Tracey Knievel: The Knievel Who Chose the Ground Over the Ramp

Here’s the thing nobody talks about when they talk about Evel Knievel. They talk about the jumps. The crashes. The cape. The broken bones — all 433 of them, allegedly. They talk about Caesars Palace and Snake River Canyon and Wembley Stadium.

They do not talk about his daughter, who quietly ran the whole show after he died.

That’s Tracey Knievel. And she might actually be the most interesting person in that entire family.

Quick Bio

Detail	Info
Full Name	Tracey Lynn Knievel
Born	Early 1960s, Butte, Montana
Parents	Evel Knievel (Robert Craig Knievel) & Linda Bork
Siblings	Kelly Knievel, Robbie Knievel (d. Jan 2023), Alicia Knievel
Spouse	Mitchell Kent McCloud (married June 1986)
Wedding Venue	First Baptist Church, Butte, Montana
Nationality	American
Profession	Business executive; President of K&K Promotions
Education	Butte High School alumna
Public Roles	Legacy guardian, brand manager, occasional documentary subject
Siblings’ Path	Brothers pursued stunts; Tracey did not

The Girl on the Side of the Ramp

Imagine your dad is literally on the evening news every few weeks. Not because he got a promotion. Because he just launched himself over thirteen buses at Wembley Stadium and the whole country held its breath.

That was Tracey Knievel’s childhood.

She was born in Butte, Montana — a rough, worn-in mining city that shaped the whole Knievel mythology. Butte isn’t glamorous. It’s the kind of place that puts steel in your spine, and it clearly did that for the whole family. Her father Robert Craig Knievel, who became “Evel” somewhere between a criminal record and a motorcycle ramp, went from driving around that city with basically nothing to becoming one of the most recognizable humans on the planet.

And his kids watched every minute of it.

Tracey grew up as the oldest of four. Kelly came next, then Robbie, then Alicia. The family dynamic you’d expect — boys got pulled toward the machines, the stunts, the fire walls and the jump ramps. Tracey and Alicia were the quiet observers. But “quiet” doesn’t mean irrelevant. Not even close.

By the early 1970s, Evel Knievel was operating at a level that’s hard to describe now. He wasn’t just a performer. He was merchandise, a TV event, a Halloween costume, a lunchbox, a toy. The Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle toy that Ideal released in 1973 — with the little action figure in the red-white-and-blue jumpsuit you could launch off a wind-up ramp — sold like nothing else on the market. The family went from a trailer to a mansion. Life changed fast.

For Tracey, that meant growing up inside one of the strangest fishbowls in American pop culture.

What “Normal” Looks Like When Dad’s on Live TV

There was no separating the personal from the professional in the Knievel household. That’s not a criticism — it’s just physics. When your father’s job involves potentially dying in front of a hundred thousand people, home life doesn’t feel like a sanctuary. It feels like the calm between acts.

Tracey has described — in the rare moments she’s spoken publicly — a childhood defined by travel. Hotel rooms. Tour buses. Stunt shows. Living in the orbit of an event machine. While her mother Linda provided the stability, Evel provided the spectacle. Sometimes both were exhausting.

The thing people miss when they romanticize the Knievel story is that Linda Knievel was a saint. She married this man in 1959. She stayed through more than thirty years of chaos, infidelity, career highs and devastating crashes. She was there for the Caesars Palace disaster in 1967 — that famous crash that shattered his pelvis and femur and put him in a coma for twenty-nine days. She held the family together when Evel was literally hospitalized and when he was emotionally elsewhere, which was often.

Tracey absorbed that. She watched her mother do the invisible work.

And at some point, both Tracey and Linda turned deeply toward their faith. They served as missionaries together. This is actually cited in Evel’s obituary as something that drove a wedge between him and Linda — he complained she had become “unbearably religious.” He cited it when explaining their eventual divorce in 1997.

That tells you a lot about the Knievel marriage. And it tells you a lot about Tracey — who, in the middle of all the noise and spectacle, found something quieter to anchor herself to.

The Lawyer Who Never Went to Law School

Fast forward past the chaos. Past the stunts, the 1974 Snake River Canyon disaster, the public disintegration of Evel’s health in his later years. Tracey went to Butte High School. She married Mitchell Kent McCloud in June 1986, right there at home — First Baptist Church, Butte, Montana. Her mother Linda stood as matron of honor.

That’s a woman who knew where she belonged.

While her brother Robbie was out there building his own career — jumping the Caesars Palace fountains that their dad had failed to clear back in 1967, earning the nickname Kaptain Robbie Knievel, racking up 300-plus jumps and 20 world records — Tracey built something entirely different.

She became the executive.

