Freestyle Kings Live launch 2024 McDonald Jones Stadium event

The Newcastle leg on March 9 will be the "jewel in the crown" of the Freestyle Kings tour, which will make nine stops on the east coast, and comes after the event was staged at Newcastle Entertainment Centre in 2021.

"We just sold out the indoor arenas across Australia," TEG Sport event organiser Nathan Brown said.

"This show is now too big for indoors so being in the premium stadiums allows the guys to jump higher, jump further and do the biggest tricks that aren't possible indoor.

"I think that correlating it directly back to what happened here at the entertainment centre in 2021, you can't even compare it. Double the amount of people will be here.

"Newcastle is just a hub for action sports and dirt bikes in particular. This was the first show we booked and we built the whole tour around that because this is the biggest stop."

If all goes to plan, Mr Brown said there will be "multiple world records, double backflips, front flips" and more.

"We like to call it organised chaos," he said. "We kind of have a plan of what the show should look like, but working with action sports athletes, they sometimes go off script. That's how the sport was born because they didn't like conforming to the rules of racing.

"It's led by Robbie Maddison, who is known around the world as the modern day Evel Knievel. He hasn't done a show in Newcastle for a long, long time and he's an absolute fan favorite.

"He has his 12-year-old son jump in the show, 55-feet long 30-feet in the air.

"You can literally hear the gasps of the mums and dads in the crowd because they know that their kid is going to go home and say 'I want to do that'.

"We've got riders from Perth, the Gold Coast, local rider [Michael] Chucky Norris."

Norris, who grew up in Cameron Park, said he was "over the moon" when he heard the tour was headed to Newcastle.

"Coming back to my home town, in front of heaps of friends, family with the Supercross is amazing," he said.

"We start with quite little tricks and then towards the end of the show, the ramps go higher, we get so much more hang time. It's awesome. It's just two hours of an adrenaline-packed show."

Mr Brown said organising the event was a "nine-month process".

"We have a traveling crew of 35 people back from as far as North America and then all over Australia," he said.

"The show set-up is like nothing that's been seen in Australia before because we have a take off dirt bike jump and a return dirt bike jump which is not traditionally what you can do in the indoor arenas."

But despite the extensive set-up, Mr Brown assured the stadium pitch would be protected. A supercross event at the stadium in November 2022 led to a dispute between stadium owner Venues NSW and AUSX Events over alleged damage to the grass.

"The process is a little bit different in the sense that all their ramps are inflatable, they're in and out really quickly," McDonald Jones Stadium manager Dean Mantle said.

"So there isn't the delay that we had with the supercross with the field being covered up. So there's really minimal risk to this event.

"We put a whole bunch of turf protection because we know how the hallowed turf of McDonald Jones Stadium has to be respected," Mr Brown said.

"We have a fiberglass flooring system that goes down on the grass the morning of the show and only sits for 15 hours to allow the turf to to breathe and grow.

"This show goes to all the best stadiums around the world so we've got a pretty strong system knowing that if we that if we damage one turf, word will get around and we won't be welcome back."

About 15,000 attended last year's supercross event, and Mr Mantle said he expected similar numbers for the freestyle event.

"It was hugely popular, we drew people from as far as the North Coast, Mid North Coast right up to the border," Mr Mantle said.

"Likewise when Nitro Circus has been here in the past, it was hugely popular."

Some fans from NDIS provider Lavender Plan Management were on hand at the stadium to launch the event on September 6, including Scott Tindall who says he has been a motorsport fan for 10 years.

He rides a motorbike around on his farm, and says he can't wait to see the bikes in action next year.

Tickets go on sale in October.

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