I always write this column on my way home from an event, in the window where the raw emotion is still at the surface. Fair warning: I am the person who cries at The X Factor when someone finally achieves the thing and in the same vein, Rogue is the weekend of the year I love the most.

What Caity and Bill Henniger have built feels like a family reunion for the sport and I say that fully aware that family reunion is one of the laziest phrases I can reach for but I cannot think of a better one. CrossFit athletes, strongmen and strongwomen all competing in the same arena across the same weekend. James Sprague and Mitchell Hooper having lunch together is not a thing that happens anywhere else.

Legends from a decade ago are back on the floor, quietly advising the people who grew up watching them. Crew, volunteers and fans fly in from every continent because this is the weekend they want to be at and nobody is in a hurry to leave.

A Different Version of Elite Sport

There is a version of elite sport and we have all seen it, in which the athletes arrive composed and leave composed and nobody at any point sees anything of the actual person. Rogue does not do that. Rogue has, somewhere along the way, built the kind of weekend where the athletes feel at ease enough to show the whole person inside the competitor. Warm and funny and affectionate, sharp and challenging and antagonistic. The thousands of people in the P&J Live trust the format enough to meet them there.

This is the weekend where Harry Lightfoot has twice now had the kind of moment that goes viral. One year running around the crowd mid-event. Another year tumbling into the buzzer and breaking it. These are not things that happen at the other events on the calendar, they happen at Rogue because the format gives him room to be fully himself in the middle of a competition that will test him as hard as anything in the sport.

Chandler Smith has slid down Matter Hill at Dell Diamond with a level of unguarded personality you forget elite athletes still carry. Gui Malheiros has danced on top of the power stairs after a win in a way nobody in a season-points chase would ever risk.

James Sprague has photobombed what feels like every volunteer photograph taken on the floor of this event over multiple years. These are elite athletes being, for one weekend, themselves.

Serious, But Fun

The best part is, the crowd gets to be in on it. Rogue is the only elite event in this sport that will stop in the middle of a day of competition for a bit of fun with the room. Everybody is drinking beers. A blow-up horse race called by Matt Chan. Hafþór Björnsson pulled out of the stands and put in goal. Brent Fikowski launching prizes into the crowd. Rich Froning deploying voices nobody else gets to hear him put on.

These are the moments the crew will tell you were their favorite part of the weekend and the moments the fans are still talking about on the way to the airport the next morning. None of it takes away from the competition but all of it makes everyone in the building feel like they are allowed to laugh. Sport can and should be serious, but as we know from our gyms and affiliates back home, it is also meant to be fun.

The Rogue Legends

The legends get to be themselves too and that might be my favourite part. Rogue gives them a weekend to be fully present in the sport they built.

To help the current crop, catch up with the people they used to compete against, spend time with the fans who have followed them for years. Pat Vellner was forced into premature retirement by a ruptured Achilles only a few months ago, and he has turned up at Rogue as one of the most generous presences. He has quietly been helping half the field with workout strategy, with new movements, with back problems.

He loaned Jack Farlow his Garmin this weekend. He is also perfectly comfortable skulling a pint on camera in front of a crowd. Josh Bridges brings a personality to every interaction, and this weekend was willing to put himself out there whether that was drinking beer, doing burpees or taking over the microphone.

Tia-Clair Toomey-Orr, a women who redefined what competing at the top of a sport looks like, was MC-ing fans on the Echo Ski and chatting to them like they had been friends forever. Watching these humans get to spend a weekend inside the sport they built is one of the best things in it.

The Competition Itself

And then there is the competition itself, which is why all of this works. Nothing I have described above would land if Rogue was not also one of the hardest, most creative, most testing weekends of programming on the calendar.

The athletes are being properly tested. The standard is as high as the sport gets, and Caity Henniger has held it there for years. So when a competitor who has just put themselves through a tough day gets to crack a joke in an interview, dance on a podium, or share a moment with a crowd, that is what provides the warmth.

You are not watching them stop being an elite athlete, you are watching an elite athlete be a whole person, in a weekend that has decided those two things do not have to be mutually exclusive.

The Results and Beyond

Lucy Campbell won the women’s title, her self-belief finally catching up to her ability after a horrific wrist injury. A cutaway shot of her family watching her achieve her dream was enough to set me off, and judging by the room, I was not alone.

Dallin Pepper won the men’s, having missed the competition last year and fallen short at the Games. He had been publicly watched chasing something, falling short, and once more publicly watched, but this time arriving.

James Sprague and Tudor Magda, his best mates since the teenage CrossFit Games, stood either side of him.

Trey Mitchell took strongman. Angelica Jardine took strongwomen, a division Rogue added two years ago to serve the community. All of them leave with prize purses that will allow their careers to continue for years. The results page tells one version of all this. The weekend tells a bigger one and what the Rogue Invitational has done for fitness and strength sports cannot be overstated.

I am never surprised by how much I love this weekend. What catches me off guard every year is why. Most of what I do for a living is watch elite athletes be the composed, contained, trained version of themselves. Rogue is the weekend I get to watch them be more than that.

Pat skulling a pint. Annie Sakamoto making the broadcast team panic with innuendo. Harry Lightfoot carrying the crowd on a lap he was never meant to run. Dallin crying on a podium. It’s a competition culture where the people I spend my career watching are allowed to be whole humans, to be themselves in front of thousands.

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