National Finals Rodeo Draws Just Less Than 170,000 Attendance For Ten Days At Thomas & Mack Center

Tim O’Connell in action.
Photo credit: ProRodeo photo by Dan Hubbell.

By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com

Another National Finals Rodeo is in the books, with the 10-day rodeo event at Thomas & Mack Center drawing attendance of 168,289 fans for the Dec. 5-14 run.

That’s an average of 16,829 fans a night for the rodeo that began promptly at 6:45 p.m. each evening and had 120 contestants in seven rodeo events splitting $10 million in prize money.

That’s more than 325 consecutive sellouts for the Super Bowl of rodeos, sanctioned by the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA).

The National Finals Rodeo has turned into a major two-week Western and country lifestyle festival with country music acts and retail exhibitors up and down Las Vegas Boulevard from South Point to Mandalay Bay to the Mirage.


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Alan Snel

Alan Snel brings decades of sports-business reporting experience to LVSportsBiz.com. Snel covered the business side of sports for the South Florida (Fort Lauderdale) Sun-Sentinel, the Tampa Tribune and Las Vegas Review-Journal. As a city hall beat reporter, Snel also covered stadium deals in Denver and Seattle. In 2000, Snel launched a sport-business website for FoxSports.com called FoxSportsBiz.com. After reporting sports-business for the RJ, Snel wrote hard-hitting stories on the Raiders stadium for the Desert Companion magazine in Las Vegas and The Nevada Independent. Snel is also one of the top bicycle advocates in the country.