The CrossFit Mic Drop Problem: When “Just Kidding” Stops Being Funny

Opinion

An honest look at whether the loudest voices in CrossFit podcasting are covering the community, or dividing it

There are two CrossFit communities right now that is evident about 3 minutes into a show, but  it was highlighted when my husband (who only follows the sport because of me) asked me a question. “When did these guys get so far off the rails?” while watching a recap show on the CF Network channel.

Sometime around 2021, CrossFit media stopped being a sleepy corner of the fitness internet and turned into a real ecosystem with real audiences, real revenue, and real fights. Today there are probably a dozen shows producing content on a weekly or daily basis. The CF Network is uploading nearly every day. CF Network is grinding out interviews and reaction shows. Andrew Hiller is posting takedowns of judging calls with a thumbnail face that looks like he just smelled something. The Barbell Spin keeps the data nerds happy. Clydesdale Media talks to everybody. WODprep keeps the affiliate-level athlete in the loop. Training Think Tank covers programming. Mayhem covers Mayhem and how Rich Froning is still more disciplined than the rest of us

That is a healthy media landscape by any measure. CrossFit, an actual sport with a global championship, finally has the kind of coverage other sports have. Good.

Now before I get too far down the rabbit hole of my opinion, I want to say this CLEARLY…  

I do not think Sevan Matossian is a bigot. I do not think the rotating cast on CF Network are  bigots. I think they are largely playing a character. The character is the guy at the back of the gym who says the inappropriate thing in his head  out loud and then looks around for a high five. That character has existed in every gym in America since Nautilus equipment had wood grain on it. He is a real person, he is sometimes funny, and he occasionally makes a point nobody else has the guts to make. The character is also the reason your wife stopped coming to the 5:30 a.m. class.

The defense of all of this, when it gets offered, is satire. So and so is doing a bit. The other guy  is needling. The chat is in on it. The guest is in on it. The fans are in on it. If you do not like it, you are the problem, you are too soft, you are the New York Times, you are CrossFit HQ in 2020 trying to get someone fired again. Satire works when the audience is laughing at the thing being mocked. It stops working when half the audience is laughing because they think the bit is the point.

I want to be honest about something else. Some of this stuff is funny. I have laughed. There is a real comedic instinct on Sevan's show that the polished podcasts do not have. Talking Elite Fitness will never make you spit coffee. Sevan will, two or three times an episode, and sometimes for the right reasons. The problem is not that the show is edgy. The problem is that "edgy" has become a permission slip to skip over whether the joke is actually about anything. A bit about an athlete's training is a bit. A bit about an athlete's last name is just the last name said in a funny voice. One of those is satire. The other one is junior high.

So,  here is the question I keep wondering based on what I hear on these shows and what I see from listeners in the chats: “are some of these personalities too controversial in how they deliver the news, and is that delivery making the community feel more divided than it actually is?”

I want to take that question seriously instead of dismissing it, because I think both answers are defensible and the people landing on either side are not crazy.

Start with the case that nothing is wrong. CrossFit was built by Greg Glassman, who was famously and proudly contrarian, profane, and allergic to corporate polish. The original CrossFit Journal had a tone. The original message boards had a tone. CrossFit  has always been a little spicy, and the idea that a sport founded on the premise of "your fitness regimen is making you weak and we will tell you so" should suddenly produce media that sounds like NPR is, on its face, a little funny. Sevan Matossian in particular came up inside that culture as the head of media at CrossFit HQ for years, and his unfiltered interviewing style is not a bug he developed in his garage. It is the house style of an earlier era of the company, now operating outside the company. His fans love him precisely because he sounds like the sport used to sound. There is a real argument that the polished shows are the deviation, not the loud ones.

Andrew Hiller fits this defense too. Hiller is not vulgar in the same way, but he is absolutely combative, and his entire brand is built on calling out what he sees as bad judging, bad programming, and bad behavior from CrossFit HQ. He has described himself, half-jokingly, as a vigilante. He is not gentle with the people he disagrees with. And he has, by most accounts including his own, helped force real changes in how the sport is run. You cannot get those changes without accountability… and sometimes accountability sounds rude.

Now the case that something is wrong, or at least off.

