HOUSTON — Ninety days from Tuesday, Nov. 30, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo will be back! It’s slated to get going on Feb. 28 and wrap up on March 20. This year will mark 90 years of the iconic Houston event.
RodeoHouston is highlighting 90 reasons to Rodeo, but for brevity’s sake, we're sticking with nine things to be on the lookout for.
Cookoff
Let’s kick things off with the cookoff. The World’s Championship Bar-B-Que Contest pits more than 250 teams against each other to see who can serve up the best brisket, ribs, chicken and Dutch Oven dessert.
Food
On the topic of food, there are a ton of options at Rodeo. In 2019, visitors chowed on about 376,000 fried Oreos, an orchard’s worth of apples and 6,000 pounds of kettle corn.
Rides
Carnival food goes hand in hand with carnival rides and we took more than 2.5 million in 2019. The most popular rides: Skyride, Ice Jets, Crazy Coaster and La Grande XL. That last one gave about 70,000 riders a full view of Rodeo grounds.
More than 25,000 brave souls hopped on the Titan, the tallest portable ride in the U.S., and shot 17 stories up going 60 miles an hour.
Games
Let’s not forget the carnival games. They handed out more than 600,000 prizes in 2019, the most popular being basketballs, llamas and alpacas.
Rodeo
But the real competition goes down inside NRG Stadium where the world’s top rodeo athletes face off in tie-down roping, bareback riding, team roping, saddle bronc riding, steer wrestling, barrel racing and bull riding. Contestants walked away with a total of $2.17 million in 2019.
Livestock
That’s the rodeo part of Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, but this event started as a livestock show. That tradition is going strong. Junior auction sales totaled more than $17 million in 2019 with world record amounts set in 11 categories.
Scholarships
The Rodeo also ponies up scholarships for Texas students to the tune of $27 million in 2019 alone.
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AgVenture
It also offers an incredible learning experience for kids. About 61,000 of them visited AgVenture for a school tour or field trip.
Music
Last, but certainly not least, we have the music. RodeoHouston brings in some of the biggest acts in the world. In 2019, Go Tejano Day, Cardi B and Kane Brown all set attendance records.
Will more records fall come 2022 when Cody Johnson, Parker McCollum, Bun B and George Strait take the stage? We’ll have to wait and see.
What’s your favorite thing about RodeoHouston? Sound off by texting 713-526-1111.