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 18 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 Semifinals, culminating in the 19th edition of the CrossFit Games.
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.
The Affiliate Cup competition allows teams of athletes from each gym to compete with one another and potentially advance to the Semifinals and Games.
The 2025 CrossFit Open takes place from Feb. 27-March 17, 2025.
THE SEMIFINALS
Individual Division
The top 1% of individual athletes from the Open will advance to the second stage, with opportunities to compete at virtual in-affiliate Semifinals and/or in-person qualifying events.
Team Division
Any licensed CrossFit affiliate gym in good standing with CrossFit may register a team, or multiple teams, for the team competition. Teams will consist of at least two men and two women who validly register for the Open in the individual division.
After the Open, all team athletes from their respective affiliates will be eligible to compete in the in-affiliate Semifinals.
Age-Group Division
The top 2% of Open finishers (or a minimum of 200 athletes) from each age-group division will be invited to compete in the in-affiliate Semifinals.
Adaptive Division
Adaptive athletes will start their season with the the Adaptive Open hosted by WheelWOD. The top 20 adaptive athletes in each division will then compete at the Semifinals stage.
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 individual, team, age-group, and adaptive athletes in the world.
Individual Division
A total of 30 men and 30 women will advance from Semifinals to the 2025 CrossFit Games from Aug. 1-3 in Albany, New York, where we’ll crown the Fittest on Earth.
Team Division
The top 20 affiliates worldwide will advance from Semifinals to the 2025 CrossFit Games from Aug. 1-3 in Albany, New York.
Age-Group Division
The top masters athletes from Semifinals will qualify for the 2025 Masters CrossFit Games by Legends from Aug. 21-24 in Columbus, Ohio. The top teenage athletes will qualify for the 2025 Teenage CrossFit Games by Pit Teen Throwdown from Aug. 21-24 in Columbus, Ohio.
Adaptive Division
The top 10 adaptive athletes from each division after the Semifinals will move on to the 2025 Adaptive CrossFit Games by WheelWOD from September 11-14 in Las Vegas, NV.
SCORING
The CrossFit Games website will host the official leaderboards for the Open, 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.