No, this is not a reshare of an old news story! We have just had word that Sea Otter is again trying to bring its festival Down Under, this time under the tutelage of Juliane and Martin Wisata and Rocky Trail Entertainment.
Scheduled to land in late October 2025, Rocky Trail Entertainment is bringing Sea Otter to the NSW South Coast, hosting the festival at Mogo, which will open its first 70-80km of trails later this year.
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Wait a minute – wasn’t Sea Otter supposed to happen in 2021?
This will actually be the third attempt to bring Sea Otter to Australia, to complement the already existing events in Monterey, California, Blue Mountain Resort, Canada, and Girona, Spain.
Initially spearheaded by Bike SA — the peak body for recreational and commuter cycling in the state — the event was pegged for Stromlo in October 2021. Bike SA even got to the stage where it started taking entries for the races and events. Unfortunately, that coincided with the first wave of the Delta Coronavirus variant hitting Australian shores, and the organisers made the decision to postpone the festival for 12-months. A year later, it was postponed for a second time.
The contract to run the festival then went to another event company which unfortunately fizzled out. We can only speculate as to what happened as the closest thing we have to an official announcement of the change of hands are a few cryptic LinkedIn posts and an archived URL that doesn’t load.
In that time, the URL Sea Otter Australia went dead, and the socials went totally silent, while the other three stops on the Sea Otter Calendar delivered two year’s worth of festivals.
Then, late last year, Sea Otter reached out to Rocky Trail Entertainment. Started back in 2008, you probably know Rocky Trail for its Fox Superflows and Rocky Trail Academy, which run 20 weekends out of the year across three states, in addition to The Willow, Jetblack 24 and the Shimano 100, to name a few. The team behind Rocky Trail have also managed events like The Croc Trophy.
“When we started talking to Frank Yohannan, the owner of the global rights to Sea Otter and one of the founders, it was uncanny how our values and goals aligned — we’re passionate about families and getting families involved,” says Juliane Wisata from Rocky Trail.
According to Yohannan, the last 30 years of Sea Otter were about participation, which is why around the globe, each festival not only has races across just about every discipline, but there are also participation events focused on kids and families, a gear expo and more.
And if Sea Otter’s figures are to be believed, the trade show at Sea Otter Girona attracts 65,000 people, and the Monterey event gets 80,000 people, which is more than twice what Eurobike gets!
Rocky Trail has come on to bring Sea Otter to Australia for the next ten years, and Wisata tells us they plan to make it as integral a part of the local events calendar as Cannonball, The Otway Odyssey or Cape to Cape.
However, given we’ve seen this announcement of Sea Otter landing in Australia before, it should not come as a surprise that some may be a bit hesitant to get their hopes up. We put this to Wisata, and she made it clear how motivated they are to finally bring the event to our shores.
“This is coming on the back of 16 years of Rocky Trail. Martin and I have put our names on it proudly, knowing that we will instil our values and beliefs into it,” she says. “We want this event to be successful not just in general or for our business. We want this to be established on the South Coast for the next ten years and beyond, and that needs buy-in, not just from sponsors and funding bodies, but also by the consumers as well,” she says.
What can you expect at Sea Otter Australia?
While the event is still nearly two years off, the schedule is still being ironed out, and it’s far too early to build out a list of exhibitors. But Wisata explained their overarching goal is to make the event accessible to the core mountain bikers and roadies, as well as the little old lady who lives in Mogo and wants to see what all the hubbub is about.
“We’re planning things like the dual slalom because that is such an iconic event at Sea Otter, but we’re also planning to run basically every format that Rocky Trail does over the four or five-day schedule. There will definitely be Superflow, Academies, Marathons, maybe a shorter XC format. We’re looking at potentially a Dirt Crit in the event centre, Dual Slalom, and gravel,” she says.
Outside of the on-the-bike events, Wisata tells us they’re also planning a summit or forum of sorts, focused on bringing the bike industry together to keep it growing.
“What we don’t want it to be is a sales event for Rocky Trail. I want this forum to be for the growth of the industry. I want it to be a meeting place where mountain bike club presidents, or business owners, or project managers can get together and share knowledge. We are looking at bringing in people from bike parks that have emerged in Austria and the Czech Republic or even Slovakia to come over and speak to their experience developing trails,” she says.
But their vision isn’t limited to just industry-focused goals; they want to create spaces for clubs to come together and bounce ideas off one another, and forums for teachers and principals to learn more about creating mountain bike programs at their schools.
As we mentioned earlier there will also be a trade show and gear expo. For many years big brands have used the Sea Otter events to launch new products. Wisata is under no grandiose impression that the first year out of the gate, Specialized, SRAM or Giant will unveil its latest and greatest kit at Sea Otter Australia. But with the date set for October, it does provide a sufficient interval for those new innovations to arrive in Australia.
“If something is launched in April in California, by October, Shimano or Fox or someone else would have had time to bring it over, and Mogo could be one of the first places where people can see and test these new products,” she says.
Why Mogo?
Mogo being the venue for Sea Otter Australia shouldn’t come as a huge surprise given that Wisata’s other company, Rocky Trail Destination, launched during Covid out of the worry that events would never bounce back, is managing the build of the 155km trail network.
A stone’s throw from Batemans Bay, what will become the second largest trail network on the mainland and form a triad of new destinations on NSW’s South Coast.
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However, Rocky Trail and the Eurobodalla Shire Council go even further back. In 2017, the Eurobodalla Council was the first government body to pitch them to bring an event to town. Mogo and Bateman’s Bay are also uniquely positioned in that the area already has a well-established tourism industry, so there are beds, grocery stores, restaurants and things to do off the bike.
“We had long been on the lookout for a place where you could emulate something like the Alpentour, a four-day stage race at Schladming that gets 500 racers from all over Europe every year. They base themselves in a fancy hotel — you know with spas and everything — for four days and bring all of their families. The course is like a bit of a cloverleaf out of the same start and finish every day, with different stages, sometimes as long as 100km,” she says.
Wisata notes that many existing trail networks large enough to support and event like this are built in State Forests, which aren’t close to population centres.
With three trailheads to be split across Batemans Bay and Mogo, neither of which are big population centres — though combined, they’re similar in population size to Monterey, California, oddly enough — they are less than 300km on the highway from Sydney and 150km from Canberra.
While it’s been a long time coming, the first 70km of the trail network on the Mogo side is pegged to be open sometime in June 2024 and the remainder is to follow in early 2025.
“A lot of the trails are in now, and the crew is working over the next few months to connect them all up and make them flow,” says Wisata.
We have ten excavators going and 20 staff building every day and we’re talking to landscapers at the moment to design and build the trailheads. There will be one in Mogo itself, one at the Botanic Gardens and one on the Bateman’s Bay side. It’s called Curtis Road, which isn’t too far from Corrigans Beach,” says Wisata.
Where can I learn more about Sea Otter Australia?
It’s all very early days for this incarnation of Sea Otter Australia, we’ll keep you updated as more details about the schedule and who is going to be there are announced. In the meantime, head over to the new and improved Sea Otter website.
Photos: Next Level/KiPhotomedia, Eurobodalla Shire Council, Rocky Trail/GiroVisuals, Rocky Trail/OuterImage.com.au, Sea Otter Classic