Last Updated on May 6, 2025 by
Have you noticed the recent trend of dudes training shirtless?
My Instagram feed is just littered with “influencers” trying to be their local Nick Bare — cutting meat on wooden chopping boards, gulping bone broth, lifting weights and clocking miles.
In other words — they’re “getting at it”.
This idea of a Hybrid Athlete (the novel concept of both running and lifting heavy objects) has birthed a new category of sport — one that is growing at a blistering pace of 100%+ YoY growth since it started.
Yes folks, you can blame the shirtless trend on HYROX.
HYROX is the fastest-growing sport on the planet.
In 2025, they will have 83 events and over 650,000 athletes compete.
They operate in 11 countries globally, and do ~US $140m in revenue.
But how did they get here?
Let’s break it down.
How HYROX Turned Training into a Global Sport
HYROX was founded by two-time Olympic gold medallist Moritz Fürste.
Realising there was an opportunity to create a new event combining weightlifting with running, he teamed up with Christian Toetzke in 2015, a veteran in the events business, to create HYROX.
The concept?
Fitness racing.
From his time playing professional Hockey, Moritz realised that there are so many people who both lift weights and run. In fact, in Germany, Moritz’s home country, 52% of gym-goers call ‘fitness’ their main sport.
But ‘fitness’ isn’t a sport in and of itself.
In the words of Mortitz:
“Imagine there are a million people hitting golf balls at the driving range each day… but there are no golf courses.
That’s how we felt about the fitness industry. People go to the gym, they train a lot. But there was no competitive sport where they could sign up and play their sport on the weekend.
There are marathons — but marathons are for running specifically. Then there is CrossFit, but that’s a training methodology, not a sport.
We wanted to create the golf course for all of the fitness people in the world”.
Performance Metrics: The Secret Behind HYROX Retention
His second insight?
Data drives retention in sports.
What’s the first question you ask somebody after they finish a marathon race?
“What was your finish time?”
Quantifying performance is what keeps you coming back for your 2nd, 3rd, and 4th marathon. To get 2% better.
And so HYROX was born.
8 repeats of a 1 kilometre loop, followed by a ‘circuit’ station, combining cardio with functional strength.
Standardised, measured, timed. Giving ‘fitness’ a sport.
10 years later, HYROX is off to the races. 😂
The Operating Model Behind HYROX’s Global Growth
Operationally, most ‘event’ businesses are extremely difficult to run.
Often, you need to front large costs upfront to rent a venue in advance, and face the risk of not getting enough customers to meet your fixed cost base.
But HYROX has its operations down to a tee.
They operate each event setup through a set of 9 trucks that drive from city to city, with 10 of these setups globally. It then takes only 36-48 hours to get an event set up.
This is what allows HYROX to have 175 revenue-generating ‘event days’ each year.
The ‘beautiful’ thing about the business model is the fact that, because the format is standardised, it dramatically increases the scalability of the model.
The Viral Growth Strategy
HYROX has absolutely crushed it on social media.
450k+ Instagram followers — the perfect distribution to show off good-looking, shirtless young people doing hard things.
From a marketing perspective, HYROX events are all oversubscribed.
HYROX New York sold out in only 40 minutes. In London, HYROX holds a ballot to allocate 16,000 slots to over 70,000 applicants.
With a few exceptions, having demand outweigh supply in a consumer discretionary business is beautiful.
Not only does it dramatically increase revenue quality (because supply is almost always likely to be bought), but it creates an ‘aura’ about the brand.
Supreme built their entire business off this concept — creating a supply-demand imbalance that created the allure of a luxury brand.
Inside the Revenue Engine
This business is an absolute monster financially.
They will do about ~$140m in topline revenue this year based on this interview with the Founder/CEO Moritz Fürste.
Almost more incredible is that they have grown ticket sales by 100% YoY for the past two years, spending $0 on paid marketing.
Those numbers feel venture-esque and show just how disruptive this sport has been. If your product is good enough, it should sell itself.
