an Instagram post,<\/a> he apologized for \u201cnot reacting immediately during the race\u201d and took responsibility for not foreseeing \u201cthese potential incidents.\u201d\u00a0He also confirmed that new rule changes and procedures would \u201cprevent situations like this from happening again.\u201d<\/p>\nSome of the competitors from that day \u2014 many of whom would need to pass through the same stations and use the same weights as Wietrzyk \u2014 had their tickets refunded by Hyrox. But the incident caused an uproar in the online fitness community, which criticized Hyrox\u2019s initial approach.<\/p>\n
The damage inflicted on Hyrox from a public relations perspective was clear, but it has not dampened the company\u2019s ambitions.<\/p>\n
Toetzke, F\u00fcrste and the British entrepreneur Keith Barlow are now focusing on their new venture \u2014 and capitalizing on the cultural force that fitness and mass-participation competitions have become.<\/p>\n
Xenom has been bolstered by $15 million in capital, raised largely from tech investment firm WndrCo, which is run by former Disney chair Jeffrey Katzenberg.<\/p>\n
Katzenberg is a renowned Hollywood producer who worked on classic films such as Dead Poets Society and Pretty Woman. He later founded DreamWorks, the animation giant behind the Shrek series.<\/p>\n
Alongside the movie mogul betting that Xenom can follow Hyrox\u2019s trajectory is fellow investor Sujay Jaswa, the former chief financial officer of tech giant Dropbox.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s funny because when we started Hyrox, we did it not to create any competition for CrossFit,\u201d says Toetzke from Thailand, speaking to\u00a0The Athletic before the Wietrzyk controversy stemming from the Beijing race.<\/p>\n
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\n Hyrox co-founder Christian Toetzke. (Hyrox)<\/p>\n
\u201cBut we noticed we had a big influx from CrossFit. Not because they think our training is so much better but because they don\u2019t have mass events where everyone can train hard and go compete.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you are a runner, you can do a marathon. If you are a Hyrox athlete, you can race at an event most weekends of the year somewhere in the world, and you feel a bit like a professional or a star. You\u2019re chasing a time, there are people watching you, you can even get on a podium, but you don\u2019t need to be the best in the world. So we had all these CrossFitters coming because they want events.\u201d<\/p>\n
CrossFit was founded in California in 2000 and grew into a global phenomenon with an estimated 10,000 affiliated gyms in more than 250 countries.<\/p>\n
Its only recognized competitive event is the annual CrossFit Games. While anyone can enter by submitting videos of themselves performing benchmark workouts at qualifying times, most contestants at the Games are semi-professional or fully professional athletes.<\/p>\n
Toetzke and Barlow see Xenom as a gateway to mass participation at numerous events, but to make their model work, they have had to abandon a major tenet of CrossFit.<\/p>\n
The latter prides itself on giving contestants no prior notice of the competition format, encouraging them to excel in a wide range of technical and complex movements from gymnastics and weightlifting to be ready for anything.<\/p>\n
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\n CrossFit competitors in Nuremberg, Germany, in 2025. (Sebastian Widmann \/ Getty Images for adidas)<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the one principle that you have to throw overboard,\u201d says Toetzke. \u201cWith Xenom, you know what the workouts are.\u201d<\/p>\n
Barlow is an avid CrossFitter himself and the pair insist they have a friendly relationship with the sport, which has led to an official partnership.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve spent time with Bruce (Edwards), the new (CrossFit) CEO in recent weeks,\u201d he says. \u201cWe believe competition drives the underlying ecosystem.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur event will give purpose to training for millions of people. You can talk to a gym owner and say, \u2018Hey, we will attract new members and help you retain those you have already.\u2019 As soon as someone is committed to training for an event, they won\u2019t quit their membership.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey work out with their friends and bring their community to the event.\u201d<\/p>\n
That demographic \u2014 gym-goers who want to build friendships and push themselves \u2014 is also driving growth for other hybrid race companies.<\/p>\n
Jason Curtis is the founder and CEO of the Deadly Dozen fitness race. He\u2019s a former British Army physical training instructor and gym owner who watched Hyrox grow from its modest beginnings in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017. Curtis decided he could carve his own space in the market.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was like, right, what Hyrox has pioneered now is mass participation fitness racing, like gym sport,\u201d he says from his firm\u2019s headquarters in Macclesfield, north-west England.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo CrossFit was a $4billion brand but highly specialized, and it can include anything. Hyrox asked: \u2018How do we turn it into a mass participation sport?\u2019 and they nailed it. So I just looked at them and felt it\u2019s a no-brainer that I can make the most scalable race on the planet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead of hiring costly indoor venues as Hyrox does, Curtis uses ordinary athletics tracks to stage the most popular version of his event, which consists of 12 laps of 400 meters interspersed with 12 functional exercises in the central area inside the track.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery country on the planet has an athletics track,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019re built for mass participation in sport, and they\u2019re cheap to rent. When we started, we didn\u2019t get any investment, so it was zero starting capital. The tickets I sold paid for my kit. Now we\u2019re in 35 countries.\u201d<\/p>\n
