Someone Just Bet $15 Million That CrossFit Needs Its Own HYROX.

You’ve done a HYROX. Or watched someone do one. Or at least seen the Instagram stories.

And somewhere in the back of your brain, a thought formed that you probably never said out loud. Cool race. But where are the snatches? Where are the muscle ups? Where’s the part that actually tests what I do in the gym five days a week?

A guy named Keith Barlow had the same thought. Except he was standing inside HYROX events while it happened, because his PR agency was the one helping build the brand. He watched HYROX scale from small venues to stadiums. 1.8 million participants this year. A legitimate global sport built on one simple idea: same format, everywhere, every time.

And the whole time he kept thinking the same thing you did. This is one narrow slice of fitness. Where’s the version for people who actually train everything?

So he built it.

What XENOM Actually Is

XENOM (pronounced zee-nom) is a two day competition with ten fixed events. Five on Saturday, five on Sunday. The events never change. The scoring never changes. You compete, you get a score, and that score is directly comparable to anyone else who does it anywhere in the world.

They’re calling it the Decathlon of Fitness. The scoring is modeled after track and field decathlons. Each event has a benchmark standard worth 1,000 points. You get more or fewer points based on how you perform. Add up all ten events and you have your Elite Performance Index. That number is yours. You can compare it to your friends. You can compare it to people in other countries. You can compare it to yourself next year.

No leaderboard manipulation based on who else showed up that day. Your score reflects your performance. Period.

The Events They’ve Shown So Far

Three of the ten events are public. The other seven are coming before the first competition.

• Event 1: One rep max snatch. Nine minutes. Four attempts at 90 second intervals. This is pure strength and technique. Nothing in the HYROX universe touches this.
• Event 5: 3,000 meter run straight into a 2,000 meter ski erg. No break. Go out too hot on the run and the ski will bury you.
• Event 7: A gymnastics triplet. Toes to bar, dual dumbbell hang snatches, and bar and ring muscle ups. The elite version is brutal. The scaled version adjusts the movements so you don’t need muscle ups to compete.

Three events, three completely different fitness demands. Maximal strength. Long aerobic output. High skill gymnastics under fatigue. That range is the whole point.

Who Is Behind This

Keith Barlow is the founder. He co-owned Fittest PR, a UK agency that worked with HYROX, Puma, Red Bull, and other fitness brands. He’s a CrossFit L2 certified athlete who did the Open from 2019 to 2022. He recently left the agency to run XENOM full time.

The money came from WndrCo, a venture capital firm run by Jeffrey Katzenberg (co-founder of DreamWorks, former chairman of Walt Disney Studios) and Sujay Jaswa (former CFO of Dropbox). $15 million in seed funding. That’s massive for a fitness startup. Most competitions launch on a shoestring and hope for the best. XENOM is starting at stadium scale on purpose.

Rogue Fitness signed on as the foundational equipment partner. They’re building what is reportedly the biggest competition rig they’ve ever made. They’re also unveiling a brand new piece of competition equipment specifically for the series.

XENOM also holds an official CrossFit Partner Event Series license. This is not a rogue operation. CrossFit is on board.

The Format and Who Can Compete

Two categories: Individual or Same Sex Pairs.

Three divisions: Elite (you need to apply, top level athletes), RX (you do RX classes consistently, you have basic gymnastics proficiency, moderate to heavy loading is comfortable), and Compete (scaled, you train CrossFit regularly but you’re not throwing around heavy weight or stringing together muscle ups).

2,000 athlete spots per competition. Heats of 68 athletes running simultaneously across three zones. This is CrossFit at a scale nobody has seen before.

The Schedule

Season 1 has 11 competitions planned across the US and Europe.

• Event 001: Dallas, Texas. June 27 to 28. Ford Center at The Star in Frisco (the Dallas Cowboys headquarters and training facility).
• Event 002: London, UK. August 29 to 30.

Miami and Paris are confirmed. Dates TBD.

Long term goal is 60 competitions per year by season five.

The Price

$500 per individual entry (early bird). $450 per person for pairs. $25 for spectators.

They’re giving away 250 free entries through a ballot that closes March 13. You enter on xenom.global. Winners get notified March 16 and have 48 hours to accept. General ticket sales open March 16 after the ballot closes.

Why This Might Actually Work

HYROX proved that everyday athletes will travel, pay real money, and keep coming back to a standardized competition format. The key word is standardized. People don’t need new workouts every time. They need a number to chase and a community to share it with.

CrossFit has never had that in person outside the Open. The Open is incredible but it’s in your gym. No stadium. No crew of friends driving three hours to watch you compete. The Games are for elites. Semifinals require qualification. For the other 99% of CrossFitters, the biggest competitive experience available is a local throwdown that ranges from professional to barely organized.

XENOM is filling that gap. Fixed format. Big venues. A score that means the same thing everywhere.

Why It Might Not

$500 is a lot of money for a brand that didn’t exist last week. Add flights, hotel, and food for a two day event and you’re looking at a $1,000+ weekend easily.

The competition calendar is already packed. HYROX, World Fitness Project, Legends Championship, the Gauntlet, and dozens of regional events are all fighting for the same athletes and the same weekends. XENOM’s London event is already on the same weekend as another major competition.

And there’s the philosophical question that some CrossFitters will absolutely raise. CrossFit is supposed to be constantly varied. Unknown and unknowable. A fixed 10 event format is the exact opposite of that principle. Barlow’s response is basically that the training stays constantly varied because you’re still doing CrossFit. The competition is just the annual expression of that training. Same way a marathon runner varies their training but the race is always 42.2 kilometers.

Whether that argument lands with the community is the $15 million question.

The Bottom Line

XENOM is either the most exciting thing to happen to competitive CrossFit in years or an expensive experiment that proves most people would rather just do the Open and call it a year.

The gap it’s filling is real. The money is real. The partnerships are real. The question is whether enough people will spend $500 and a weekend to find out if the experience is real too.

Ballot for free entries closes March 13. First event is June 27. If nothing else, the next few months are going to be very loud.