By Alan Snel
LVSportsBiz.com
It takes will power, good safety sense and a backbone to ride a bicycle on our nation’s public roadways these days. Which is why the Sea Otter Classic bicycle festival and mountain bike/road races held at a famed race car track venue in the grassy hills just west of Monterey is such a hoot and bucket list visit for velo lovers.
Unlike other industries, the Balkanized bicycle industry lacks one centralized powerful voice and singular event to rally the bike-supporting masses. The industry’s former national trade show called Interbike, which was held in Las Vegas for years until 2017, used to be a once-a-year reunion for bikey types from all the bicycle tribes to swap bicycle stories and industry gossip.
But as the bicycle industry grew more fractured, Interbike died a sad death after the show moved to Reno in 2018. And the Sea Otter Classic has grown from being America’s Burning Man and Woodstock of Bicycling to also a place where some of the industry’s most established brands such as Trek and Specialized are showing up and showing off product after spurning Interbike to stage their own events for their own dealers.
The number of exhibitors is up 30 percent at Sea Otter this week and there are nearly 1,000 brands on the grounds of Laguna Seca, an 11-turn, 2.238-mile track venue surrounded by scenic federal land of rolling hills between US 101 (near Salinas) and the Pacific Ocean (Monterey) about an hour and a half south of San Jose and the Bay area. The demand for outdoor exhibition space was so intense this year that Sea Otter organizers paved over a dirt demo and biking area to create more square footage for companies to show product. The 29th annual Sea Otter event is now holding 200,000 square feet of display space. It’s billed as cycling’s largest consumer trade show.
At its root, Sea Otter will always be about the dozens of mountain bike races held on the sloping landscape and the zany bicycle characters who descend on the Monterey Peninsula site. The Laguna Seca track people sell bicycle jerseys and said there’s even a monthly $10 bike ride on the hilly course that looks suited for grand prix open-wheel race cars.
“It’s the cheapest way to get on the track,” a Laguna Seca rep selling Laguna Seca track bicycle jerseys.
“Is Sea Otter the new Interbike? I don’t know. It’s a big bicycle party. You can make it whatever you want,” said Steven Sperling, a technical sales specialist with DT Swiss, which makes wheel spokes.
The exhibitors have set up displays that are far more than tents. The Ibis bicycle folks set up an impressive looking bar with a temporary carpet being vacuumed Thursday morning (see photos below), while the Kenda tire people had wood chips spread around for their space.
A look at the Kenda bike tire site.
As the many passionate members of the bicycle industry work on how best to spread their message of velo power, the Sea Otter exhibitors said the Interbike show may come and go but as a person at the Honey Stinger energy food booth put it, “Bikes will never die.”
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