Sea Otter Shocker

I'm a slacker. I haven't signed up for Sea Otter yet. Last weekend, Jenna Kowalski mentioned that racing downhill at Sea Otter is so expensive that she's thinking about racing road instead. She, of course, can do that.

I know Sea Otter is expensive, but I didn't think about pre-registration until today. Mark Jordan brought the Sea Otter shocker to my attention. He posted a little rant about the cost of racing the downhill on declinemagazine.com. He points out that no matter what class you race, as of today you have to pay $90.00 to race. If you want to race slalom too, tack on $75.00. I went online and started putting it all together. In addition to the $165.00 in entry fees for the two events, you also have to pay a fee of more than $6.00 for each race. My total came out to $177.27. (I didn't commit, though.)

Mark points out pricing comparisons to other events, which makes the cost of racing at Sea Otter even more painful. Since the registration is hosted on Active.com, I was unable to figure out which riders had pre-registered (a handy feature on Sportsbaseonline.com). I'm interested in learning how many riders wait until the last minute to register.

I used to pre-register for everything. Until I started crashing all the time. In fact, after eating it last weekend at Fontana, I wasn't sure that I'd be able to ride at Sea Otter at all. Now that I know I can race, I'm not sure I want to ride both downhill and slalom like I'd originally planned. Ironically, as I was contemplating all of this, Allie called to see if I'd registered yet. She brought up a few more disturbing points.

• The late entry fee rate has risen $24.00 from last year's cost.
• On the Downhill Racing page on the Sea Otter home site, the $65.00 entry fee rate is not raised to $90.00 until "after April 4". Active.com says the rate changes on April 3.
• Pros have no downhill practice on Saturday according to the schedule on the Sea Otter site.
• The chart on the 4-day event schedule has no pro downhill practice on Friday or Saturday.

I'm a copy editor by trade, so I tend to get nitpicky when it comes to type-os and missing information. However, if I'm going to pay $90.00 to enter an event, I want to know precisely when I can practice. For $90.00, I should be able to ride as many laps on the course as I please.

Visit declinemagazine.com to read Mark's comments.