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Joanna Wietrzyk won all four Majors last season, came 2nd on an off-day at Worlds and has now won the first Elite (previously Major) race of this season.
The aftermath of the Beijing incident had some people wondering what the future may hold for her, and she might have wondered herself. But she made her feelings clear in a public statement on Instagram and an interview with the BBC. She was sorry for what happened and now it’s time to move on and let her performances do the talking. Her race in Hamburg spoke volumes, as she finished ahead of a resurgent Lauren Weeks to take her fifth consecutive Elite15 victory.
Lauren Weeks? The three-time World Champion keeps pushing her own levels and was within 14 seconds this weekend, so she has a chance. In fact if you ignore her lifetime PB on the fastest course in history (Warsaw in April), Weeks’s Hamburg race was only a second off her next-fastest time, set in Glasgow last year. Weeks is about ten years older than Wietrzyk but may still be getting faster.
Mcelheny? She has done it before but was slightly off it in Hamburg.
Ascending track stars Eybergen and Millard will have their eyes on Wietrzyk at the back end of the season I suspect, as they continue to improve their stations work and adapt to compromised running. (Although Eyebergen’s victory this weekend in a regional cross-country race is a reminder that her priorities lie elsewhere.)
And you can’t rule out Meg Jacoby if she continues her current momentum and stays injury-free. It will be interesting to see her progress under new coach Thiago Lousa, whose less-volume-more-intensity approach has been behind Alex Roncevic’s record-breaking performances.
Wietrzyk also combined with Calypso Sheridan to win the (non-Elite15) women’s Pro Doubles in Hamburg, cruising to victory over two minutes ahead of the rest of the field. They now have two wins, 210 points, and sit one more event win away from a place in the Elite15 (Strength of Field score permitting). Expect to see them in the London Elite15 race.
And given another convincing Weeks-Tafuto win in the Elite doubles, the Wietrzyk-Weeks rivalry looks set to continue in both race formats: great fun for all of us watching.
Sean Noble claims to be a man of less-than-elite talent but who loves pain enough to prevail. But a love of pain alone won’t get you to a 53:19 Elite15 win. Sean’s one of the very talented all-rounders in the Elite field who can compete on every run and doesn’t lose ground on the stations either. All that came together on Friday night as a see-saw battle with Luke Greer saw Noble finally grab the win by just two seconds as he came from behind on the wall balls.
While not one of the favourites due to suffering with injury for much of the off-season, he will be a marked man for the rest of the season and nobody can be confident they have him beat. Same goes for him in the doubles with his partner Ronan Lindsay. They won the standard Pro race in Hamburg to jump into Challenger15 with a top-end Elite15 time of 49:40.
The men’s doubles points system is crazy at this point. You can win all three of your qualifying races and be down in 21st place depending on your Strength of Field score. There surely needs to be a change to the system to allow real movement up and down the rankings, as things are too static and locked down as they are.
Greer too came in relatively unfancied. Like Noble he has rounded into form recently and enjoyed a strong win in Budapest, but had been low on confidence after some earlier near-misses. Despite the strong performance in Hamburg he was underwhelmed by qualifying for Elite15 in the World Championships, given he led into the wall balls and lost by about a second, but commented to me afterwards that he was at least, “Trending in the right direction.”
I don’t know what we’re supposed to do after that.
At least the women, despite some off-days, didn’t make us look so bad. It didn’t need Nostradamus to give a Wietrzyk-Weeks one-two.
Fabian Eisenlauer and Paul Weindl have both DNF’d recent singles races due to flaring injuries as they prioritised their partnership. Most recently DNF’ing the singles Challenger race the day before their Elite doubles in Hamburg. They weren’t in many people’s top 5 predictions, which was harsh as they have been sub-50 minutes twice before Hamburg. So a new PB of 49:18 and 4th place overall surprised other people more than it did Eisenlauer. “No mistakes and we win,” was his summary to me when looking back.
USA Athletics recently celebrated five athletes losing to Jakob Ingebrigtsen in a 5K. So as an Englishman I feel content to do likewise: big up 2nd and 3rd in both men’s and women’s Elite15 doubles: Botterill & Dearen followed by Greer & Williamson in the men’s, and Searle & Stockley followed by Millard & Archer (a hair ahead of 4th) in the women’s.
