At the 2025 TYR Wodapalooza in Miami, we witnessed one of the most impressive injury comebacks in CrossFit competition history.
- After sitting out two seasons due to a wrist injury that required multiple surgeries, the UK’s Lucy Campbell, a 2022 CrossFit Games rookie, came out of nowhere to win the women’s division. Not only did she take the top spot, but she did so against a stacked field that included Arielle Loewen, Emily Rolfe, Brooke Wells, Alexis Raptis, and 2023 Games champion Laura Horvath.
At one point, even coming back to competition at all seemed unlikely for Campbell. After her first operation, her surgeon told her, “There is literally nothing I can do for you.”
What makes Campbell’s comeback even more impressive comes down to three factors:
- She sat out two full CrossFit Games seasons before coming back and winning one of arguably the top three biggest competitions of the year.
- Campbell isn’t exactly a veteran in the sport. She only has one CrossFit Games to her name, where she placed 16th overall and had never finished on the podium at any major event before her injury.
- She wasn’t even able to perform movements like ring muscle-ups or barbell cleans until very recently, so the fact that she could even be competitive, let alone win, is worth noting.
Campbell’s comeback in Miami last month got us reminiscing about other noteworthy comebacks in CrossFit history. Here are the four we picked.
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Most Impressive In-Competition Comeback — Will Moorad
Will Moorad’s 2022 Semifinals performance takes the cake as the most impressive come-from-behind moment during a competition.
Remind me: Will Moorad was in 10th place, five spots, and 76 points out of the final qualifying spot heading into the last day at the 2022 Syndicate Crown Semifinals. It was a deficit that seemed impossible to overcome.
- The final workout — “King Kong 2.0” — included three rounds of ring muscle-ups, deficit handstand push-ups, sandbag-to-shoulders, and squat snatches. At the time, everyone was focused on Tudor Magda and Matt Poulin, who sat at the cutline in fifth and sixth, respectively. Moorad was so far back that his name wasn’t mentioned on the broadcast — the cameras didn’t even pay any attention to him.
But he blew through the event in a time of 5:43, picking up a win and making up 81 points to beat James Sprague by just one point to earn his fourth trip to the CrossFit Games. It was the biggest single-event comeback in Regional or Semifinal history.
Most Impressive Comeback Kid — Cole Sager
If there were an award for the athlete who has a consistent knack for coming from behind to qualify for the CrossFit Games, it would undoubtedly go to Cole Sager.
On more than a couple of occasions, the 11-time Games athlete dug himself a hole at Regionals or Semifinals before finding a way to get it done on the final day and in the final event.
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2016: At the 2016 West Regional, with five qualifying spots up for grabs to the Games, Sager sat in 10th place at the end of Day 1 and ninth after Day 2.
- With his back up against the wall heading into the final event, Sager essentially needed an event win to have a chance at earning his invite to the Games. He delivered just that, doing just enough to earn the fifth and final qualifying spot.
2023: Cole Sager entered the sixth event in 11th, three spots and 21 points outside of the CrossFit Games cutline.
- “This guy is used to making comebacks on the final day,” announcer Sean Woodland said.
Sure enough, Sager stepped up again, finishing the weekend with two strong performances and doing just enough to snag the ninth and final qualifying spot for the 2023 Games.
2024: The 2024 North America West Semifinals were a similar story: Sager again found himself having to fight for his life to clinch the final qualifying spot with one event to go.
- Sager and Colten Mertens were separated by just three points on the cutline heading into the final event, setting Sager up for his usual come-from-behind qualification. Once again, he managed to do exactly what was required to snag the eighth out of nine Games invites en route to his 11th CrossFit Games.
Most Impressive Injury Comeback — Brooke Wells
This list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Brooke Wells’ comeback in 2022 after undergoing reconstructive elbow surgery.
Remind me: Wells tore her ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) and dislocated her elbow at the 2021 CrossFit Games during a max snatch event. The injury required surgery and a long rehabilitation process with no promise that she would ever regain her form.
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- The following year, Wells did the improbable, considering the severity of her injury. She not only made it back to Madison, WI, but she went on to finish fifth at the 2022 Games, tying her best-ever placing.
Most Impressive Postpartum Comeback — Annie Thorisdottir
While we have to mention Tia-Clair Toomey-Orr’s pregnancy in 2023 and her return to win her seventh CrossFit Games in 2024, to some degree (as spectacular as that was), it was kind of what we expected from the G.O.A.T.
Annie Thorisdottir, however, sat out the 2020 season to have her first child, Freyja, and was not expected to return to the podium the following year. But that’s exactly what she did when she finished third at the 2021 Games.
- What made this comeback particularly impressive is that Thorisdottir, a 12-time Games athlete, hadn’t been on the podium since 2017 and had to come back from a difficult birth and postpartum recovery that included some serious diastasis recti (abdominal separation common after pregnancy.)
Four years after giving birth to her first child, Thorisdottir, now a mother of two, told the Morning Chalk Up even she can’t believe she was able to do that
- “I think it’s still a miracle, in my head, that I actually podiumed [the year] after having Freyja. That’s ridiculous, and it makes no sense to me that I was capable of doing that,” she said.
Thorisdottir may be a two-time Games champion, but her performance in 2021 still goes down as one of the most impressive comebacks of any kind in CrossFit Games history.
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Featured Image: Ava Kitzi
