As the continued lock down from the COVID-19 outbreak keeps us all wondering when things will get back to normal, the bike industry has been hit hard with event cancellations and no bike demo days. With state and federal restrictions in place on gathers of people, events of all types have all been canceled in every industry. With the virus hitting hard at the start of spring mountain bike season, all but one bike event happened before everything else was canceled.
From early March through October, there are a good number of mountain bike festivals and individual brand bike demo days throughout the United States. The Coronavirus has put a stop to basically every bike event that was supposed to happen and as of this writing, at least through June 2020, there will be no bike related events or bicycle demo days of any type. Most brands have been hit hard by the shutdown and have ither laid off their event and demo staff or just straight up canceled all their scheduled events for spring and summer 2020.
The first major bike event happening every year in the bike industry is the Sea Otter Classic in Monterey, CA. This event has basically become the bike industry trade show since the shut down of Interbike and as such is always looked forward to by all in the industry. They were the first major bike event to make the call early on in March that the 2020 spring event would not happen and would be rescheduled for October 1st, 2020.
Since the rescheduling of Sea Otter, all the other bike events, mountain bike festivals, road bike touring events, etc announced they were canceling or rescheduling their event to the end of 2020, with multiple events announcing October rescheduled dates. The multitude of October bike event dates will put brands in a bad situation when they will be pulled in multiple directions to not only get their operations back in order, but deciding how and when to restart bike demos and event exhibiting.
With the closure of basically all but essential businesses, bike brands and some major bike events have stayed quite about what's happening or what their plans will be for rescheduling. Some events like Outerbike have multiple bike demos throughout the year all over the United States, but it's been crickets from them on if or when their events will happen at all. The same can be said for almost every bike brand out there with event schedules being taken down off company websites and bounced emails from industry staff who have been laid off.
Only time will tell how the event season plays out for the bike industry. If the lock down from COVID-19 continues through the fall, there's really no telling how things will be for these bike brands come 2021. That sentiment is the same for mountain bike festival owners, ebike events and trade shows in all sports categories as they continue to figure out how to adapt in what could be a long time with no events that used to bring thousands of people together.
DemoDays.com will be doing their best to keep the website updated with current event and demo day schedules and info. For specific brand or event information, please start your search here. You can search by brand or event name or product type or event type to find the correct company page for updated event or demo day info.
Be aware that event info and demo day schedules are changing all the time during the Cornavirus Lock Down with more and more event cancellations or rescheduling happening daily. Please join our email newsletter to receive updates or click the links below to follow our social media channels for updates.
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