Puyallup Sportsmen’s Show Cancelled

Organizers of the Washington Sportsman’s Show have cancelled this year’s event in Puyallup and say it will be back in early 2022.

O’Loughlin Trade Shows had already moved that and other shows back from their usual midwinter time slots in hopes that the pandemic would ease and vaccines be more widely available by then and that the safety protocols the company had developed would allow a modified event to happen.

But with Pierce County still in phase 2, limiting indoor entertainment establishments to the lower of a quarter of their max capacity or 200 people, Puyallup proved to be a no go.

“Unfortunately, the State could not see their way clear to help us to reclassify this event as indoor retail, even though we had developed a safety plan that would assure everyone’s safety and exceed current guidelines,” O’Loughlin said in a statement on the show’s website.

“Therefore, under these guidelines we have no other choice than to cancel our 2021 Washington Sportsmen’s Show.”

Their plans called for mandatory masking, regulating the number of attendees on the grounds at any one time, one-way traffic, widened aisles and more, a spokesman told us in December.

At this point O’Loughlin does still plan to hold the Central Oregon Sportsmen’s Show in Redmond on March 11-14 and the Pacific Northwest Sportsmen’s Show and Portland Boat Show March 24-28 at the Expo Center in Portland.

The cancellation of Puyallup follows on other sportsmen’s and boat shows across Washington and Oregon either being rescheduled, held digitally only or just scrubbed until 2022.