FORT WORTH, Texas >> The atmosphere at the closing ceremony of the CrossFit Games last week at Dickies Arena, a 14,000-seat venue in Fort Worth, Texas, was decidedly solemn.

Ordinarily a triumphant moment for the men and women named the “fittest on earth” after participating in a four-day competition involving grueling feats of physical strength and endurance, the festivities this year were overshadowed by the death of a competitor on the first day of the contest. Lazar Dukic, a 28-year-old athlete from Serbia, died during an 800-meter open-water swim in Marine Creek Lake.

Dukic’s death was the first in the event’s 17-year history. It has raised many concerns, some long-standing, about the safety of CrossFit as both a workout regimen and an athletic competition.

When Greg Glassman, a personal trainer and a former gymnast, founded CrossFit in the mid-1990s, he took an approach to exercise that was radically different from the bench presses and dumbbell curls that prevailed at gyms at the time. His methodology combined elements of Olympic weight lifting and gymnastics with movements involving kettlebells, rowing machines and skipping ropes — a program of “constantly varied, high-intensity functional fitness,” as Glassman originally described it.

Early fans of CrossFit’s workouts included members of law enforcement and the military, associating it with grit and mental toughness. Glassman did not exactly stifle that perception: Speaking about CrossFit to The New York Times in 2005, he said, “If the notion of falling off the rings and breaking your neck is so foreign to you, then we don’t want you in our ranks.”

But part of its appeal was that the workouts, though sometimes extremely demanding, could be adapted to accommodate almost anyone: While one athlete might jump onto a 30-inch box, another could step onto a raised platform, achieving the same stimulus with different intensity.

That accessibility helped CrossFit grow rapidly through the 2000s and 2010s, even as some people saw its exercises as hazardous for amateurs. An early, ironic brand mascot was “Uncle Rhabdo,” a vomiting clown named after the potentially deadly muscle condition that CrossFit has sometimes been known to cause.

The devotion it inspired helped it outlast other fitness fads. CrossFit popularized the concept of “high-intensity interval training” and spawned many imitators, including OrangeTheory, Barry’s Bootcamp and F45. If you’ve ever done kettlebell swings, wall ball shots or jump rope double-unders, you have felt the influence of CrossFit, which has reshaped the way many Americans exercise.

After Glassman sold the company in 2020 in the wake of scandal, CrossFit has shifted its messaging to further emphasize accessibility, abandoning its former motto, “Forging Elite Fitness.” The company has been trying to emphasize its openness to beginners, returning to Glassman’s theory that “the needs of the Olympian and our grandparents differ by degree, not kind.”

But CrossFit the workout and the CrossFit Games are meant to be different.

The CrossFit Games, a competition for elite athletes, have been held annually since 2007. They were conceived “as a marketing effort at a time when the company didn’t have a marketing department,” said Adrian Bozman, CrossFit’s competition director. Over the years, they have become the subject of popular documentary films and a must-see event for fans.

The ostensible purpose of the CrossFit Games is to test the fittest on earth by challenging them to conquer “the unknown and the unknowable,” for which CrossFit is meant to prepare them. The participants do heightened versions of common CrossFit movements, such as heavy barbell snatches or bar muscle-ups, as well as more unusual tasks, like leaping over hay bales, swinging a sledgehammer or tossing a medicine ball in a situp. Outdoor swimming events, though relatively common at the Games, would never be performed in a CrossFit class.

Still, some top CrossFit athletes have said that the competition often pushes participants too far, exceeding what’s necessary to test fitness. During an outdoor event in 2015, several participants passed out because of heat exhaustion. Chris Hinshaw, the onetime coach of Mat Fraser, who has won the CrossFit Games multiple times, has described how Fraser nearly drowned during a swimming event in 2017.

“We’ve been talking about our safety concerns for a long time, and it’s fallen on deaf ears,” said Pat Vellner, a veteran CrossFit Games competitor.

Questions about the safety of the competition quickly resurfaced after Dukic’s death. Some people took issue with the decision to hold an outdoor run and swim in Texas in August, when the water temperatures were allegedly unsafe; others wondered whether enough lifeguards and safety personnel had been on the scene.

The morning after Dukic died, Dave Castro, CrossFit’s director of sport and the programmer of the Games, said in an interview that safety “is always taken into consideration.” Castro declined repeated requests for a follow-up interview.

After Dukic died, the rest of that day’s events were canceled. But the next day, after hours of deliberation and consultations with other athletes and Dukic’s family, organizers decided to proceed with a modified version of the competition schedule.

“We spent a lot of time talking about this, and we were clear that the decision needed to be about how to honor him,” said Don Faul, CrossFit’s current CEO. “If we felt like the appropriate way to honor him was to cancel the Games, then we absolutely were going to cancel the Games.”

Of the 80 individuals in the competition, 13 immediately withdrew because of the decision to continue. (Those who quit at that time included Jeffrey Adler and Laura Horvath, the reigning male and female champions.) More athletes continued to withdraw from the event as it continued, including Arielle Loewen.

“It felt wrong to go on the competition floor and pretend like everything was fine, pretend like everything was OK, pretend like the show must go on, when this is a tragedy and we should treat it as such,” Loewen said.

The Professional Fitness Athletes’ Association, a group that includes CrossFit Games athletes Brent Fikowski, Annie Thorisdottir and Vellner, has called for the removal of Castro from his position as director of sport, suggesting the degree to which athletes hold the programming responsible for Dukic’s death.

Tia-Clair Toomey, 31, a seven-time champion from Australia who knew Dukic, chose to stay in the competition because, having gotten to know Dukic by participating in past Games, she believed “that’s what he would have done himself.”

She added that she thought “Dave and his team try to make every event as safe as possible.’”

The reactions among CrossFit fans were similarly divided. Rob LaLonde, a gym owner from Ottawa, Ontario, who was at the Games, said he was experiencing “a whirlwind of not knowing what to feel or think,” but he added that he was glad the Games were continuing.

Thea Andreasdottir, an athlete from Germany, said she had “never been more affected by the death of someone I don’t actually know.” She placed the blame for Dukic’s death squarely on the organization.

Vellner, the veteran CrossFit Games competitor, hoped Dukic’s death would prompt a sort of reckoning among CrossFit leaders. But, he said, “the fear is that at the end of this there’s no accountability.”

Whether the death of an elite CrossFit Games athlete will deter other athletes from competing, or will stop casual exercisers from walking into their local CrossFit gym, remains to be seen. Most longtime CrossFit enthusiasts understand that the CrossFit Games are very different from the fitness methodology, and that what happens at one doesn’t reflect the other. But will that be clear to outsiders?

Danielle Brandon, 28, who participated in her sixth CrossFit Games this year, was among the athletes who chose to keep competing. She said she had always felt safe in the competition despite “the risk” involved.

“I mean, CrossFit itself — it’s kind of crazy, right?” Brandon said while warming up for an event that included sprinting, toes-to-bar and 70-pound dumbbell snatches. “What’s so safe about putting a heavy dumbbell over your head?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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