Just a couple of months removed from the incredible winter season of Monster Jam on the North American continent a fleet of the world’s most powerful trucks and a bevy of top Monster Jam teams now head across the Atlantic Ocean for the beginning of the 2009 Monster Jam World Tour in Europe with stadium events scheduled over the next three weekends.
As it was in 2008, this year’s European Tour is broken into two halves. The spring segment begins with a brand new Monster Jam event in Chorzow, Poland, followed by returns to a couple of cities that have hosted wildly successful events in recent years: Cardiff, Wales, and Gothenburg, Sweden. The remaining stops in Europe, which includes arguably the most successful Euro event year after year in Arnhem, Holland, and the two longest running Monster Jam Europe sites in Stockholm, Sweden, and Helsinki, Finland, will be on tap later this fall.
Starting this year’s European run is the sport’s inaugural event at the National Stadium of Poland, Stadion Slaski in Chrozow. This huge venue stays busy throughout the year with soccer matches and even speedway motorcycle racing. Now this beautiful facility, originally built in 1956, gets set to host the superstars of Monster Jam Saturday night for the first time. A star-studded line-up of the sport’s best look forward to another opportunity to be a part of the growth of the sport into a new country and the excitement is running high, both for the fans anticipating their first chance to see Monster Jam live and for the competitors looking forward to bringing the thrills of Monster Jam to a brand new audience.
While the work schedules are intense for the crew on the Europe trek there is always at least a little time to explore in each country on the schedule. The trip to Poland will include a special, unique opportunity for all those on the tour who will have the chance to visit the World War II Auschwitz concentration camps after Saturday night’s event.
From there it’s a lengthy trip back across the continent for the second leg of this year’s tour, our return to spacious Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, Wales. The National Stadium of Wales is an ultra modern facility, the first retractable roof stadium ever built in the United Kingdom. The venue sports a natural grass surface for its soccer events that is completely removed for Monster Jam. This will be the third consecutive year that Monster Jam has been contested on this huge floor. It’s such a spacious layout that Millennium Stadium lends itself to spectacular moves on a massive freestyle course, and a couple of years ago Don Frankish drove Jurassic Attack on the ragged edge, one of the veteran’s best runs ever. He earned that season’s Save of the Year award in Cardiff, a testament to how the huge floor of that dome allows for big Wow moments, and I expect many more on this year’s stop in Wales.
The final stop on the first portion of this year’s Euro series is in one of my personal favorite places, Ullevi Stadium in Gothenburg, Sweden. The National Stadium of Sweden is, appropriately, the country’s largest sports venue and was originally opened for World Cup soccer competition in 1958. Monster Jam debuted here in 2007 and set a one day European Tour attendance record with two phenomenal shows, to this date the only Monster Jam World tour events that have been televised as part of the Monster Jam on Speed TV program. Most fans will remember that first trip to the beautiful city in southwest Sweden for Tom Meents’ back flip, albeit not a completely clean one, in Maximum Destruction. The Swedish fans are amazing and they have shown that they love Monster Jam, so this should be another huge event in Gothenburg. One final note about Ullevi Stadium. I’m told by our Monster Jam World Tour execs that Ullevi Stadium has one of the largest solar power plants that is located on top of the stadium’s luxury boxes.
Make sure you check on line often here at Monster Jam online over the next three weeks as this site will be your exclusive home to all the latest info, pictures, and results from Monster Jam’s return to Europe. And in the future American fans will be able to see some of the action as the Monster Jam on Speed television team will be sending a crew to Poland to cover the action there, so at least some of that action will coming to the Speed TV viewing audience.
