Denver will host Europe’s largest action sports festival over Labor Day weekend, drawing an expected 20,000 spectators and athletes to two BMX and skateboarding venues in the city.
The International Festival of Extreme Sports, or FISE World Series, is a 19-year-old traveling carnival of extreme sports that regularly lures the best athletes in the world as well as a half million people to each of a series of events in Europe and Asia.
FISE on Wednesday announced Denver as its first American host. The event is scheduled for Sept 3-5.
“This will be an event like no one in America has ever seen. It will change the game of action sports in this country,” said Chris Olivier, a Denver BMX legend whose PlusSize BMX event production team organized the Denver bid.
Olivier was in Paris on Thursday, the day after the ballyhooed, multilingual announcement of the 2016 FISE World Tour, which includes skateboarding, BMX, inline skating and wakeboarding contests in France, Croatia, Canada and China.
The locations for the free events in Denver have yet to be announced.
When , they pedaled B-Cycles through downtown, surveying Civic Center, Sculpture Park, the open fields of Metropolitan State University and the parking lots of the Pepsi Center as potential venues for contests and concerts.
Olivier said organizers were in the process of securing agreements for two downtown locations and could not discuss anything specific.
Visit Denver, which hosts and supports most large-scale events in the city, traditionally takes year to plan big events. This is very short notice for organizing a multi-venue festival that promoters say will draw 20,000 to 30,000 spectators.
The 2012 NCAA Women’s Final Four, which was heavily publicized years in advance by Visit Denver, drew .
In July, Matt Payne, the executive director of Visit Denver’s Denver Sports Commission, said little about the FISE plan, noting “there is still much diligence to be done with promoters.”
On Thursday, Payne said even less, noting he was busy “getting a big bid out the door.”
“This is one where they wanted to put it on the 2016 calendar and we think we can make it work,” Payne said, explaining that the original plan “has changed and altered.”
The FISE World Series weekend in Denver will include the launch of the Union Cycliste Internationale’s BMX Freestyle Park World Cup, part of the cycling union’s push to develop more youth-oriented disciplines. UCI last May said that FISE’s 2016 World Series would host its latest cycling discipline, which features acrobatic athletes spinning and jumping their bikes through an urban-style course of jumps and rails.
“I think the future is looking very, very bright indeed for this exciting part of cycling,” said UCI president Brian Cookson at
BMX freestyle park is tracking toward inclusion in the Summer Olympics, with a world championship planned for next year and inclusion in the Youth Olympics in Argentina in 2018.
And unlike any other invite-only U.S. action sports contest, all FISE events are open to any athlete.
“So amateur riders will get to ride alongside the pros and not only get to showcase what they have but actually build their skills and build up their sports at the same time,” Olivier said.
French BMX champion Alex Jumelin, 38, grew up watching U.S. riders as icons of his sport and has competed in FISE in each of the last 19 years, winning the BMX flatland competition in his home country in 2015. Competing in the U.S., he said, “will be very special to me because it is where BMX was born.”
The short timeline doesn’t daunt organizers. Looking at the 2005 and 2006 Dew Tour success at the Pepsi Center, as well as the record crowds that flock to the Winter X Games in Aspen every year, they know there is support among spectators.
“FISE has this down pat,” said Olivier, noting the outfit’s track record for hosting huge annual contests across several continents. “They know how to get this done. FISE is pushing our sports the hardest and developing the world’s best riders. The U.S. is the birthplace of BMX and this is sort of a homecoming that is a long time coming.”
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374, jblevins@denverpost.com or @jasonblevins
