All The Smiling Faces

“So, seen anything cool?”

Some variation of this question has haunted me ever since the Sea Otter evolved out of a bike race into an expo that also features a ton of bike racing. By my reckoning, then, I’ve been hearing and sometimes asking this very question for about 26 years. The first five years of the Sea Otter I was busy either drooling on my own stem somewhere on the XC course, sharpening my elbows at the short track race, or getting beaten up by roving gangs of empty beer bottles at the campsite; often all three of these acts seemed to happen in very close order to each other. As such, I didn’t pay the expo much mind during the first few years.

Then it sort of became my job to be in the belly of the beast for the duration of the event. I think that entrenchment solidified somewhere around 2002. However, if it was my job to competently answer that question – “So, seen anything cool?” – I have made a career out of abjectly failing to come up with any credible response. Hopefully Cam and Pete didn’t hire me to fulfill this role. By my count, the pay-to-play “journalists” over at GMBN had somewhere around 100 people at the event in charge of cataloguing and broadcasting every inch of the midway, indicating that there are plenty of potential hires if that is the direction this site needs to go…

Nevertheless, this IS the Sea Otter, and so THAT question is going to come up. And after a couple years of pandemic turning every single one of us into socially feral semi-hermits, arriving beneath the beating sun on Thursday into a venue vibrating with an almost tangible celebratory buzz, for the first time in decades, I had an answer to that question.

“Seen anything cool?”

“You!”

All of you. Okay, maybe not YOU who are reading this, but the collective “you,” or maybe more appropriately, the collective “we”, the “us” of cycling.

Holy shit, it was good to see so many faces again!

I mean, yeah, Continental have some interesting new big heavy tires, and Lazer have helmets with inbuilt crumple zones instead of MIPS, and Magura have a pretty awesome looking brake that’ll retail for $99 a wheel and you get to choose whether you want 4-piston or 2-piston calipers, but you probably already knew about that, and there were all those rad old Haros in the Haro booth, and there was a whole galaxy of rad other new shit that I completely failed to take notice of. Because I was busy.

I was busy hugging, and fist bumping, and shaking hands, and high-fiving, and laughing, and talking, and drinking out of other people’s flasks, and it felt like a four day conversation that started about when I crossed the tire bridge on the way in and didn’t slow down or let up until I climbed back across the tire bridge and got back in my van to come home. The general gist of that conversation follows a similar train of interrogation:

“God Damn! So good to see you.”

“Where’d you get that coffee?”

“What a weird couple years! How are you holding up?”

“How about that supply chain SNAFU?” (general consensus seems to be that things should mellow out by, ohhhh, sometime in 2024)

“Did you hear about …….? Yeah, Covid/cancer/massive heart attack. How are YOU doing?”

“We’re worried about the independent bike shops.”

“Where’d you get that beer?”

“Can I swoop some of that sunscreen?”

“So, seen anything cool?”

I have talked a whole lot of shit about the Sea Otter over the years. And I have similarly painted a pretty grim picture of trade shows and expos during that long arc of time. Sea Otter 2022 was such a powerful reminder that all my jaded Eldest Oyster grim pessimism really needs to get put in check more often. This was an epic gathering of the entire cycling community. Athletes, consumers, retailers, manufacturers, engineers, marketing wonks, dreamers, superstars, nerds, old, young, every size, every shape, every gender, every color. A 70,000-ingredient stew of humanity, the only absolutely for sure common thread between them all being a love of bikes.

Seen anything cool? Yep. You. Us. All of us. It was majestic.

I had some kind of “Soylent Green is people!” riff lined up when I started writing this, as a way of alluding to both my fear of crowds as well as my deep abiding love for dystopian movies featuring Charlton Heston, but I couldn’t really tie the room together with it. But that might help explain the lead photo. Well, that and the fact that I didn’t take any photos. As it turns out, I maybe shoulda gone with an Andromeda Strain theme instead of Soylent Green. Yesterday the text messages began rolling in from Covid positive friends post-Otter. I refuse to let that tarnish the glow. Concerns? Yes. Regrets? None.