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He Risked Everything on HYROX. Now It’s on Track for 1.5 Million Annual Participants
He Risked Everything on HYROX. Now It’s on Track for 1.5 Million Annual Participants
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Phụ đề (173)
0:00
I personally risked everything to make HYROX happen for me.
0:04
I borrowed more money than I ever knew exists from family, friends, banks.
0:11
For whatever reason, I went all in, literally, and I didn't have a plan B.
0:16
Moritz Fürste had already reached the top of his sport: Olympic gold in Beijing,
0:22
Olympic gold again in London, then bronze in Rio. But after he left field hockey,
0:27
he was searching for something most athletes never get back: a second arena.
0:35
The idea became HYROX, a standardized indoor fitness race built for the
0:40
millions of people who train in gyms but did not have a sport of their own.
0:44
Four hours ago, we sold the one millionth ticket for this year, 2026.
0:49
We currently sold one million tickets and with roughly another 500,000-600,000
0:54
to be sold till the end of the year and we're operating in 34 countries.
0:58
The format is simple and unforgiving.
1:00
Eight one kilometer runs, each followed by one functional workout station. The
1:06
same race. The same order. Anywhere in the world.
1:09
If we would change the format, it would just not be HYROX anymore.
1:12
There are three numbers to look out for in HYROX's story.
1:16
650 - the number of people at HYROX's first event in Hamburg in 2017
1:22
1.5 million - the projected HYROX participants in the 2025/26 season and
1:28
$270 million - HYROX's projected revenue this year.
1:34
This is Founder Effect.
1:39
My name is Moritz Fürste, that's how everyone calls me. I'm one
1:42
of the co-founders of HYROX, and I'm operationally the CMO.
1:47
Before HYROX, Moritz Fürste lived what he calls his first life: field hockey.
1:53
He played for Germany across three Olympic Games.
1:56
I was 23 when we won our first Olympic gold medal, I was 27 when we won the second one.
2:01
These are emotions that are on that level, so high, so incredibly like indescribable, almost.
2:09
Moving away from what I call my first life, which was being a professional athlete,
2:14
actually is tough. And the second you finish your career, you start asking yourself,
2:19
will I ever experience any kind of emotional highs or lows like that ever again?
2:25
A lot of athletes describe that as kind of a hole they're falling into post their career,
2:29
and I was always scared of that.
2:31
That's why you say athletes die twice, because it feels like an end to something that is,
2:36
I think, very difficult to compare to anything else.
2:40
Moritz needed something that could replicate the intensity of being an athlete.
2:45
I always wanted to be able to feel that fire,
2:49
that intrinsic motivation for something again that I had when I was an athlete.
2:54
The path to HYROX was shaped in part by a public disappointment in Hamburg.
2:58
Moritz had campaigned for the city’s bid to host the 2024 Olympic Games.
3:03
The bid failed after a public referendum - but the campaign connected him with sports-events
3:09
entrepreneur Christian Toetzke, who would later become his co-founder.
3:12
That was a big disappointment, but that was the time when Christian and I met,
3:17
and we did the process of this bidding campaign together. The loss went into win,
3:22
because we ended up teaming up and creating HYROX.
3:24
They didn't know yet what the product
3:26
would be — only what they had observed about millions of gym-goers worldwide.
3:31
HYROX is the competition within the gym world. People have been going to the gym for ages, and
3:39
we found the insight that 52% of the people that go into the gym consider
3:43
fitness their sport. There was no sport of fitness. Fitness is not a sport. It's
3:48
a training methodology. We wanted to create the sport that all these people
3:52
were already training for. So HYROX is a mix of functional fitness workouts and running.
3:58
Now, it became a global movement that people call hybrid racing,
4:02
which is the sport, and HYROX is the product.
4:05
But before any of it could scale,
4:07
the founders gave themselves an operating principle they would defend for years.
4:12
We wanted the athletes to feel like Olympic athletes walking into a big arena,
4:16
to feel very special, to have their names on screens. Everything from a
4:20
branding perspective, to the sound and light systems - we wanted that
4:23
to be professional and something that has never been done and seen before.
