The headlines said a private equity firm bought Hyrox. Read the actual announcement and the direction reverses: Christian Toetzke and Moritz Fürste, the two men who invented the thing, bought their company back. The Hyrox L Catterton transaction takes Infront Sports & Media — the Swiss agency that had held the majority since 2022 — off the cap table, with L Catterton and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo coming in alongside the founders. Terms weren’t disclosed. Reported figures put the business around €600 million, which nobody involved has confirmed. Bloomberg reported the deal on September 9.
So what does €600 million buy in a business whose product is people running around a convention centre?
Not the events. The events are the marketing. What Hyrox owns is a standard.
A Hyrox race is eight one-kilometre runs, alternating with eight fixed workout stations — ski erg, sled push, sled pull, burpee broad jumps, rowing, farmers carry, sandbag lunges, wall balls. Same eight, same order, same distances, everywhere. That sounds like a boring detail. It is the entire asset. Because the format never varies, a time posted in Hamburg means exactly what a time posted in Dallas means. Marathons have this too, and it’s why a marathon is a thing you can have a personal best in. Almost nothing else in fitness does.
Once you have a standard, you can license it. That’s where the money quietly lives. Thousands of gyms around the world pay roughly $1,500 a year to call themselves Hyrox Training Clubs — a rounding error for a gym, one new member covers it — and in exchange they get the name, the programming, and a listing where athletes searching for race prep will find them. The gym then does the recruiting. It builds the classes, fills them, and delivers trained racers to Hyrox’s events, which the racers pay again to enter. Revenue went from roughly €40 million in 2024 to €130–140 million in 2025 on a marketing budget close to nothing, because the marketing is being done by thousands of small business owners who are paying for the privilege. The same shape shows up whenever a brand is rented rather than sold — we looked at it through Care Bears, of all things.
Now compare that to a marathon, which is the obvious analogue and the wrong one. Nobody owns “the marathon.” The distance belongs to athletics federations, individual races are run by separate organisers, and the rankings are scattered. Hyrox owns all of it at once — the format, the events, the rankings, and the certification that lets a gym train for it. That is closer to owning a sport than owning a race company.
Which is also the risk, and it’s the reason the founders wanting control back is the interesting part of the Hyrox L Catterton story. When a company owns the whole of one sport, it has no second business to fall back on. Fitness formats have a history of arriving very fast and leaving the same way. The upside of owning the standard is that everyone has to come through you. The downside is that there’s only one thing to own.
My take: Owning a sport means owning a trend, and trends don’t renew their licence.