There is a difference between a host who is harsh on ideas and a host who is harsh on people. Hiller, when he is at his best, is harsh on a missed rep, a vague rulebook, or a CEO who will not answer a question. When he drifts off that target and starts going after individual athletes by name in a personal way, his audience gets uncomfortable, and you can watch it happen in his own comments section. He usually course-corrects. The mechanism works.

But, on other shows (like CF Network and CrossFit shows formerly on The Sevan Podcast), particularly the big chat-driven daily ones, the target moves around more. The host will riff on a workout, then on an athlete's body, then on someone's accent, then on a country, then on a guest who is no longer in the room. Some of it is funny. A lot of it gets defended as satire. But satire has a target, and when the target keeps shifting from "the thing" to "the person," what you have is not satire anymore. It is just being mean with a laugh track.

The defenders of this style, who are sincere and not crazy, will tell you that everyone is in on the joke, that the guests come back, that the chat loves it, and that anyone who complains is soft, or worse, a tool of CrossFit HQ trying to relitigate 2020. Some of that is fair. The CrossFit press did, at points, treat reasonable men like villains, and the reaction against that coverage is real and earned. But "the New York Times was unfair to me in 2020" is not a permanent license to be unfair to a Brazilian athlete's English in 2026. The shield gets smaller the longer you carry it.

Here is the part that I think gets missed in this debate.

The question is not whether a host is allowed to be edgy. Of course they are. American media has had shock jocks since Howard Stern, sports talk has had screamers since Jim Rome, and the whole point of independent podcasting is that you do not have to sound like a press release. The question is what happens to the audience when edge becomes the entire product.

Watch the comment sections. The fans of the most combative CrossFit shows do not just enjoy the sport. They sort each other into camps. There is a Sevan camp and a Hiller camp and a Talking Elite Fitness camp, a Barbell Spin camp etc and it seems that slowly those camps do not overlap as much anymore. Athletes get categorized as friends or enemies of a given show. Other media members get categorized as friends or enemies of a given host. Somebody floats a feud, the algorithm rewards it, and the next week half the community is arguing about a thing that, at the gym you actually train at, nobody cares about.

That is a media problem, not a CrossFit problem. The sport itself, the workout you are going to do tomorrow morning at 5:30 a.m., is not divided. Your gym is not divided. The Open is not divided. The Games are not divided. The thing that is divided is the conversation about all of those things, and the conversation is shaped, more than anyone wants to admit, by whichever shows had the loudest week.

So is the delivery too controversial? My honest answer is: sometimes, and it depends on the host, and it depends on the day. Andrew Hiller's combativeness is mostly aimed at institutions, and institutions can take it. The looseness of various personalities on CF Network are  sometimes aimed at institutions and sometimes aimed at individuals, and the second category is where the show has its weakest moments. CF Network varies wildly depending on who is on the panel that day. Talking Elite Fitness, the Barbell Spin, Clydesdale Media, WODprep, Training Think Tank and Mayhem rarely have this problem at all, which tells you it is solvable. People are doing the same job with similar access without sounding like a Thanksgiving argument turned into WWIII.

The thing I would ask, and I would ask it of myself too as somebody who consumes all of this content, is whether the moment a podcast becomes more entertaining than the sport it covers, the podcast has stopped being CrossFit media and started being its own thing. There is nothing wrong with being your own thing. Joe Rogan is his own thing. Barstool is its own thing. But once the show is the show, the divisiveness people feel is not really about CrossFit anymore. It is about the show. And the community that was supposed to be united by burpees ends up arguing about a host instead.

Maybe that is fine. Maybe that is just what happens when a sport gets big enough to sustain a media class. Or maybe, somewhere between the polish of some shows over the chaos of the daily shouters, there is a version of CrossFit media that is honest, funny, occasionally rude, willing to push HQ, and still kind to the actual humans inside the sport.

I would listen to that show. I think many of you would too. The question is whether anyone is going to make it, or whether the algorithm has already decided that the loudest version wins.

Is it possible the divisiveness people keep complaining about in the CrossFit community is not coming from CrossFit at all? Is it possible it is coming from the podcasts?

Or, put differently: when the character the host plays for an hour a day starts shaping how fans talk to each other in the comments, in the gym, and at the local throwdown, at what point does the character stop being a character?

I do not know. 

The author listens to every show named above, owns affiliate gear, drank the CrossFit KoolAid and is on record as having been wrong before.