The majority of this revenue will come from direct ticket sales ($96.2m), but their other revenue streams are also very healthy, and growing, with photos, merch, gym affiliate and spectator ticket sales.
Cost Breakdown
It’s difficult to tell exactly what the cost structure of the business is, but there are a few interesting data points here.
The founder estimates that the ‘typical’ event needs ~1500 competitors before it reaches breakeven on a gross basis.
Based on 83 events this year with 650,000 competitors, that implies ~7,800 competitors per event… or roughly 80% gross margins… insane.
Now, there would obviously be other operating costs in the business on an ongoing basis, but I suspect that HYROX could be operating at 30-40% EBITDA margins very comfortably.
Historically, the numbers also look very good.
In 2021, the parent company Upsolut Sports GmbH had around 26% net profit margins based on accounts lodged with German regulators.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve gone up since then.
How Large is the Market?
So, if they have 650,000 athletes today, how large can they get?
In the bull case, I think HYROX can still 3 – 5x from here.
For context, CrossFit has 4 million participants globally. CrossFit is also a less accessible sport, given the Olympic weightlifting and gymnastics components, so there is reason to believe that HYROX could be larger — it’s much more inclusive for the mass market.
The key barrier to growth will likely be operational, and not necessarily limited by customer demand.
Throwing 10x more events will require significantly more investment into their trucking/equipment fleet to service these events.
There is the risk that as they start to continue to offer more capacity to members, they will lose some of their hype.
But perhaps the biggest risk of all is on the retention front. Anecdotally, I have a number of friends who have ‘tried’ CrossFit. But how many of these members will keep coming back?
It will be interesting to see what the businesses’ retention curves look like.
That being said, there is significant monetisation upside from here, even in the existing member base.
Just as we saw CrossFit open a number of gyms internationally through a license model, I think HYROX is still in the very early days of the licensing/gym rollout model.
Today, they charge $1500 to allow gyms to offer HYROX classes (versus $3k for CrossFit), but I think the opening of HYROX-specific gyms could provide another inflection point for growth.
Can HYROX Be Dethroned?
When asked about competitors in his interview with Harry Stebbings, the founder remarked, “We have none”.
I always think it’s a huge red flag when founders can’t name competitors — but in this case, I actually think HYROX might be okay.
1/. Brand
The first point of defensibility is around the brand.
As much as HYROX is a fitness competition, it is also a status symbol.
With over 450k Instagram followers, their organic growth engine is largely driven by people posting photos from their events, showing off their toned stomachs to friends — a total flex.
2/. Pricing is Still Conservative
A HYROX event entry today is priced similarly to a half-marathon entry.
So even if someone else wanted to compete with HYROX, they probably wouldn’t be able to undercut them by very much.
3/. Customer Obsession
The founder is absolutely obsessed with the customer.
He has openly stated that his mission is to make every athlete feel like an Olympic athlete.
He is also willing to invest in the brand over a very, very long-term horizon. He has acknowledged that they are undermonetising today, because they want to build the community going forward.
I don’t think it’s an accident that Moritz won two Olympic gold medals. The guy is an animal.
That being said, I don’t think it would be difficult to replicate the race format. After all, this business isn’t TSMC. They just rent a few erg machines and put them into an event centre.
I think we could see well-funded competitors go after HYROX if they continue succeeding.
The Future of HYROX
Given how passionate the founders seem about the business, I don’t think we will see an exit anytime soon.
That being said, businesses like HYROX have been acquired before.
In 2015, Ironman was acquired by a PE shop, Providence Equity Partners, for $650m at roughly 13x EBITDA. Not a bad exit at all.
Just like Ironman, HYROX have cracked the one moat that Peter Thiel will never understand.
An incredible brand.
I think HYROX still has a lot of ‘room to run’. 😂
If they can realise their vision of getting ‘fitness racing’ into the Olympics in the next 10 years, this could turn into a behemoth of a business, so it will be interesting to watch it unfold.
