Sports in Las Vegas - Special Sports Events

Special Sports Events

Las Vegas hosts the Maaco Bowl Las Vegas, a college bowl game, around Christmas Day. The game generally pairs a Pac-12 team and a Mountain West Conference team.

In 2005–06, the city hosted ArenaBowl XIX and ArenaBowl XX at the Thomas & Mack Center, the AFL's first neutral-site title games. After two years of disappointing attendance the game was moved.

The NASCAR Sprint Cup Series has drawn up to 165,000 fans. Las Vegas also hosts a significant number of professional fights. Many of these fights (such as those in MMA's UFC) take place near downtown or on the Strip in one of the major resort/hotel/casino event centers. Mandalay Bay is frequently a top contender as a venue for the UFC. The National Finals Rodeo has drawn thousands of fans to the city since 1985, and a contract extension was signed in 2005 keeping the event in Las Vegas through 2014. The Professional Bull Riders circuit also holds its world finals in Las Vegas.

Af2, a second-tier arena football league, announced on June 24 that the ArenaCup, the league championship game, would be played in Las Vegas at the Orleans Arena on August 22, 2009. Af2 President Jerry Kurs stated that the league had serious plans to put a team in Las Vegas to play at the Orleans Arena. He said that he had "no qualms" about this even given the problems that the Las Vegas Gladiators of the Arena Football League had in the city. This turned out to be the last season of af2 due to the demise of its parent league, the original Arena Football League.

The city has become a regional hub for college basketball conference tournaments. The Mountain West Conference holds their annual tournament at the Thomas & Mack Center. Las Vegas hosted the tournament for the first seven years of the conference's existence, then the tournament returned to Las Vegas in 2009 after three years in Denver. In 2009 the West Coast Conference, which does not have a team in Nevada, moved their tournament to the Orleans Arena. The Western Athletic Conference moved their tournament to Las Vegas in 2011. The WAC also plays at the Orleans Arena. On March 14, 2012 the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that the Pacific-12 Conference is moving their conference tournament to Las Vegas in 2013, to be played at the MGM Grand Garden Arena.

In July 2009, it was announced that the USA Sevens, at the time one of the eight stops (now nine) in the annual IRB Sevens World Series rugby sevens circuit, would move to Sam Boyd Stadium from its former home of San Diego effective in 2010. Rugby sevens is a variant of rugby union that features seven players per side instead of the normal 15, and 7-minute halves (10 minutes in competition finals) instead of the normal 40 minutes. The IRB Sevens World Series is an annual series of tournaments for national sevens teams, with most of the events featuring 16 teams competing for four distinct trophies.

Las Vegas submitted a bid to host the 2020 Summer Olympics, but did so without United States Olympic Committee (USOC) consent. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) requires that a national Olympic committee nominates a city within their country followed by the submission of the bid to the IOC. The USOC stated that they would not submit a 2020 bid. Las Vegas proceeded without USOC support. The IOC reportedly rejected the bid. The day after the September 1, 2011 deadline for bidding, the IOC revealed the six applicant cities and Las Vegas was not one of them.