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Jared Farley lay motionless on the dirt after his face smashed flat against Bombs Away’s horn. Thousands of fans held their breath as paramedics rushed to assess the damage. After several agonizing minutes, the dazed bull rider got to his feet and walked safely out of the fenced arena.

He wasn’t the only rider to take a beating Nov. 19 as the bulls were angry for the last night of the 2011 Professional Bull Riders Canadian Finals at Credit Union Centre.

Josh Faircloth was temporarily knocked unconscious after Ring My Bell rang his bell. Scott Schiffner was charged at and trampled by Kicking Stones and Zane Lambert’s shoulder popped out of its socket when Tree Shaker’s back legs landed hard on his chest.

The statement that bull riders are the toughest athletes on earth was reiterated over and over again as injured competitor after injured competitor managed to stand on his own two feet, battered but not broken.

“I’ve never seen a day this bad to start with. I don’t know how many guys got knocked out and run over,” said Tyler Thomson, a rider out of Black Diamond, Alta. “That’s just how things go and it’s great to have the best bull fighters in all of Canada to stick up for us.”

The bull fighters, whose sole job is to distract the bull from charging a fallen rider, found their toughest match in the bull Serendipity.

After nearly jumping out of the chute before his run, Serendipity threw his rider off and attacked everything in the ring. He tossed one fighter into the air with a flick of his horns and rammed the outrider Lee Trach and his horse, George, into the fence.

While George was unharmed, Trach broke his ankle.

Trach, whose job is to guide the bull out of the ring once a competitor has finished his run, kept working for the remaining two hours of the event.

“If you don’t finish you don’t get paid,” he joked when asked if there was someone who could have replaced him after the injury. “I kind of blocked it out and tried to do my job. It was a long two hours.”

Dusty Ephrom from Kenosee Lake, Sask., put up three strong runs and a total score of 257 to win the event and finish third in the season’s standings. He said he was unaffected by the second night’s unusually aggressive bulls.

“We deal with that all the time. I try to just keep my focus on riding the bull and not let it bother me. I had to win this event to get close [to a national title] but Tyler [Thomson] was right in there too.”

Thomson’s third-place finish at the event kept him atop the regular season standings and secured his first-ever Canadian national championship.

“I didn’t get the finals’ championship because Dusty was better than me this weekend,” said Thomson, but “It was a long season and I got the better of him throughout the year.”

Thomson, who put up 255.5 points in his three runs, stole the show with the weekend’s best single-run performance.

On the 2009 bull of the finals and Canadian champion bucking bull, Unabomber, Thomson scored 91.5.

“He went one way and back the other and I stayed with, him which was pretty awesome,” he said. “He’s a great bull. I had him when he was young and he bucked me off.”

Harve Stewart from Stephenville, Texas took second place at the event while Lambert finished second on the season.

A riding score is determined by how strong the bull bucks, how controlled the rider is and if the rider stays on for eight seconds. A rider who is bucked off before eight seconds receives no score. A rider’s total event score is the accumulated score after all runs.

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Photo: Raisa Pezderic/The Sheaf