The 2020 Rogue Invitational is one of multiple CrossFit Sanctionals® competitions that has been postponed due to the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
On March 18th, it was announced that the Rogue Invitational originally set to be held on May 16-17 at Rogue HQ in Columbus, Ohio would be postponed until June 13-14 due to concerns surrounding the coronavirus outbreak. On March 24th, an additional announcement was made by the Rogue team that the Rogue Invitational will now take place online.
The Rogue Invitational was expected to gather nearly six thousand people for the event.
“Bringing 6,000 people from all over the world is not the right thing to do given the crisis the world faces today. We want to have an event with the athletes, spectators and vendors all feel safe without hesitation.”
Although the competition is moving online, the Rogue team still intends to stream the event in its entirety.
“Our goal is to stream from the athlete’s location to a live event that the whole world can watch.”
The shift to online competition will not change the prize money that will be paid out and Rogue is refunding all ticket holders who were planning on attending to spectate the competition live.
This is not the first time this season that a CrossFit Sanctionals® competition has decided to move online. On March 11, the 2020 CrossFit Italian Showdown announced it would move online due to the lockdown currently in effect across Italy.
At the 2019 Rogue Invitational, Mat Fraser and Tia-Clair Toomey stood atop the podiums in the men’s and women’s individual divisions, respectively. CrossFit OC3 took first place in the team competition after defeating CrossFit Invictus Back Bay in the tug-of-war.
2020 Reebok CrossFit Games
Despite the postponements of multiple CrossFit Sanctionals® competitions thus far due to the pandemic, there has not yet been any schedule changes made to the 2020 Reebok CrossFit Games. On March 11, CrossFit HQ announced that:
“event planning procedures [will] include patient observation of the coronavirus (COVID-19).”
Feature image via Mathew Fraser’s Instagram page: @mathewfras
