Dave Castro Shares Regrets, Says Firing CrossFit Media Team in 2018 “Set Us Back”
As Dave Castro wraps up his final interviews with the 79 (excluding Ilya Makarov) 2024 CrossFit Games athletes, we continue to focus on Castro’s insights into this year’s upcoming competition and his reflections on the past.
One big thing: Not one to admit regrets publicly (at least very often, in our estimation), Castro’s statement that CrossFit has been in a “rebuilding and recovering” phase since 2018, at least from a media perspective, is, in a word, huge.
The details: When chatting with Jacqueline Dahlstrom, the Norwegian athlete asked him if he has any general regrets, knowing what he knows now about the sport and its growth, and if there’s anything he would do differently if he could.
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Castro ruminated on CrossFit’s drastic decision in 2018 to fire a large majority of its media team and shut down their social media accounts.
- “I believe [this] set us back,” Castro says. “If you look at that moment, [2018], [2019], when we shut down our media, social media [and] started getting rid of our media teams, it kind of set us back, and it feels like we’ve been rebuilding and recovering from then.”
He continues to discuss how this decision had a negative impact on CrossFit’s trajectory.
- “The Open was on this growth path that was straight up, and the Games was growing and literally when you look at that time frame, it just went down…. So we’ve been coming out of a hole ever since then,” Castro continued.
Some background: The culling of the media team in 2018 was a bizarre decision, and Castro is open to admitting that he regrets it. CrossFit and the CrossFit Games also shuttered all social media accounts except Twitter.
Creators like Buttery Bros’ Heber Cannon and Marston Sawyers were let go after 10 years of work, including producing some of the top 100 best-selling documentaries of all times on iTunes: Fittest on Earth: The Story of the 2016 Reebok CrossFit Games, Fittest on Earth: A Decade of Fitness (2017), and The Redeemed and the Dominant: Fittest on Earth (2018).
- All are staples of any CrossFitter’s viewing library.
The Buttery Bros. were only two of about 100 media team members let go between 2018 and 2019.
In a 2019 interview with the Morning Chalk Up, Tomm Marquez, another media team member who went on to create Talking Elite Fitness with Sean Woodland, said:
- “I do still believe that they can actually put on an effective CrossFit Games primarily because the major players still in place heavily lean towards the event side.” Marquez continued, “Most of the fallout is going to be on the media side of things.”
The bottom line: This was a candid admission from Castro, the GM of Sport for CrossFit, and not one he has made publicly in the past (to our knowledge). It also provided a unique insight into how the most forward-facing member of CrossFit HQ views the past move.
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Featured image: CrossFit