2024 closed out with Dalton Rakestraw of Fontana having put his city on the map with his fifth place finish in the 2024 World Horseshoe Pitching Championships held at the
Toyota Center in Tri-Cities Washington from July 29 to August 4.
Rakestraw had the fifth most impressive sustained performance overall with a percentage of 65.90. He had a single game score of 82.35 percent against Nathan Williams, another competitor from California, the seventh-place finisher.
Throughout the championship round, Rakestraw racked up a record of ten wins and five losses, competing against the cream of the world’s horseshoe pitchers.
Rakestraw, like six of the 16 others in the finals for the championship, pitched over his incoming average.
In the Class A preliminary tournament to get to the championship round, Rakestraw threw 62.99 percent, finishing seventh, with a record of 8 wins out of 15 games. Ahead of him in the Class A competition in descending order were first place finisher Dan Watson, Alan Francis, Cal Beaudoin, Austin Bailey, Matt Fuller and Ben Webb. Behind him, again in descending order, were eighth place finisher Terry Hudson, Nathan Williams, Joseph Smith, Don Davis, Bobby Bartell, Rick Bermingham, Jeff Finke, Tom Liles and Gary Currier.
In the championship round, perennial and 28-time reigning world champion Alan Francis, of Ohio, went undefeated, scoring an unfathomable 100 percent – 100 ringers out of 100 throws, in a game against Finke, of Texas. A ringer, which resounds with a metal-against-metal ring, is recorded when the entirety of the horseshoe surrounds the target stake.
The final standings in the championship round were Alan Francis, Dan Watson, Cal Beaudoin, Austin Bailey, Matt Fuller, Dalton Rakestraw, Nathan Williams, Ben Webb, Terry Hudson, Josh Olson, Don Davis, Joseph Smith, Foster Kenton, Jr., Rick Bermingham, Bobby Bartell and Jeff Finke.
Rakestraw claimed a $500 prize for his fifth place finish, which was not enough to offset the cost of traveling to the world championship competition and his board while he was there. While horseshoe pitching does not have the same cachet and following of many other national and international sports, it requires skill, strength and eye-hand coordination that are as demanding or more so as in any other sport.
This was the finest tournament showing of Rakeshaw’s 19-year career as a competitive horseshoe pitcher.
Rakeshaw is among a very limited universe of highly skilled horseshoe pitchers believed to have an outside chance of dethroning Francis, who is universally accepted as the greatest horseshoe pitcher ever, someone who has been lauded by the New York Times as the “the most dominant athlete in any sport in the country.”
In the championship round, Francis averaged, as he has consistently for the last decade-and-a-half, over 90 percent ringers.
With Rakestraw having demonstrated an ability to reach beyond 80 percent in some single games, he now needs to up his performance to make a steady and constant show of that accuracy to stand in the elite company of Francis and Watson, Francis’s current closest rival. Francis has a lifetime average of 85.36.
Rakestraw was introduced to horseshoe pitching as a child by his grandfather.
He was the vice president of the National Horseshoe Pitchers Association from 2019 to 2022.
Rakestraw is employed as a cardiac arrhythmia technician with AMN Healthcare of San Diego.