K&K Promotions is the Las Vegas-based company that controls the intellectual property empire surrounding Evel Knievel’s name and image. The trademarks. The licensing rights. The brand. Tracey serves as president of the organization, working alongside her brother Kelly who holds the publicity rights.

Let that sink in for a second. Every time someone makes an Evel Knievel toy, every time a movie references his image, every time a theme park ride echoes his aesthetic — there’s a legal infrastructure around that. And Tracey is at the helm.

People don’t think of “celebrity legacy management” as a hard job. It absolutely is. You’re running interference between a mythologized dead man and a world full of corporations that would love to use his image for free.

The Disney Fight. The Kanye Fight. Yes, Both.

Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting.

When Toy Story 4 dropped in 2019, the new character Duke Caboom immediately raised eyebrows. Voiced by Keanu Reeves — which, sure — Duke Caboom was a 1970s motorcycle-riding toy stuntman in a white jumpsuit with a matching helmet, associated with a classic wind-up stunt cycle toy. Ring any bells?

K&K Promotions thought so. They filed a federal trademark infringement lawsuit in Las Vegas in September 2020. The complaint ran twenty-nine pages. It put photos of Evel Knievel side-by-side with Duke Caboom. It noted the poses, the stunts, the outfit, and even pointed out that Disney had allegedly instructed cast members not to mention Knievel in promotional interviews for the film.

Disney’s defense was essentially: this is parody, it’s protected art, and anyway the character is clearly Canadian, not American, so there.

The Nevada federal court agreed with Disney. Then the Ninth Circuit upheld that in 2022. The ruling said Duke Caboom was “transformative,” “artistically relevant,” and that nobody was going to confuse a fictional animated Canadian toy for a specific real dead American person. First Amendment protection. Case closed.

You can argue about whether that’s fair. Honestly, looking at the two side by side, the resemblance is not subtle. But the law is the law.

The Kanye situation is a different story — and arguably more interesting, because it actually involved Evel himself before he died.

In 2006, Kanye West released “Touch the Sky.” The music video featured Kanye portraying a character named “Evel Kanyevel” — not subtle — in a white star-studded jumpsuit, attempting to launch over a canyon on a rocket-powered vehicle. It directly parodied Evel’s infamous failed Snake River Canyon attempt from 1974. Pamela Anderson played the love interest.

Evel was furious. He called the video “the most worthless piece of crap I’ve ever seen in my life.” He sued for trademark infringement and use of his likeness, accusing Kanye of using his image to “promote his filth.”

They settled in November 2007. Amicably, apparently. Evel described Kanye as “a wonderful guy and quite a gentleman.” He said he was satisfied with the result.

He died two days later. November 30, 2007. Clearwater, Florida. Age 69.

The timing of that is something. Evel Knievel died having just made peace with Kanye West. That’s an objectively strange final chapter.

She Showed Up on Screen. Once or Twice.

Tracey doesn’t chase cameras. But the cameras have found her a couple of times.

In 1988, she appeared as herself in a documentary about her father called The Last of the Gladiators. A decade later, in 1998, she appeared in the E! True Hollywood Story covering the Knievel saga.

These are small moments. But they matter. Because they’re times Tracey stepped into frame on her own terms, to speak to the family story, to make sure something was told right.

Then there’s the 2004 TNT biopic starring George Eads as Evel. Some sources suggest Tracey served in a co-producer capacity on that film. Whether or not that’s confirmed at every level, the family was clearly involved. The movie has its detractors — reviews on Letterboxd are not kind, calling it “hokey” and noting some spectacularly bad CGI — but the Knievel clan had interest in ensuring their father was represented, not just exploited.

That’s the recurring theme with Tracey. Guardianship. Control. Not fame.

The Brothers Were Different

You have to understand the contrast within the siblings to fully appreciate what Tracey chose.

Robbie Knievel literally picked up where his father left off. He jumped the Caesars Palace fountains in 1989 — the jump that nearly killed Evel in 1967 — and completed it successfully. He jumped the Grand Canyon. He jumped military aircraft on the deck of the USS Intrepid. He performed 300-plus jumps and set 20 world records. He called himself Kaptain Robbie Knievel, which tells you everything about his energy.

He also took the physical toll. Injuries accumulated. His brother Kelly told the press after Robbie died: “Daredevils don’t live easy lives.”

Robbie passed away January 13, 2023, in a Reno hospice, at 60 years old. His daughters were by his side.

That loss hit the family hard. Tracey went from three siblings to two. And with Evel already gone since 2007, the responsibility for the family legacy became heavier, carried by fewer hands.

Tracey is still standing. Still managing. Still president of K&K.

