Skateboarder Mathieu “Gumbie” Therres can?t leave his home in Patterson Park without being surrounded by action sports.
“You?ll walk into a store and get a candy bar and see a little bear skateboarding,” the 22-year-old Baltimore resident said. “Or, you go to McDonald?s and get food and the bag will have a skateboarder on it. You look up at a billboard and seea skateboarder on it, you go down to the science center and they have a giant picture of a skateboarder doing an invert.”
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Therres? experiences only reinforce action sports are becoming a bigger and bigger draw for fans not only in America, but worldwide. The AST Dew Tour, which has five stops across the country, including Baltimore, Cleveland, Portland, Ore., Salt Lake City and Orlando, Fla., is the most watched and attended action sports event in the world.
The tour drew about 300,000 fans last year, including 55,000 in Baltimore, and an average of about 41 million viewers tuned to NBC and USA to watch the competition in each of its first three years. And with last year?s event in Charm City affected by rain, this year?s Panasonic Open, which started Thursday and runs through Sunday at the Camden Yards Sports Complex, figures to draw an even larger crowd.
“The Dew Tour is more in line with traditionalsports in United States as it has an overall champion and five stops,” Jamie Bestwick, the three-time defending Dew Cup BMX champ, said. “I think the more of these tours that we do get, obviously we build these fans up. NASCAR and the NFL and hockey have all been around for years and years and years and they have been through their hard times where the fans weren?t as big as they are now. But that paid dividends for them and you just look at any major game on TV now and it?s sellout crowds.”
The Dew Tour doesn?t have the marketing machine behind it like the X Games has in ESPN and ABC, but has plenty of advantages to grow its brand. NBC broadcasts the tour to more than 100 countries in 23 languages and in April, the AST Dew Tour held an event in China. In May, MTV Networks Music Group, which has the highest-rated cable network for the coveted 12 to 24 year-old audience, got in on the act. The company that has more than 150 channels worldwide signed a partnership with the tour, nearly doubling its annual television schedule with expected programming for MTV and MTV2.
At the Olympics in Beijing this August, BMX bicycle racing will be an event for the first time in the Games? 116-year history, but there are no plans to add skateboarding or motocross in the future.
The Dew Tour will piggyback off the event?s expected popularity by running the first post-Olympic BMX super cross race at its stop in Salt Lake City in September.
In December through February, the Dew Tour is slated to hold its first three-stop Winter AST Dew Tour ? focusing on snowboarding and skiing ? to sustain the momentum created by the summer and fall seasons.
“In the past with different events we used to sit here chopping wood with hammers and nails for three weeks,” said Chris Prybylo, vice president of events for the Dew Tour. “But now we have created a unique system where we tour around the country and configure it each time. Not only do we take it around the county, we take it around the world.”
