This 24-Year-Old Jockey Is Blazing A Trail For Women In An Extreme And Perilous Sport

Summer is winding down and Logan Red Crow is mounting her horse in Enoch, Alta. for one of her final races of the 2024 season. The flag drops, and she launches like lightning—reaching 70 kilometres per hour in mere seconds. There’s no saddle, no helmet, only reins, and the crowd is roaring in anticipation.

Suddenly, Red Crow leaps off her horse mid-gallop, landing on the soft red dirt track with practiced instinct, while an attendant (in racing terms, a mugger) catches the horse as it slows down. Within a fraction of a second, Red Crow has already jumped onto her second horse, who is being held by the team setter and is raring to go. 

It’s all a blur. “It happens so fast sometimes, I black out,” Red Crow says with
a laugh. 

After one final, thunderous lap, she throws up her whipstick as she crosses the finish line at the River Cree Cup. Another first-place win is under her belt. 

“There were girls from the States who came out, and I just wanted to win that one,” she recalls. “I was excited.” 

For the 24-year-old Blackfoot relay racer from Siksika Nation in southern Alberta, this wasn’t just another win; it’s a testament to the path she is carving for women in a sport that, until recently, had little space for them in Canada.

Indian Relay, as it has long been called, is not your average horse race: it’s raw, demanding and unforgiving. It’s also a thrill to watch. The women’s relay is a two-lap race on a soft dirt track, with the rider changing horses as quickly as possible halfway through. Watching, you can’t help but admire the speed and strength of the horses as they kick up dust on the track. You might even find yourself holding your breath, and then letting out a sigh of relief, as the riders make a smooth transition from one horse to another.

Relay racing can be traced back 300 years, when it began as an all-out recreational sport—horses thundering across the plains, winner taking home the pot. It has since transformed into a sanctioned, organized, high-stakes event, first gaining mainstream popularity in the early 1900s, when it became a regular feature of tribal fairs. It has been a staple on the United States rodeo circuit for decades, but only recently gained recognition in Canada at events such as the Calgary Stampede. It’s popular, and it’s lucrative. These days, relay teams—consisting of a rider, a mugger, holders (people who set up horses for the next lap) and the horses themselves—compete for six-figure purses. But for Red Crow, it’s never been about the money. “Since I was very, very young, when I first saw the relays, I just wanted to do it,” she says. 

Red Crow was raised on her grandparents’ ranch. She had an especially close relationship with her late grandmother, Christine Big Snake, who was a renowned horsewoman and got the family their first herd of horses. Her father, Allison Red Crow, kept the racing tradition alive after her grandfather, a bareback rider in his own day, passed away.

While other kids were riding bikes around cul-de-sacs, Red Crow—who grew up with her brother, 32-year-old Racey Big Snake, and two cousins whom she calls brothers, Mark and Cody Big Tobacco—was brushing down horses, picking their hooves clean and learning how to read their moods. “They’re kind of like us humans,” Red Crow says. She was nicknamed “Mighty Mouse” by her father because even back then she could climb up a horse “faster than a mouse.”

She had always wanted to race, but at first Allison forbade it; he thought it was too dangerous for her. Eventually, Red Crow’s mother, Jayme Big Snake, set the gears in motion. Red Crow was 15 at the time, and helping her dad exercise the horses for his relay team, Old Sun, named after their ancestor, a former Siksika chief.

“My mom asked me if I wanted to race. And that’s when the dynamic shifted,” she recalls. She had to learn how to pick up speed while riding, to ride without a saddle—and, if she wanted to race relay one day, how to quickly and safely jump off and back on to the horses. While she had worked around horses most of her life, this aspect of training was new.

Because there were no women’s relays at that time, she started in single-lap ladies’ races. These races, where riders have the option to use a saddle or sidesaddle, couldn’t be more different from the chaotic excitement of relay. 

Red Crow’s first race was in Brocket, Alta., in 2015, when she was 15. She opted to use a saddle, and that first race was fierce—the competition environment was unlike anything she’d experienced with her horses on the ranch. She quickly came to love the adrenaline rush, and her relationship with horses grew even closer over the next few years.

In 2019, womens’s relay racing debuted south of the border. Red Crow competed in the first ladies’ relay finals at the Championship of Champions in Walla Walla, Wash., where she placed seventh out of 10 riders. For Red Crow, it was a dream come true to finally compete in a relay.

She had been training with the Old Sun team, and shortly afterwards started her own ladies’ team under the same name, even though there was no women’s division in Canada—they’d cross into the U.S. to race.

But that wasn’t enough. She wanted to see women’s relay at home. So Red Crow started to connect with other women riders in Canada, reaching out via Facebook or approaching them in the barn before events to ask if they’d be interested in racing relay—and if they’d be interested in joining her team. She knocked on doors and asked to borrow extra horses to make it happen. She even made the jerseys for her team, basing the design off of her grandma’s beading patterns. Two years after Red Crow’s first relay race in the States, the first official women’s relay in Canada ran on the Enoch Cree Nation Reserve in 2021—a milestone she helped create.

Others are helping the movement, too, like Kimberly Big Crow, a relay coordinator who lives in Lethbridge, Alta., and is organizing at least eight Indian Relay shows across Alberta and Saskatchewan in 2025. These events, once just sporting exhibitions, are being reshaped to honour Indigenous culture, creating safe spaces for community members and keeping the riders in the spotlight. For races that happen off of First Nations reserves, Big Crow asks the host venue to invite an elder from their local Indigenous community to bless the land to keep participants and the audience safe. She also encourages all participating athletes to live a healthy lifestyle, which includes going substance-free. 

Big Crow says that Indian relay is growing in Canada. In 2019, there were about 20 teams in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Today, there are almost twice as many, with four to five new teams this year alone. Only three Canadian teams are women-only. “I’ll keep building it, because this sport deserves a spotlight,” says Red Crow, “and our people deserve to shine.” The impact that she’s having on relay racing is undeniable. “She’s a role model within our Indigenous female community,” says Big Crow. “I’ll always admire her strength, and she’s just so humble.” 

In 2021, Red Crow became the first woman to race relay at the Calgary Stampede when she competed with her dad’s team in the men’s race. It was a testament to all her hard work: her father, once hesitant to have his daughter involved in the sport, acknowledged all the effort she’d put in. She wore her grandma’s moccasins for the occasion. On race day, the commentators at the Stampede kept referring to Red Crow as “him,” a reflection of how uncommon it was for a woman to be participating. But that didn’t matter to Red Crow; she had arrived. One of the biggest rodeo stages in the world, and she was galloping across it like she belonged. Because she did.

“When I look back at my whole racing career, I was just a little kid with a dream to do this. And it happened,” Red Crow says. 

These days, Red Crow trains like it’s her job, in between full-time nursing studies at the University of Calgary. Her days often start at 5 or 6 a.m. and sometimes don’t end until after the sun goes down. For training, Red Crow focuses on strength work, long-distance running for cardio endurance and endless hours on horseback. Her horses have a regimen, too: They do hill work (walking up big hills to improve strength and balance) in the valley near her home, conditioning runs on the track and constant, careful transition practice to make sure that pivotal moment in relays is safe. 

Classes, clinicals and lectures are balanced with racing, training and travelling. She’s aiming to graduate in 2027, though right now, with the sun warming the spring thaw and her horses restless in the paddock, school has a hard time competing. Red Crow is thinking about becoming an exercise rider, keeping racehorses fit and ready for races by riding them for workouts, or maybe even becoming a professional jockey someday. The horizon keeps stretching out, and she keeps leaning in.

“It’s fun,” she says. “I like going fast.”