FINDING THE FITTEST ON EARTH™
The CrossFit Games are the ultimate proving grounds for the Fittest Man and Fittest Woman on Earth™ and are world-renowned as the definitive test of fitness. For the past 16 years, fans from around the world have attended the multi-day sporting event, streamed the competition online, or watched on ESPN, CBS, or a wide range of international broadcasts. The international field of play has included athletes from over 120 countries.
THE ULTIMATE TEST
The Games began in 2007 in Aromas, California, as the first competition to objectively measure fitness. From their inception, they have been unlike traditional sports such as track and field, gymnastics, weightlifting, or even decathlon — all specialist sports in which the events are known long in advance. Instead, athletes from around the world are tested against a variety of unannounced events, each with different movements, equipment, and time domains. Competitors are required to train for the unknown, and the scores of events have included distance swims, obstacle courses, 1-rep-max lifts, handstand walking, sled pushes, rope climbs, and odd-object carries.
The test has continually evolved. As top athletes began to train year-round for strength, speed, endurance, and skill, they were met with new tests each year that took them outside their comfort zone.
This year, a worldwide Open competition involving hundreds of thousands of competitors will allow the best athletes to advance through Quarterfinal and Semifinal rounds, culminating in the 17th edition of the CrossFit Games from Aug. 1-6, 2023, in Madison, Wisconsin.
THE WORLDWIDE OPEN
The road to the CrossFit Games starts with the worldwide Open, the largest participatory sporting event on Earth. During the three-week competition, one event will be released online each Thursday, and athletes have four days to record and submit scores. Anyone who is at least 14 years old can sign up and join in the first stage of the CrossFit Games season with special divisions for teenagers, age groups, and adaptive athletes.
The Open allows hundreds of thousands of individual athletes to quantify their performance and rank themselves with peers. Separate hashtag-based leaderboards will be available for teachers, military service members, healthcare workers, firefighters, college students, law enforcement officers, and hundreds of other professions, interests, and groups. The leaderboard will also be searchable by continent, country, or user-generated hashtags. For example, athletes can search for the fittest in South America or Switzerland. (Please note: Countries are assigned to athletes based on citizenship and assigned to teams based on location.)
The Affiliate Cup competition allows teams of athletes from each gym to compete with one another and potentially advance to the Quarterfinals, Semifinals, and Games.
The 2023 NOBULL CrossFit Games Open takes place from Feb. 16 - March 6, 2023.
QUARTERFINALS AND SEMIFINALS
Individual Athletes
The top ten percent of individual Open athletes on each continent advance to the second stage of the competition, the Quarterfinals. The Quarterfinals are an online competition in which qualified athletes compete over the course of a weekend, from March 16-19, 2023, for a chance to advance to the third stage, Semifinals.
The top 60 men and 60 women from Quarterfinals will be invited to compete in-person at the North America East, North America West, and the Europe Semifinal. Thirty men and 30 women will be invited to compete at each of the Semifinals in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and South America.
The top 40 men and top 40 women will advance to the 2023 NOBULL CrossFit Games.
Teams
The top 25 percent of the total number of teams per continent (for continents with a minimum of at least 50 teams) will be eligible to advance from the Open to the Quarterfinals on their continent. Team rosters for the Quarterfinals consists of four athletes, two men and two women, and two alternates, one man and one woman, who will compete in the online competition from March 29-31, 2023.
The top teams in the Quarterfinals advance to the Semifinals for a chance to earn their spot at the Games.
Age Groups
Based on Open finish rank, the top 10 percent of age-group athletes worldwide in each division advance to the Age-Group Quarterfinal, from March 31-April 2, 2023, to compete for a spot at Semifinals. This includes masters athletes ages 35-65+, and teenage athletes ages 14-17. The top 30 athletes in the Online Qualifier from each division will earn a spot at the online Age-Group Semifinal, taking place from April 28-30, 2023.
The top 10 from each division will advance to the 2023 NOBULL CrossFit Games.
ADAPTIVE DIVISIONS
At the close of the Open, five adaptive divisions — Vision, Intellectual, Seated With Hip Function, Seated Without Hip Function, and Short Stature — will crown their Fittest on Earth. Prize money will be awarded to podium finishers. Three divisions — Multi Extremity, Lower Extremity, and Upper Extremity — will send their top five men and women to the 2023 NOBULL CrossFit Games.
THE CROSSFIT GAMES
The season culminates with the ultimate test of fitness. A key element to a fair test of fitness is the unknown and unknowable. At each CrossFit Games competition, athletes engage in a series of challenges unknown to them until right before the events begin. The combination of highly trained athletes and unknown events makes for an explosive mix.
At this point in the season, the field has been whittled down from the hundreds of thousands of athletes in the Open to the top 40 men, 40 women, 140 masters athletes, 40 teenage athletes, 40 teams, and 30 adaptive athletes from around the world. The CrossFit Games rank the world's fittest and determine who is the Fittest on Earth.
SCORING
The CrossFit Games website will host the only official leaderboards for the Open, Online Qualifier, Quarterfinals, Semifinals, Last Chance Qualifier, and the Games.
The CrossFit Open and the CrossFit Games use a relative scoring system. In the Open, athletes are ranked on the leaderboard based on their performance relative to other athletes in their division, and are assigned a point value based on their placing in each event (e.g. 1st place = 1 point, 2nd place = 2 points). At the end of the Open, the athlete with the least amount of points is the overall winner.
The CrossFit Games use a scoring table, which can be found here. Each event is worth up to 100 points, and athletes earn points based on their finish. At the end of the Games weekend, the athlete with the most points is the winner and is crowned the Fittest on Earth.
In both the Open and the Games, ties will be broken by awarding the best position to the athlete who has the highest result in any single event. If athletes remain tied after this first tiebreaker, the process continues to their next highest single result, and so forth. More than one athlete can share an event rank, and each will earn the original point value. The athlete with the top performance across multiple events in a competition will be placed higher on the leaderboard.