Curtis says Deadly Dozen made \u00a3344,000 in ticket sales in its first year and \u00a31.8 million last year, with costs kept down by using basic kit such as dumbbells, weight plates and kettlebells.<\/p>\n
For him, along with the simplicity of his concept, the firm is also riding a boom in both running and female fitness.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve had a gym boom and a running boom; everyone is running,\u201d he says. \u201cThe natural progression of the fitness industry has been when strength guys start to plateau, and all the running education now tells people they need to do resistance. You need to do resistance training for bone density.<\/p>\n
\u201cOlder adults, women through the menopause can lose like 20 percent of bone density, so all that education is there, so all the runners now are going, you need to do a little bit of resistance training. Hybrid training gives you both.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is a style of training, he says, which has been especially popular with women.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt any of our conditioning classes at the gym, it\u2019s probably 60\/40 women to men, if not more,\u201d says Curtis. \u201cSo traditionally, lots of women were already doing that training, but there was still that little bit of sexist bias with women in the weight room. Not so much these days. Women want to train both ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Women](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/HYROX-Hamburg-Elite-15-scaled.jpg\")
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\n Women competing in Hyrox in Hamburg. (Hyrox)<\/p>\n
\u201cFitness racing in many ways attracts women who are more willing to take the leap. The female doubles element of Hyrox and Deadly Dozen is hugely popular.\u201d<\/p>\n
Social media also drives sign-ups.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe millennial generation grew up in quite an entrepreneurial-inspired culture,\u201d he says. \u201cThey look up to people like that, but it isn\u2019t just about financial success; it\u2019s about physical success.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople want to portray that they are living their best life, and fitness racing taps into that. Then there\u2019s a travel aspect to it \u2014 people go to all these races at locations around Europe.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019ll dwarf most of the trends within fitness. You\u2019ve had the trend of HIIT training, insanity, the bodybuilding era \u2014 fitness racing will be the No 1 adult participation sport.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Hyrox, the aim of global domination continues. Toetzke is unconcerned by the rival brands, such as Deadly Dozen, Deka or Ireland\u2019s Tryka. He sees them as imitators tweaking his format for a \u201cpiece of the business.\u201d<\/p>\n
He is targeting more expansion into China, where the event is growing in popularity \u2014 a point that perhaps underlines why what happened in Beijing was such a difficult moment for the firm \u2014 and expects to reach 300,000 participants in China by 2027. Toetzke says he is also in talks with several broadcasters over the rights to show Hyrox\u2019s elite world championship finals.<\/p>\n
He and F\u00fcrste are also back in control of the company they founded. Along with private equity firm L Catterton, they have bought back their majority shareholding, which they had sold to Infront Sports & Media in 2022. Hyrox and Swiss firm Infront did not \u200bdisclose the financial details.<\/p>\n
Katzenburg\u2019s WndrCo was also involved in funding the buy-back, underlining its belief in Toetzke\u2019s insistence \u201cthat fitness had the potential to become one of the largest sports in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Barlow, the challenge of turning Xenom into a similar success story is enticing.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s rare that new sports are created,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you think about the last 50 years, maybe padel, CrossFit, UFC (the mixed martial arts Ultimate Fighting Championship), and Hyrox. We believe Xenom is one of them.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look at the way Christian and Mo scaled Hyrox concurrently in dozens of countries at a time and spoke to someone with an MBA, they would say you want to concentrate on one market at a time, get profitable in one market, and be steady and slow.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo go and say the conviction is there to build it everywhere, all at the same time, is a bold play that isn\u2019t in the textbooks. But they did it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is already a multi-billion-dollar industry and one of the fastest-growing sectors in sports. And now a new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":795443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[6647,417,102,3564,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-795442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fitness","tag-fitness","tag-global-sports","tag-health","tag-sports-business","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/795443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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