What She Actually Built

Look. It would be easy to write Tracey Knievel off as a famous last name attached to a quiet life. That would be wrong.

She took a brand — built on one man’s willingness to throw himself at ramps and hope for the best — and turned it into a managed, protected intellectual property that has generated licensing revenue, spawned lawsuits against Disney and Kanye West, and continued to generate toy lines and merchandise decades after Evel’s death.

That’s real work. Corporate work. Not glamorous. Not televised. But hard.

She shows up to Evel Knievel Days in Butte when they’re running — the annual festival in Uptown Butte that celebrated her father’s legacy for years. She doesn’t go there seeking applause. She goes as a family. As a steward. There’s a difference.

She’s a grandmother now. Living privately. You won’t find her on Instagram. You won’t catch her doing a reality show. The Knievel name is a whole genre of entertainment and she moves through it like a person, not a character.

Final Words

Here’s the honest opinion: Tracey Knievel deserves more credit than she gets.

She grew up in one of the most chaotic, high-octane family environments in American pop culture history. She watched her father risk his life repeatedly. She watched her mother hold everything together in the background. She watched her brothers follow their dad toward the ramp and the roar.

And she chose something different. Not boring — different. She chose to be the person who made sure none of it got stolen, diluted, or disrespected.

The Disney lawsuit didn’t work. But she showed up. The Kanye thing got settled. Evel died satisfied. The brand still exists, still generates revenue, still lives in toy stores and documentaries and cultural references. That doesn’t happen by accident. Someone has to fight for it.

Tracey Knievel fought for it. Quietly. Persistently. Without a jumpsuit.

That’s its own kind of daring.

FAQs

1. Who is Tracey Knievel?

She’s the daughter of motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel and his first wife Linda Bork. Growing up in Butte, Montana, she now owns and operates K&K Promotions, the business that oversees her late father’s name, reputation, and intellectual property.

2. Did Tracey Knievel do stunts like her father?

No. She’s the only sibling who never pursued stunt performance. Her brothers Kelly and Robbie both performed stunts — Robbie became a professional daredevil in his own right — but Tracey focused on the business and family side of things.

3. Is Tracey Knievel married?

Yes. She married Mitchell Kent McCloud in June 1986 in Butte, Montana. The ceremony was held at the First Baptist Church, with her mother Linda serving as matron of honor.

4. What are K & K Promotions?

It’s the Las Vegas-based company that owns the intellectual property, trademarks, and publicity rights surrounding Evel Knievel’s name and brand. Tracey serves as president. The company has pursued legal action against major entities — including Disney — to protect those rights.

5. Did Tracey Knievel sue Disney?

Yes, K&K Promotions did so in 2020 for the Toy Story 4 character Duke Caboom. The family argued the Canadian stuntman toy character was an unlicensed use of Evel Knievel’s likeness. Disney won. The Ninth Circuit upheld the ruling in 2022.

6. What happened to Evel Knievel and Kanye West?

Evel himself — not Tracey specifically — filed that suit in 2006, objecting to Kanye’s “Touch the Sky” music video where Kanye portrayed “Evel Kanyevel.” It settled amicably in late November 2007. Evel described Kanye as pleasant to deal with. Evel died two days after announcing the settlement.

7. When did Evel Knievel die, and what was the cause?

Evel Knievel died November 30, 2007, in Clearwater, Florida. He was 69 years old. The cause was pulmonary fibrosis — scarring of the lung tissue — combined with the long-term physical effects of a career that left him injured more times than anyone reasonable could count.

8. What happened to Tracey’s brother Robbie?

Robbie Knievel — known as Kaptain Robbie Knievel — died January 13, 2023, in Reno, Nevada, at age 60. He had been battling pancreatic cancer. His daughters were by his side when he passed away.

9. Did Tracey Knievel appear in any documentaries or films?

Yes. She appeared as herself in The Last of the Gladiators (1988) and the E! True Hollywood Story covering her father’s life (1998). She has also been connected to the 2004 TNT biopic starring George Eads.

10. What is Tracey Knievel’s net worth?

Not confirmed publicly. Although K&K Promotions and the Knievel estate oversee substantial intellectual property value, the family has withheld certain financial information. You’ll see various estimates floating around online — treat them as guesses.

11. What was Tracey’s relationship like with her father?

Complicated, like any relationship with a man who was larger-than-life and frequently absent due to his career. She loved him. She also watched him put his family through significant hardship. Her decision to serve as a missionary alongside her mother is an interesting footnote in that story.

12. Does Tracey Knievel have children?

She’s reported to be a mother and grandmother, though she’s kept her children’s identities private. This tracks with her whole approach: she belongs to a famous family, but she doesn’t belong to the public.

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