Due to safety concerns in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota with ongoing USA Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) operations, including the killing of cyclist Alex Pretti, the 2026 Frostbike trade-show planned later this month has been cancelled.

Organized by Minneapolis based Quality Bicycle Products (QPB or just Q), one of North America’s largest cycling distributors, Frostbike was set to make a post-COVID comeback with upwards of 1000 bike shop owners, suppliers and product manufacturers planning to attend.

QPB President Rich Tauer posted the cancellation notice on the company’s website:

As we have been preparing for the return of Frostbike, over the past six weeks we have been monitoring the situation in the Minneapolis metro area related to federal immigration enforcement activity. While we have been hopeful that a significant de-escalation would take place, it does not appear that meaningful change is coming soon. While better days for our community are certainly in our future, the current conditions make it potentially unsafe for some attendees. For that reason, we have made the difficult decision to cancel Frostbike 2026. 

In the coming days, the Frostbike events team will be reaching out to exhibitors to provide guidance on logistics related to the cancellation of the event. This decision did not come easy, and it was not the one we wanted to make, but we recognize if the current enforcement activities make it unsafe for some of our attendees to travel to the Twin Cities, then the event is not safe for all attendees. 

The theme of Frostbike 2026 is Take the Lane, and we encourage each of you to be proactive and Take the Lane for your business, your community, and yourself. There’s no better example of the power of our industry taking the lane together than last Saturday’s memorial ride honoring Alex Pretti, who was fatally shot in Minneapolis by Department of Homeland Security agents on January 24. Angry Catfish Bicycle Shop, with the help of other businesses and local citizens, hosted the Minneapolis ride and guided other organizers in hosting more than 250 officially scheduled rides across 14 countries and 43 states. In Minneapolis alone, we had over 5,000 riders show up despite the snow and cold weather.

The power of the bicycle and the collective bicycling community knows no bounds. Those boundless possibilities are the reasons we were very much looking forward to convening members of the bicycle industry to connect with each other and learn from one another. Events like Frostbike are important to us because we know that when we can meet face-to-face to share ideas and work through problems, the outcomes are good for the industry and good for our collective businesses. And while we have recently seen some bright spots, there’s still a lot of work for all of us to do, together, to help get more people on bikes and build a healthier, more sustainable industry. That’s why we are working diligently to find alternative ways to share much of the educational content and industry perspectives we had planned for this year’s event and we’re hard at work planning Frostbike 2027.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your Q representative or Q Customer Service.

Sincerely,

Rich Tauer, Q President

Photo Credit: Getty/B. Bell

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