I should probably also mention…
Another race, another win for seemingly unbeatable duo Lauren Weeks and Vivian Tafuto. But what makes them so good? Tafuto is fond of saying essentially ‘well Lauren is amazing and I just hold on.’ Which is a classy response but also only half the story. So what other factors make the difference, I asked her?
“I think our strengths are almost opposite on the stations so we each get to capitalise well there and seriously Lauren is so so so gritty and if she’s having a day, she’s so unbelievable on the burpees to the point where the gap is almost too much to overcome.
In terms of qualifying [for Elite15 World Championships] early it gets us to the driver’s seat in how we can set up the rest of our season, risks we can take in races, different strategies we can try, etc. Also for me personally, I’ve struggled in the races at the end of the season for the last two years now, so it’s letting me try out taking a short break in the middle of the season to try to recover and reset without worrying about qualifying.”
That’s what Cole Learn said a few weeks ago and he wasn’t wrong. There was a cluster of pairings with a legit shot at the crown in Hamburg but Dubé and Learn grabbed it with both hands, posting a searing 47:54. Learn has been very vocal of late in wanting stiffer competition in the Pro races and the two of them backed that up in the most powerful way possible.
Meanwhile the top FIVE teams finished under 50 minutes, a mark that has already become a line in the sand for would-be contenders.
The new Challenger15 race was brought in this season as another way into the Elite15. Points scorers ranked 16-30 were invited to Hamburg for a race that had points, but also provided the winner with a ticket to the Elite15 race in Hamburg. That place comes at the expense of the 15th-ranked athlete on points, who will drop into the Challenger15 race.
So there was plenty at stake in all four Challenger15 races, as evidenced by some epic battles and finishes.
Jannik Czapla, Doubles World Champion with Tim Wenisch in 2025, was ranked 24th in singles coming into the race and won by 23 seconds ahead of Frédéric Dubé, in 53:58. He is now 18th in the rankings and looking forward to the London Elite15 singles. “it was amazing,” he told me; an “unbelievable feeling to win this race in front of my home crowd. I started with a lot of confidence into the race and pushed from the beginning. If I was after the burpees in a very good position I knew that I can win it today…it is good to know during the race about my strength in the second half of the race.”
In the women’s singles, Stefanie Oswald pulled her sled down the lane FIVE times rather than four, “had a cramp in my left quad from the sled pull onwards” and said it “wasn’t really my race.” So did she come last? Well, not exactly… She won the Challenger15 race by 15 seconds from Pettrow and Arning to put herself straight into the London Elite15 race. “I got my spot and that feels absolutely amazing!!” she said.
The women’s doubles Challenger event saw Gloria Corbetta & Camilla Massa win by 12 seconds over Swiss duo Melanie Maurer & Celine von Potobsky who clocked 56:38. Meanwhile previous Elite15 staples the Vandenlindenloof sisters were down in fourth and will look to bounce back in London as they attempt to make the Elite15 races in Bangkok, Vegas or Lyon.
On the men’s side, Louis Osselaer & Emile Mattheuws had a see-saw battle against Hidde Weersma & Thierry Willigenburg. The latter pairing were quicker on the runs, while the former generally had the edge on the stations, so it was impossible to see at any point who really had the edge.
“Towards the wall balls,” Osselaer told me, “they tried to shake us off with acceleration in the beginning of the last run…we stayed patient and we caught them on the wall balls [even though] I started off with two no-reps on the target.” For next time, “We need to work a little bit on the running… [but] I think we got the fastest stations with the Elite race combined; that’s where we made the difference and that’s where we will keep making the difference in the future.” And bearing in mind Emile has only been doing Hyrox for 10 months this is a pair to be wary of in the Elite15 in London as he is only going to get better.
And if you like watching ecstatic celebrations, watch Osselaer & Mattheeuws’ win. A come-from-behind win in 49:15, only 4 seconds ahead of the runner’s up and booking your ticket to Elite15…it shows.
