The Storied Past Of The Sea Otter Classic

With over 30 years of history behind it, the Life Time Sea Otter Classic is now the biggest cycling festival in the world.

This Sea Otter XC lineup from the late 1990s included many of the top XC riders in the world, including Cadel Evans (1), who would later go on to win the Tour de France, and Thomas Frischknecht (far right, #6), who was the top men’s XC racer in the UCI World Cup Series in the 1990’s. 

Frank Yohannan is the man responsible for the start of the event, and he’s still running the Sea Otter operations today. A long-time veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Frank flew aerial combat missions during the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. He flew second seat in a two-man F-4 fighter jet in Cambodia, protecting the U.S. ground troops from the air. “We took enemy fire on every mission,” Frank recalls. “I flew 57 strike missions. A ‘strike’ is a combat sortie that encounters enemy opposition,” he told MBA. Fortunately, Frank’s jet never got shot down, and he never got injured by enemy fire. Frank flew in the F-4 jet in the 1970s and the early ’80s before being sent back to the U.S. on assignment to get an MBA degree at the University of Colorado. Frank then joined the Marine staff at the Pentagon, where he worked on their new microcomputer development program.

Frank was a lieutenant colonel when he decided to leave the Marines in 1990 after 22 years of service so he could go into business. “I had just retired from the Marine Corps, and a friend of mine, [Lou Rudolph], whom I met in Rotary, said, ‘Hey, Frank, when you get out, why don’t we start an event management business together?’“Since I had my MBA and my background in organizational skills in the Marine Corps, I said, ‘Yeah, Lou, that sounds great. Let’s do that. We happened to be in a bike shop talking to the owner, and he said, ‘You guys should put on a mountain bike race.’
“That was it. We didn’t know anything about mountain biking/racing at that time, and we had no idea where, and we didn’t know if it would be successful, but we said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it.’
“We were doing country music concerts at that time frame in Monterey, then we put on a couple of century rides for the Leukemia Lymphoma Society, and also a couple of trail-running events, but nothing took off like Sea Otter. The first event was in ’91, and it just kept growing.”

THE PRECURSOR OT THE SEA OTTER CLASSIC: THE LAGUNA SECA CHALLENGE
To make their first mountain bike event happen, Frank Yohannan and his partner, Lou Rudolph, met with the officials of Monterey County, which owned the land. Laguna Seca had begun putting on automobile races in 1957 on a two-mile-long paved course that was completed that year. The world-famous Laguna Seca Raceway is still used today, and it’s on the same piece of land where the Sea Otter Classic is held today. Most of the Sea Otter festival area lies inside the automobile racetrack, although nearly all of the mountain bike action takes place outside of the track’s circuit. Fortunately, the Laguna Seca Recreation Area has miles of additional land that can be used for mountain bike races, while the Sea Otter’s road cycling events often end up on the automobile racecourse.
The Laguna Seca Recreation Area, where the Sea Otter Classic is held, used to be part of the Fort Ord military base. The military site took up 28,000 acres (44 square miles) of land near the town of Monterey. Fort Ord could hold as many as 50,000 soldiers when the U.S. used the area for infantry training from 1947 to 1975. The government closed the base in 1994 and turned the land over to the Bureau of Land Management. Most of the land was designated as the Fort Ord National Monument in 2012, which will keep the land from being turned into business or housing developments.

THE BIRTH OF THE EVENT
Frank and Lou met with the officials of both Laguna Seca Raceway and Monterey County, and the two men booked the area for their first mountain bike race in 1991. They called the event the Laguna Seca Challenge that year.
The first Laguna Seca Challenge was held in April of 1991. The event drew 350 athletes and 150 spectators that first year. Frank Yohannan recalls now, “We broke even the first year and looked at each other and said, ‘For a first-year event—not really knowing what we’re doing—that’s pretty good. Let’s try it again next year.’”

