Tampa Bay Times20%
On board Kumba’s last ride ever, with the man who built it 12%
By Christian Blauvelt10%
8/3/2026, 11:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 16 faulty reasoning types, including Bandwagon, Appeal to Emotion, and Anecdotal, with Availability Heuristic as the most egregious example at 10.9% saturation with 71 hits. Analysis detected 452 faulty-reasoning hits from 653 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 21.8% and a BS Rank of 12% (26,905 of 30,584 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 88.00% of the article peer group.
He was the first one ever to ride Busch Gardens’ Kumba way back in 1993.
And he was the last to ride it as well.
Mark Rose, 76, also happened to be the man who designed and built the steel roller coaster.
Serving as the Tampa park’s vice president of design and engineering for 33 years, he oversaw the creation of all but three of its rides and two of its animal enclosures by the time he retired in 2018.
On Sunday, Aug. 2, he boarded Kumba’s last ride, sitting in the front row, with this Tampa Bay Times writer right behind him.
About 100 diehard customers lingered at the exit to cheer on Kumba’s final passengers.
At the “One last ride on the beast” sign that had become a selfie staple for coaster enthusiasts in Kumba’s last days, someone had even left flowers.
A sign of respect, and, perhaps, mourning.
Rose is full of stories about Kumba.
With its seven inversions, it put Busch Gardens Tampa on the coaster map, competing against Six Flags parks around the country as a destination for thrill seekers.
But the suits were initially worried about being compared to Six Flags.
“Our corporate people did not want anything that looked like a Six Flags coaster back then,” Rose said.
“So we had to avoid a primary color, because all the Six Flags coasters were primary colors.”
That led to the unique aquamarine shade for the track on top of burnt-orange pillars.
The entire track was assembled in place by manufacturer Bolliger & Mabillard, per Rose’s design, before they added any of the colors — adding an additional challenge for the painters.
Rose also wanted to integrate the contours of the land to the coaster in a way that was novel for 1993.
Kumba has inspired a following in the decades since, and as we marched toward it on Sunday there was a surprise: A group of fans had hidden out so that they could enter the queue right at 8:59 p.m., a minute before the park’s closing, in hopes of becoming the last paying customers to ride it.
So much the better, because that meant that by the time of the final, final ride, when Rose got to occupy its front row, the rain that had poured on the park all day had lifted.
It was pitch dark as we embarked for the last hurrah, but that only added to the thrill.
Rose remembers getting reports in the early ‘90s of Kumba being so popular that parents would hire babysitters just so that they could go on it by themselves.
And he recalls school buses slowing down on E Bougainvillea Avenue to watch the train as it neared the summit of the lift, before that curved 135-foot first drop.
Several astronauts even made a pilgrimage and told him how much they loved the coaster.
“Kumba’s impacted this park incredibly,” Rose said, accompanied by Andrew Schaffer, the park’s current head of design and engineering.
“Every coaster we’ve done since, we’ve tried to do bigger, better, or different — because not every coaster can be bigger or faster.
Kumba’s shaped the way the park has grown through the years.”
As the coaster finished its corkscrew inversions and pulled into the station, the passengers all applauded while those who lingered by the exit began a “Kumba!
Kumba!
Kumba!”
chant that lasted, off and on, for almost 10 minutes.
They then even cheered the college-age ride attendants in their green shirts as they filed out one last time, their watch over.
What did Rose want from his final ride?
“Closure,” he said.
Not every bit of closure involves a whole bunch of your fans wanting to take selfies with you.
That’s the kind of adoration Rose received upon filing out.
For this crowd, an engineer was a rock star.
Speakers
1speaker14%attributed speech562writer words
Selected voice
97%flagged-word coverageMark Rose
91 attributed words100% of attributed speech48% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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