Gov. Gary Herbert welcomes Dew Tour to Utah for 4th straight year

SALT LAKE CITY — A group that consisted of a skateboarder, a couple of business executives, two action sports filmmakers, the vice president of the Utah Jazz, the CEO of the Utah Sports Commission and Utah Gov. Gary Herbert gathered in front of a BMX/FMX dirt course to welcome the Toyota Challenge Dew Tour to Utah for the fourth straight year.

"We're thrilled to be back in Utah, which is the only home for both a winter Dew stop and a summer Dew stop," said Chris Prybylo, general manager for the Dew Tour. "This truly is the state of sports, the state of action sports. The panel up here speaks to that."

In addition to welcoming the Dew Tour, which begins competition Friday at the EnergySolutions Arena, Gregg Godfrey and Jeremy Rawle, founding partners of Godfrey Entertainment, had a big action sports announcement.

"We're a home-grown company that's been involved in action sports for about 15 years," said Godfrey. "We're 100 percent pushing the state of Utah and trying to show the world what the state has to offer in all sports."

Rawle said the duo was born and raised in Utah and planned to start production on a Nitro Circus 3D Movie that will be released worldwide sometime next year.

"We've been working a lot of years for this," he said. "We'll shoot as much as we can here and do all our post-production work here. We love it."

Jeff Robbins, president of the Utah Sports Commission, said the movie will bring $4 million to $5 million to the local economy.

The announcement comes as the Dew Tour prepares to commence its fourth competition of the summer tour. Utah owns the Dew Tour's attendance record and usually has the highest attendance of any tour stop each season.

Herbert said he was impressed with how sports in the state have evolved over the years.

"It's much more diverse," he said, then listing some interesting facts about the tour's appearance in Utah. Such as:

In 2009 Salt Lake City had the highest attendance of any stop on the Dew Tour with 57,329 fans.

It was broadcast in 50 countries and 180 million homes. On tape delay, it was broadcast into another 180 countries. "It's 58 hours of live television coverage," Herbert said.

It will bring about $7 million to the local economy this weekend.

Robbins added that after this weekend's competition the economic impact of the tour in Utah in four years will be close to $50 million.

The preliminary rounds of competition begin at 3:30 p.m. today, while the first finals will be on Friday. Exclusive to the Utah stop is an FMX competition Saturday night under the lights. The head-to-head races will occur on a course built on a parking lot donated to the event for the weekend by the LDS Church, Robbins said.

e-mail: adonaldson@desnews.com