The second year, 1992, proved even more successful, with roughly twice as many people showing up. Frank Yohannan bought out Lou Rudolph’s share of their company after the 1992 event. Frank was then joined by Rick Sutton and his (now late) brother Ron, who had recently put on a cycling event at Laguna Seca Raceway called the Challenge of Champions.
Rick and Ron Sutton had grown up racing motocross with their dad, who even put on some motocross races near San Francisco when Rick and Ron were kids. Together, Yohannan and the Sutton brothers created the first Sea Otter Classic in 1993 under their new company, Sea Otter Classic, LLC, with Frank Yohannan owning half the company and the Sutton brothers owning the other half. The three men further expanded the Sea Otter Classic events for the next 13 years before the Suttons sold their half of the company to Yohannan and moved on from the organization.
Frank Yohannan had decided after the 1992 Laguna Seca Challenge that he didn’t want his cycling event to be named after the Laguna Seca Raceway, in case he ever had to find a new place to hold the event. Frank and the Suttons changed the name of the Laguna Seca Challenge to the Sea Otter Classic. Rick had suggested that they add “Classic” to the end of the event’s name, and the others agreed, so that became the new name for the event. The team used a picture of a sea otter’s head that Rick had drawn in their promotional materials for their first Sea Otter Classic in 1993.

The year 1993 was also the first year that the Sea Otter Classic offered dual-slalom racing. The event soon became one of the most popular events for spectators at the Sea Otter Classic. Over the years, the world’s top gravity riders would come together to race against each other in head-to-head elimination matches on the newly built dual-slalom course. The dual-slalom events came to be watched by huge crowds of spectators on the hill overlooking the expo area. Today, Frank calls it the “marquee spectator event” of the Sea Otter Classic. In recent years, it has come to be called the “unofficial World Championship” of dual-slalom racing, now that the UCI no longer offers dual-slalom racing at the UCI World Championships.
Before long, the Sea Otter Classic turned into a spectacular weekend of racing as well as a huge outdoor bike show where hundreds of companies would set up tents in the expo area to show their products to the cycling world.

MORE EVENTS GET ADDED
In 1999, the Sea Otter Classic offered its first downhill races. Before long, many of the world’s top downhill racers would add the event to their calendars, and the Sea Otter’s attendees had even more races to enjoy.
In 2014, enduro races were added to the schedule, attracting even more riders to the Sea Otter. And in 2017, ebike racing made its debut at the Sea Otter. Over 100 riders showed up to compete in that first ebike race at the Sea Otter, with crowds of spectators lining the course, cheering for their friends. With each successive year, it seemed, the Sea Otter got bigger. The number of exhibitors increased, and more of the world’s top mountain bike racers would show up.

There were occasional hiccups, too, of course. Sometimes the UCI would be putting on one of their World Cup races on or near the same weekend as the Sea Otter. The UCI events occasionally impacted the World Cup racer turnouts at the Sea Otter, but they didn’t come anywhere close to stopping the Sea Otter from happening.
Frank Yohannan says that the dedicated staff he has built up over the life of the event has played a crucial part in the long-lasting success of the Sea Otter Classic.

THE YEAR OF THE VIRTUAL EVENT
There have been some major challenges, too, of course. One of the biggest was in March of 2020, when the spread of COVID-19 caused most public gatherings in the world to be canceled or postponed. Frank Yohannan had to cancel the Sea Otter’s April 2020 event. Frank decided to run the event in September, but by July, it was clear that September wasn’t possible either. In order not to cancel the event completely, the Sea Otter team created Sea Otter Play, a virtual event, for September of 2020. Viewers could tour the Sea Otter exhibitors’ displays online, but it was not the same as being there.

In 2021, the Sea Otter Classic was still suffering from the impact of COVID-19 shutdowns. The Sea Otter Classic was initially scheduled for May 20–23, 2021, but after consulting with health officials, Yohannan rescheduled the event to the fall that year. Fortunately, the October dates worked out okay, and the Sea Otter was held that year, although the number of people who showed up was nowhere near as big as it was in 2019.
In August 2021, Life Time, Inc., a multi-billion dollar fitness and event company, acquired the Sea Otter Classic. The acquisition left in place the Sea Otter Classic leadership team and Event Co-Founder and Director Frank Yohannan.

THE MOST RECENT SEA OTTERS
After the problems in 2020 and 2021, the Life Time Sea Otter Classic came back strong again for the next two years. In fact, 2023 saw the biggest turnout in Sea Otter history, up to that time. In 2024, the Sea Otter Classic broke all of the event’s prior attendance records. The 2024 Sea Otter reportedly had over 10,000 athletes show up to compete, with over 70,000 attendees coming to the event. For 2025, all expectations are that the Sea Otter will be even bigger still.

That said, as big as the Sea Otter is now, the event’s legacy is still growing. A few years ago, Frank Yohannan began putting on the Sea Otter Europe event in Girona, Spain, which is now held every fall. Later this year, the first Sea Otter Australia is scheduled to take place in New South Wales. There’s no telling what’s in store for the future, but the Sea Otter Classic’s place in cycling history is secure.