asked. He’s big and confident, and he never really gets out of frame so he’s easy to do whatever with the cow with, but I think he’s next level rodeo type horse one day.”
