Rodeo Royal was a long-running championship rodeo held at the Stampede Corral on Stampede Park, historically running six days in mid-March each year.
About
Rodeo Royal drew top Canadian rodeo competitors for a six-day spring championship at the Stampede Corral. Its event champions qualified for the Calgary Stampede rodeo and the Canadian Finals Rodeo, which made it one of the bigger stops on the Canadian rodeo circuit. A 1977 Stampede annual report records 29,394 fans across the six days. In 2008 the Calgary Stampede moved it to October as the season-ending event of the Canadian Rodeo Tour.
A rodeo competitor’s oral history says the first Calgary Rodeo Royal was held in 1970, though a Stampede history puts the first one in 1972, when it drew over 18,000 visitors. No editions are documented after the October 2008 fall edition, and the Stampede Corral was demolished in early 2021. The last edition we could confirm was in 2008, and nothing has been announced since.