2025 CrossFit Open Registration Trending Down 40% Year-Over-Year

The 2025 CrossFit Open begins in 30 days. Register here.

“The Open is a Barometer. It tests your fitness and can forecast the year to come.” 

I wrote these words one year ago to start the first Open Report, and It seems like a fitting start for our second year of tracking Open registrations.

Last year’s introduction continued:

• “The Open is also reading the atmospheric pressure on CrossFit HQ. With the last few years of ups and downs, the coming and going (and second coming) of leadership, recent changes in affiliate fees, sponsor changes, re-location of the Games, CEO Don Faul’s stated goal of 33,000,000 CrossFitters, the list goes on… a lot of eyes are the 2024 Open to gauge if the recent changes will continue a positive climb or if a chill is in the air.”

The atmosphere, as it were, was looking good in March 2024. 

Nearly 344,000 athletes had registered for the Open. That number equated to 6.34% in year-over-year growth and a return to numbers last seen in 2019.

Year	Attendance	Percent +/-, YoY
2019	357,000	-14.18%
2020	239,106	-33.02%
2021	263,529	+10.21%
2022	293,805	+11.49%
2023	323,014	+9.94%
2024	343,496	+6.34%

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These numbers included everyone, from athletes competing in their very first Open at a brand-new affiliate, like my friends at CrossFit Fairfield, to 462 athletes who had competed in every single Open since the start. 

While the 2024 CrossFit Open showed a slight drop from the approximately 10% annual growth of the three seasons before it, the chart was still moving up and to the right in a positive direction, making what looked to be a second climb back to the peak in 2018.

As the 2025 CrossFit Games season begins, some of last year’s concerns remain, while new ones have emerged in the aftermath of Lazar Ðukić’s death at the 2024 CrossFit Games, the subsequent investigation response, and the announcement of another overhaul in the season structure.

• CrossFitters gonna CrossFit, though, and HQ is betting heavily that the broader CrossFit community will show up en masse in the Open, as this season’s registration fees will fund the CrossFit Games prize purse.

Measurable, Observable, and Repeatable

This is our second year of tracking the Open daily, which will allow for additional insights and comparisons of year-over-year growth. 

• Similar to how we track our lifting percentages, times on benchmark workouts, or even macros, tracking for 40 days and not comparing over time doesn’t get you very far.

In Greg Glassman’s 2007 article “Understanding CrossFit,” the founder of the methodology wrote:

• “The methodology that drives CrossFit is entirely empirical. We believe that meaningful statements about safety, efficacy, and efficiency, the three most important and interdependent facets of any fitness program, can be supported only by measurable, observable, repeatable facts, i.e., data. We call this approach ‘evidence-based fitness.’” 

While preparing for the “Unknown and Unknowable” is also central to the CrossFit methodology, it was with “Measurable and Observable” in mind that we set out tracking last year and again this year (Repeatable). 

Coach Glassman continued, explaining why this type of data is necessary:

• “The CrossFit methodology depends on full disclosure of methods, results, and criticisms, and we’ve employed the Internet (and various intranets) to support these values. Our charter is open source, making co-developers out of participating coaches, athletes, and trainers through a spontaneous and collaborative online community. CrossFit is empirically driven, clinically tested, and community developed.”

A running tally of daily registrations (at Known and Knowable) feeds insight, but it also may feed registration growth. 

With registration numbers tied to the Games prize purse, more registrations mean more money to the best affiliates and athletes in the Sport of Fitness.

• Day-to-day tracking is important for affiliates, who can possibly win $2,500 gift cards from Rogue Fitness. It’s equally important for athletes planning to compete for the prize purse. 

That’s where this report comes in. It’s a weekly check-in on Open Registration numbers, where they stand in historical contexts, and a current breakdown of prize money funding.

Open Report – Weekly Update 1

We are now 13 days into registration and 34 days until the Open 25.1 submission date.

Based on competitive division, the current registration progress looks like this:

Based on competitive region, the current registration progress looks like this:

We’re averaging around 2.3k total each day after the first-day total of 8,904. Okay, but what’s that look like compared to the previous year?

During the same days in 2024, the average day-over-day addition of registrations was 3.6k after the initial day one of 20,982.

As of the publishing of this article, 2025’s totals so far would equate to $340,420 in prize money, divided into the following categories:

Games – Individual	$166,805.80
Games – Teams	$34,042.00
Open – Individual	$17,021.00
Open – Affiliate	$68,084.00
Masters Games	$34,042.00
Adaptive Games	$10,212.60
Online Semifinal	$10,212.60

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This will be our weekly monitor as the Open approaches, and we will go through 25.3. I will also post daily check-ins at @known_knowable on Instagram.

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• 25% of Top 200 CrossFit Athletes Say ‘No’ to 2025 CrossFit Games Season in Recent Survey
• A Third Pathway to the 2025 CrossFit Games Leaked: Last-Chance Qualifier

Featured image: Keith Knapp, @crossfitfairfield / Instagram