X Games Announces Move To Austin, TX In 2014
By Mike Dyce
On Wednesday, ESPN announced that Austin has been selected to host one of six stops on the Global X Games circuit for the next four years. Los Angeles has played host to the summer X Games for the past 11 years, but Austin, Texas will host the 2014 summer X Games beating out Chicago, Detroit and Charlotte, N.C. to replace L.A.
Austin’s inaugural X Games are set to take place May 15-18, 2014. The Circuit of The Americas (COTA) sports and entertainment venue 20 minutes southeast of downtown Austin submitted the winning the bid. The venue is 1,600 acres and opened last year. It has already hosted Formula One races, the U.S. Grand Prix and drawn 260,000 fans to it’s gates.
Austin has been known as the Live Music Capital of the World. They annually host the huge music and film festival South by South West (SXSW) as well as Austin City Limits. It is this festival spirit and feel that helped sway the X Games to the southwest.
“First of all, Austin as a city has done a terrific job over the last several years embracing big events,” ESPN’s senior vice president for programming and Global X Scott Guglielmino said. “Music, obviously, is a big piece of that, and they have a very active community and city. The other piece of it was when we got on the ground in Austin and met Bobby [Epstein, COTA’s chairman and founding partner] and his group and saw the facility, it felt right very quickly. They shared a vision in terms of growing out this event.”
“If you haven’t visited the venue, you would probably think of it as only a motorsports venue,” Bobby Epstein said. “But when you get there, you see that it’s designed to host big events. We’ve got 1,600 acres. It’s really a campus. And as part of that, there’s a tremendous park area, a beautiful amphitheater. The other components of COTA are not afterthoughts. It’s more than a racetrack.”
The majority of the competitions will be held at COTA while some will be held in downtown Austin. The capital of Texas is also home to a large university that fits the X Games target audience and demographic. But they reiterated that geography didn’t play a role in the decision process.
“We view the X Games as a global play, and we view it certainly in the U.S. as a national play,” he said. “So we felt comfortable in any of those four [finalist] markets that we were going to be able to resonate nationally either way.”
“The X Games celebrate fitness, courage and individuality — traits greatly valued by our community — and we look forward to showing the world all of the wonderful things Austin has to offer,” Austin mayor Lee Leffingwell said in a statement.