4:27
Try to be so efficient in the way we create the product that it looks much,
4:34
much more professional than it actually is.
4:36
Of course, nowadays we are investing more than the
4:38
2 million per event — but hopefully it looks also like 15 million now.
4:43
The first HYROX event in Hamburg was closer to a proof of concept than a polished global launch.
4:49
It had 650 participants - and Moritz himself was doing whatever needed to be done.
4:55
I was actually emceeing that event, because, of course, everybody was doing
4:59
everything. What I saw was just that pure joy of those 650 people who were trying to finish
5:06
the race and trying out what HYROX was, which they obviously didn't know before,
5:10
because that was the first time it was ever presented on the world stage.
5:14
I remember that I never, from that moment on,
5:17
really doubted that this is going to work. I was totally sold and bought into the product.
5:24
That lit the fire to get up in the morning and pursue this dream of making it a big sport.
5:29
But the conviction came at a cost.
5:31
I personally risked everything to make HYROX happen for me.
5:36
I borrowed more money than I ever knew exists from family, friends,
5:42
banks. I went all in, literally. I didn't have any money. I borrowed it. I was,
5:48
for whatever reason, convinced that this is going to work out,
5:51
and I didn't have a plan B. That's definitely not a tip that I would give to the younger generation.
5:57
I was always happy to take risks, and in this particular case, it worked out.
6:02
For two years, HYROX was proving its model event by event.
6:06
Then COVID hit — shutting down exactly the kind
6:09
of mass-participation events the company was built around.
6:12
When COVID hit, that was obviously a very, very big bummer for a business
6:17
like ours — mass participation events with people that are supposed to do sports.
6:22
We were not denying COVID, but we denied the actual impact that it
6:28
might have on our business. We went into the office every day.
6:31
With live events paused, HYROX tried to keep the brand alive,
6:35
even when the product itself could not operate normally.
6:38
We did digital activations, competitions,
6:41
we invested money during COVID when everybody else just shut down. We did a lot for the
6:47
brand that made us come back stronger post-COVID which was really important.
6:50
And that bet paid off in 2022, when London became HYROX’s first true tipping point.
6:57
This was only possible because we did the work through COVID for two years. Engaging with the
7:03
community, writing emails, sending newsletters, trying to do online competitions, especially in
7:08
the UK, hitting gyms, offering them post-COVID for one year to have the license for free.
7:14
The post-COVID event in 2022 was the first sold-out event we ever
7:18
had on a day. We just sold out an event — our whole world is going
7:21
to change. But back then we did not know what was about to come.
7:27
The company had survived the shutdown. And more importantly,
7:30
it had spent the shutdown building the community it would need for the rebound.
7:35
HYROX has since become more than race entries. It has built a multi-layered business.
7:41
In 2026, we have four main revenue streams. One is ticketing — that
7:45
includes spectator tickets and athlete tickets. Also in the tickets included,
7:49
are photograph solutions and some other add-ons that we consider belong to ticketing.
7:55
The next big revenue stream for us — almost 15% of our revenue — is merch. So,
8:01
we have our own Puma co-created merch range, that we're selling at the events and the online shop.
8:06
The third revenue stream is sponsorships — also between 10 and 15% from the overall revenue.
8:11
And then 10% of the revenue is gym licenses — gyms can buy a license
8:15
from us and consider them an affiliated gym to offer HYROX training at their facilities.
8:20
HYROX is on track to deliver around $270 million
8:25
in revenue in 2026 — and has done it with almost no paid marketing.
8:30
The reality is that we don't do paid ads top of funnel.
8:33
HYROX is a very explanatory product that needs a lot of explanation to
8:37
fully understand what it is. If someone has never heard of HYROX,
8:40
it is completely a waste of money for me to just push a paid ad to that person on social media.
8:46
Instead, HYROX built through people already inside the sport: gyms, coaches,
8:51
athletes and smaller creators whose audiences believed they actually trained for the race.
