The CrossFit Games turn 20 this year. Are they still doing their job for affiliates?
I worked for CrossFit HQ. I’ve owned my gym for 20 years, through the Games’ entire rise. I just interviewed the new CEO at the Two-Brain Summit. And I recently made the decision to reaffiliate my own gym.
The Games, as they exist today, don’t bring a single new CrossFitter into your gym. But that doesn’t mean the concept behind them is dead.
How the Games Started
In 2007, the “Games” was a message on a forum: show up at Dave Castro’s family ranch, bring a tent. There were three events—a run, a max deadlift and some kind of hopper workout. James Fitzgerald won because he was a good runner and a good lifter, not because he’d trained for a “sport.”
It felt like a festival. People camped. They high-fived. Nobody was worried about squat depth.
Then sponsors showed up—Reebok, ESPN, Progenex—and the Games became a marketing vehicle. For a while, that was genuinely valuable to affiliates. The Games had millions of viewers, and malls were full of CrossFit gear.
Over time, that value disappeared.
The Type of Client the Games Attracts
When the Games got big, I started getting people walk through my door saying things like, “I want to win the CrossFit Games in three years.”
Those were my most demanding clients.
Six months in, they’re comparing their Fran time to your coach’s. They want open gym access. They want you to buy jerk blocks and the worm. They get frustrated if you’re not catering to their competitive goals. And within a couple years, most of them left to chase “real” coaching and programming somewhere else.
I ran into one of those guys last weekend. He hasn’t worked out in five years.
The Games, in its current form, filters for exactly the wrong client—people chasing competition for competition’s sake, not people chasing pride in themselves.
What Gym Members Are Buying
When people sign up at a gym, they’re really buying the chance to be proud of themselves again.
They don’t like how they look. They don’t like how they feel. Something’s rickety. And they’re buying the opportunity to change that—and to have a moment they can point to later.
I’ve got a personal training client who rode 40 kilometers in a triathlon and had to lose a bunch of weight to do it. That’s a moment she’ll never forget. She didn’t win anything, but she doesn’t need a world leaderboard for that to matter.
The Games today measure a narrowing slice of fitness. You could win the IRONMAN World Championship and not qualify for the CrossFit Games. Runners, cyclists and triathletes stopped watching a long time ago because they don’t see themselves in it.
That’s the gap the Games has fallen into. There’s such a massive difference between the fitness level of a Games athlete and the fitness level of your average member that they don’t even relate to the Games anymore.
Events like HYROX and Spartan Race get this. They’re not built only for elite athletes. They’re built to give regular people a podium.
Rethinking the CrossFit Games
I don’t believe in reinventing things from scratch. I believe in looking at what’s already working and copying it: HYROX, Spartan Race and Street Parking, for example.
I’ve got members who travel to Vegas for Street Parking’s collective meetup, and former members who still meet on the waterfront here in Sault Ste. Marie every Saturday to do Street Parking workouts together.
If I were rethinking the Games, I’d make them a massive fitness festival. I’d go back to the original intent from 2007. Bring a tent. Run a 5K in the dirt. Do a max deadlift. Do a fun chipper. Crack a keg afterward. That format brings in first-timers who just want to accomplish something, repeat participants who want to beat their old number, and friends who get dragged along and end up loving it.
What Affiliates Can Do Now
The good news for affiliate owners: You don’t have to wait on HQ to fix this. You can build your own festival, your own competition, your own reason for your members to feel famous for a day. That’s what keeps people in your gym for years, not a worldwide leaderboard.
One of the simplest ways to do this is the Intramural Open—your own version of the Open, run entirely inside your gym, with your own leaderboard and your own winners.
A few tips for your Intramural Open:
- Pick roughly two-thirds of the same events every year (a 5K, a max deadlift or clean and jerk, a chipper) so members can actually compare progress year over year.
- Run specialty clinics leading up to it for the skill you know is coming. That’s what makes the event a peak moment instead of a disappointment.
- Put people on teams, run the leaderboard for your gym only and give out ridiculous awards. Give your members a reason to celebrate.
Do that, and you’ll do more for retention than the Games ever will. Grab the step-by-step Intramural Open guide here.
And if you want help building the systems that keep members around long after your Open ends, book a call.
