Weathering the Storm: How CrossFit Benefitted From the Pandemic

It’s March 2020. The CrossFit season is well underway. Hundreds of athletes and fans are preparing to attend one of the several remaining CrossFit Santionals taking place in countries around the world, with the apex of them all -- the 2020 CrossFit Games -- scheduled for July 29 in Madison, Wisconsin. All the gears were in motion for 2020 to be CrossFit’s most bombastic year ever -- until it wasn’t.

The first postponement announcement was the Asia CrossFit Championship, slated to take place between May 8 - 10, 2020 in Shanghai. This was followed by the Italian Showdown and then the German Throwdown. As the situation in Europe and the US became more of a concern, all remaining CrossFit Sanctionals were postponed or cancelled, signaling a very different year for CrossFit and the Games.

It became clear that the 2020 season would look nothing like CrossFit had hoped. As the pandemic shut down live events, adapting to the “new normal” became a priority -- but making that transition turned out to be a lot more turbulent than anticipated.