Cole Learn was DQ’d at Worlds for leaving the ski erg with his counter at 999m. And in Hamburg the Women’s Challenger15 Doubles pairing of Lauren Richardson and Sam Pretty fell foul of the same rule as Pretty left the rower a meter shy of the distance. Race over.
Hunter trains at high altitude most of the time but even he found the going tough in the thin air and high temperatures of Mexico City.
Footage of him on the burpees seems like a man reaching the end of his capacity. Which he may have been, but that capacity is still levels ahead of almost everyone else and he eased to a 59:04 first place, 105 points, 10th in the rankings and his placed effectively booked for the London Elite15 race.
He and new doubles partner Gabe Piepergerdes later cantered their way to victory in the doubles. Piepergerdes most likely gained the distinction of being the only athlete to do a cartwheel on the way to his row erg in the middle of a men’s singles Pro race. As he later noted on instagram, it didn’t seem to improve his overall result.
Other than Mexico City where McIntyre was the star of the show, there were also Pro races in Hamburg, Nice and Birmingham. See end of article for the full results. On the men’s side notable results include Stephen Pelkofer’s long-awaited victory, a return to form for Sam Schoeman and Dylan ‘race-every-week’ Caruso winning doubles with partner Eugenio Bianchi. For the women, Jennifer Nikolaus continues her early-season charge and Anne Bonnin scores a second and first in singles and doubles at the Nice event.
I looked it up so you don’t have to…here is how the points work for Elite15 and Challenger15 races. Numbers are taken directly from HYROX, explanations are mine:
11th-15th: so long as they finish within 20% of the winner’s times, all five of these athletes receive a points total that equates to the winner’s time expressed as a percentage of their time. For example, if the winning time is 54:00 and the 12th placed finisher does 57:00, that means that the winner’s time is 94.74% of the 12th placed finisher’s time. And so 12th place receives 94.74 points.
(In normal Pro races the fixed points totals go 105, 100, then time-dependent for 3rd to 8th. In the World Championships they go 115, 112, 110, 109, 108, 107, 106, 105, 103, 100, then time-dependent for 11th to 15th.)
Should the runner-up in the Elite15 division really only secure as many points as the winner of Challenger15? And should 3rd in Challenger15 really get more than 8th in Elite15?
On pure merit, possibly not. But if you’re going to have any movement at all between divisions, you do need to make it so the second tier isn’t locked out by the opportunity for massive points bonuses all the way down the Elite15 field. The system is already stacked quite heavily in favour of those who start the season in the Elite15, against those trying to get in. Particularly when you consider that as of now, winning five Pro races would NOT be enough to get you a place in the London Elite15 race.
NEXT WEEK: the Hyrox blimp is tethered and we can all draw breath. Brace yourself though, because the week after that are SIX races across Europe (3), the Middle East, Asia and USA.
In the meantime, catch Hybrid Fitness Report podcast later this week, when Jude and I review the Hyrox Cruise and the Hamburg Elite races…although all trace of our Hamburg men’s singles predictions will be wiped off the internet before then as we got them so badly wrong it’s embarrassing, although we did OK on the others…
ELITE15 MEN SINGLES
ELITE15 WOMEN SINGLES
CHALLENGER 15 MEN SINGLES
CHALLENGER 15 WOMEN SINGLES
ELITE15 MEN DOUBLES
ELITE15 WOMEN DOUBLES
CHALLENGER 15 MEN DOUBLES
CHALLENGER 15 WOMEN DOUBLES
MEN PRO SINGLES
WOMEN PRO SINGLES
MEN PRO DOUBLES
WOMEN PRO DOUBLES
MIXED DOUBLES
MEN PRO SINGLES
WOMEN PRO SINGLES
MEN PRO DOUBLES
WOMEN PRO DOUBLES
MIXED DOUBLES
MEN PRO SINGLES
WOMEN PRO SINGLES
MEN PRO DOUBLES
WOMEN PRO DOUBLES
MIXED DOUBLES
MEXICO CITY
MEN PRO SINGLES
WOMEN PRO SINGLES
MEN PRO DOUBLES
WOMEN PRO DOUBLES
MIXED DOUBLES
CREDIT: all data on current and projected future rankings positions and current points totals, is taken from prohyroxstats.com.
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