8:56
For HYROX as a sport, the most important thing is authenticity in regards to whoever
9:01
is showcasing what they are doing and that they are racing in HYROX.
9:03
At the beginning of course we tried through partners of ours that would send us a couple
9:07
of influencer celebrities that would post for us. It didn't sell a single ticket.
9:12
The small gym guy with 4,000 followers, but with a gym with 2,000 members,
9:18
posted something and sold 100 tickets for us.
9:20
That explains one of HYROX’s biggest strategic choices:
9:24
it did not become a gym chain. It made gyms part of the distribution network.
9:29
We could open 100 gyms now worldwide,
9:31
and they might be very successful. But then we would only have 100 gyms that are doing HYROX.
9:37
Now, currently, we have almost 16,000 gyms where you can train HYROX. We don't want
9:42
to get into competition with our 16,000 gym partners. So why should we open gyms
9:47
if we have the bigger picture in mind?
9:50
For HYROX, the gym is not just a sales channel. It is a local sports
9:54
club - the place where athletes train, talk, recruit friends and prepare for race day.
10:00
HYROX’s growth has been strongest across continental Europe, the UK and
10:04
North America — but the Middle East has quickly become one of its clearest expansion priorities.
10:10
Basically, our global expansion strategy always entailed having
10:14
HYROX events. Our dream was in the 150 urban metropolitan cities in the world,
10:20
and we did a list. We went through it without having been to all of them.
10:25
Abu Dhabi, Dubai, these were all cities that were part of the list. It was always
10:30
clear that the Middle East are a very, very important part of our business.
10:34
In Abu Dhabi, HYROX staged a race at one of the emirate’s major exhibition and events venues,
10:40
in collaboration with its sports council.
10:42
More than 3,500 athletes from 124 nationalities took part.
10:48
For HYROX, it was proof that the same format that began with 650 people in
10:54
Hamburg could travel into one of the world’s most ambitious sports markets.
10:59
But global demand creates a new problem. The race can be replicated city to city,
11:04
but the experience cannot be overcrowded.
11:06
Scarcity is important. I mean, the reality is that due to the fact that tickets are very hard to get,
11:12
that's what keeps people coming back and keeps people looking
11:16
into opportunities to maybe even fly to another city or travel to another city.
11:20
We sold 15,000 tickets in New York in 2025. We sold 55,000 tickets this year in one hour.
11:27
We could have probably sold 80,000, but internally we were already like,
11:32
we are crazy, we are nuts. Why are we offering 55,000 tickets?
11:36
Moritz’s next ambition is bigger than race weekends. He sees HYROX as a platform for
11:42
hybrid-racing, the broader sport the company helped popularize,
11:46
and one that could eventually have an Olympic pathway.
11:49
I am 100% convinced that hybrid racing as
11:53
a sport will be included into the Olympic Games over the next decade.
11:58
HYROX as a brand will most likely not be an Olympic discipline, but it's very likely that
12:05
the hybrid racing Olympic Games, if you want to qualify for that, , you are qualifying
12:11
through HYROX. That's a path we're working on together with World Triathlon, the IOC,
12:16
and with all the players involved. It would be a full circle moment for me
12:19
to see HYROX ending up being at least the path towards the Olympics one day.
12:24
HYROX is also expanding beyond the race itself. Through HYROX Experiences,
12:30
the company is trying to create more moments between weekly training and
12:33
race day — from fitness travel to camps, resorts and other community-led events.
12:40
Music and sports are the only two things in the world that can bring people together,
12:44
regardless of their ethnicity or religion or whatever it is,
12:47
and these are celebration moments that we want to create.
12:50
After three Olympic medals, a near-collapse during COVID,
12:54
and a sport now on track for $270 million, Moritz resists giving founders a formula.
13:01
I am not a fan of advice at all. I don't think there are good advice in life. My experience,
13:07
and this is what I can share, if you believe in what you're doing,
13:10
then you should always pursue that. And you will know if you believe in what
13:15
you're doing — because if you are questioning yourself, then you're not believing in it.
