The 136th Rose Parade will begin at 8 a.m. PST on New Year’s Day and wind 3.5 miles through the streets of Pasadena in front of an expected crowd of hundreds of thousands.
The show will air on networks including ABC, NBC, KTLA and Univision, and air on platforms including YouTube, Fubo and Pluto TV.
Celebrating this year’s parade theme of “The Best Day Ever,” dozens of floats, marching bands and equestrian teams will make their way down Colorado Boulevard in the heart of Old Pasadena. The parade will be followed by the Rose Bowl game between the Oregon Ducks and the Ohio State Buckeyes.
The show will begin hours after a truck driver plowed into a crowd in New Orleans’ French Quarter, killing at least 10 people and injuring at least 30 in a suspected terrorist attack.
A man drove into the crowd around 3:15 a.m. Wednesday on Bourbon Street, which was bustling with New Year’s Eve revelers and visitors downtown for the Sugar Bowl college football game. New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said the driver “was determined to cause the carnage and damage he caused.”
Lisa Derderian, spokeswoman for the city of Pasadena, told The Times early Wednesday that the Rose Parade route is lined with “strong traffic barriers” and that there are more than 1,000 law enforcement officers in the city.
“This is a great corporate event, and it has been for many years, so we have state, county, state and city resources that have been in Pasadena for several days and will stay until the end of the show and the game tonight. ,” said Derderian.
“We want to assure the public that we have all the protection measures in place,” he added. “We hope that we are ready for this show and this game, but with that in mind, we sympathize with the situation in Louisiana with what they are going through.”
During last year’s Rose Parade, a woman crashed her car into one of the barriers along Colorado Boulevard, Derderian said.
“He could have easily injured or killed people,” Derderian said. “Once he got sick, he was told not to cross the line, he didn’t listen, he revved the engine, and continued driving. The barriers stopped him.”
The grand marshal of this year’s Rose Parade is Billie Jean King, a tennis and gender equality activist who won 20 Wimbledon titles, 39 Grand Slam titles, and drew an audience of 90 million people worldwide for the show on television in 1973 which was called “Battle of the Sexes” which was in 1973. defeated former national tennis champion Bobby Riggs.
When he was announced as the show’s executive director in October, King, a Long Beach native, said it was “like a dream come true.”
“When I was a kid, the annual Roses Parade was a big deal in our house,” said King, 81. “We used to talk about it all year. … We looked forward to it every year.”
The 2021 Rose Parade has been canceled for the first time since World War II due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It returned to a smaller crowd in 2022, but attendance has been growing over the years.
Candy Carlson, a spokeswoman for the Tournament of Roses, said in a statement to The Times that about 750,000 people are expected to follow the route in 2024, compared to about 700,000 in 2022, marking a “strong return” to pre-pandemic crowd sizes.
“The steady increase in attendance underscores the enduring appeal of the Rose Parade and the joy it brings to our community and visitors from around the world,” he said. “We hope that this year’s show will continue to attract an enthusiastic and engaged audience.”
The Rose Bowl, now the quarterfinal of the College Football Playoff, will be televised nationally on ESPN, with pregame festivities beginning at 1pm PST and kickoff scheduled for 2pm.
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