Being ranked first on the card of all five judges at the Ford AQHYA World Championship Show is no small feat, especially when there are 62 horses in your halter class.

But that’s exactly how the first ever performance halter geldings class played out Saturday afternoon when Renee Knowlton and A Texas Revolution took home their gold trophy and world championship buckle.

“It’s incredible, not even gonna lie,” the Ionia, Iowa, youth said. “I bawled the whole victory lap.”

And she took a full lap of the ring, with her horse trotting, or loping at times, beside her.

“We just decided this year when the performance geldings came out that he was placing in the aged geldings last year so it would be a really good idea to go in the performance geldings this year, and it obviously paid off,” she said.

A Texas Revolution has his Register of Merit, which is required to compete in performance halter, in western pleasure, a class Renee tried for the first time last year when she decided to move over to showing from her barrel racing and speed event background.

“It’s different coming into this, but I like it now and I’m not leaving!” she said.

Renee tried several events this year but came to the Ford Youth World specifically for the performance halter.

“We’ve been trying to get him beefy for this show,” she said. “It’s been real hard to keep weight on him, but he likes to eat, so that helps.”

With a little extra meat on his bones, Renee’s 2002 bay gelding couldn’t be beat by his 61 opponents.

“It felt like we were there for like three hours,” Renee said. “My knees kept locking up.It was very hard to stand there. But my horse likes to go in the pen and blow up and put his ears forward and stretch his neck out, so it was fun, real fun.”