Christian Toetzke

Co-founder of Hyrox, fitness-comp king

Q&A

How would you describe Hyrox to someone who knows nothing about it? Hyrox is the first massparticipation fitness race. It’s a hybrid event with a mix of running and functional fitness, based on natural movements. That’s the shortest way to say it. To go into a bit more detail, when we say ‘mass participation’, it’s founded on the narrative that anyone can do it. It should be a challenge, but with training and preparation, you don’t need to be the fittest or most talented person to compete. What led you to the idea?

I’ve been in this business a long time. I started in 1995 by creating a cycling concept that I called ‘marathon on wheels’. It still exists. I was also the CEO for Lagardère Sports events. We started a global mass-participation business, with events in Australia, New Zealand, China, Singapore and America. Then I sold that business on behalf of Lagardère to Ironman and Wonder Sports. In 2016, I started to think about fitness. I was always in the gym and started to wonder why these people didn’t have an event for them. Training in the gym is the biggest ‘sport’ in the world, but there are no events for these millions of gym-goers. This seemed like the last remaining gap in sports. It’s much more complicated than a running event. It had to be highly scalable. There were a lot of questions and perhaps that’s why Hyrox is still the only indoor mass-participation fitness event. Hyrox has scaled rapidly. How did you achieve that?

It was the plan from the beginning to create a global brand. The business model works like a rock concert tour, basically. We have all the best equipment, we own it and it’s all on six trucks. We can move the whole event anywhere. So, especially for mainland Europe, the more events we do, the cheaper it gets.

The London events sell out. Why has the UK taken to Hyrox so much? The UK market is amazing. At the moment, it’s outperforming every other region we operate in. We had already launched in a few other countries, so we had some experience to learn from when we came to the

UK. We had a great team in place from the start. Even the way the UK works – everything starts in London. In Germany, for example, it’s much more decentralised and there’s no dominant city. When you do something in Hamburg, for instance, no one in Munich cares. I’ve seen this in the industry time and again, that when you hit a certain critical mass and everyone who takes part is happy, then they go back and tell all the other members at their gyms and come back with five more people to the next event. You still do marketing, but you don’t have to do as much in that region. But, yes, it certainly seems to appeal to what the UK is looking for. You love the challenge of it!