Is There Room for God in CrossFit?

CrossFit | Opinion

James Sprague thanks God and people roll their eyes. Rich Froning had scripture tattooed from armpit to hip and the sport called him a legend. Something changed. It was not the faith.

James Sprague won the 2026 CrossFit Games in San Jose with 1,318 points, 27 ahead of Dallin Pepper. He won in 2024. He lost in 2025. He took it back at the 20th anniversary Games, which makes him the first man in the sport's history to win the title in non-consecutive years. Twenty scored events, the most ever run at a Games, and he never fell far enough back to lose the lead he built on day one.

Then he talked about God. Again. And you could feel the sport exhale through its teeth.

Go read the comments under any clip of him. You will find people who are tired of it. Not tired of him. Tired of the thanking, the scripture in the bio, the interviews where he gives the credit away. The word that keeps coming up is "preachy."

Here is what makes that strange.

Froning did the same thing and got a statue

Rich Froning won four straight individual titles from 2011 to 2014. Before the 2011 season he had Galatians 6:14 inked down the right side of his torso, armpit to hip. The verse is about refusing to boast in anything except the cross. He wrote a book about it. He told ESPN he competed to glorify God. He ordered his life out loud as faith, family, fitness, in that order, and then built an entire gym, a team, and a media company in Cookeville, Tennessee around that order.

Nobody called it a marketing problem. They called it Mayhem.

The sport did not just tolerate Froning's faith. It packaged it. It sold shirts. The tattoo became shorthand for the guy himself, the way a logo works. He is still the most beloved athlete the Games have produced, and his beliefs were never quiet, never subtle, and never once optional viewing.

So when Sprague says the same category of thing in 2026 and gets told to keep it to himself, the honest question is what actually shifted.

Four things shifted, and only one of them is Sprague

The sport got bigger and the clips got shorter.

Froning's peak ran through 2014. The 2026 season started with more than 254,000 athletes across 170-plus countries. A forty-second faith answer in a post-event interview no longer lives inside a broadcast. It gets cut, captioned, reposted, and served to people who never asked for it and have no context for who he is. Repetition is the offense, and the algorithm supplies the repetition.

He is not undefeated.

Froning won four in a row. People let a man sermonize when he is untouchable. Sprague won, lost, and won again, which means there is a whole season on record where the same faith did not produce the same result. That gives critics a lever. It should not. Losing is not evidence about God any more than winning is.

CrossFit has a history here, and it is not neutral.

In 2018 an affiliate in Indianapolis cancelled a Pride workout with a note about humility, and a CrossFit executive publicly praised the decision by calling Pride a sin. He lost his job. The gym closed. Members quit. Then 2020 happened and about 1,250 gyms cut ties with headquarters over the CEO's remarks about George Floyd. This community learned, twice, that religious language from someone with a platform can arrive attached to a door being closed.

That flinch is earned. It is also not James Sprague's debt to pay. He has said nothing that excludes anyone. Making him carry 2018 is lazy.

And then there is the towel.

During the 7,200-meter trail run at the Ranch, Ricky Garard passed him, tossed a cold towel at him, and Sprague responded with a gesture that was not a wave. He kept running. Later he owned it publicly and said he needed to work on how he reacts. That moment is where the real friction sits. Not the faith. The scoring of it.

People do not hate the God talk. They hate grading it.

Every athlete on that floor credits something. Justin Medeiros credits process. Ricky Garard credits a decade of not going away. Athletes credit sobriety, therapy, a coach, a dead parent, sleep, a wife, eight thousand hours of misery in a garage. Nobody writes a think piece about the guy who thanks his sports psychologist.

Sprague's origin story is the same shape as everyone else's. He was overweight, depressed, and coming apart in middle school while his parents split. His dad took him into a box. His dad is a three-time Masters Games athlete, and James beat him for the first time at seventeen, doing Christine. He says God did that. His own athlete page says CrossFit saved his life.

Change one noun in that story and it is a Netflix documentary. Leave the noun in and it is a lecture.

The difference is that faith invites an audit. When you say discipline saved you, nobody checks your discipline. When you say Jesus saved you, everyone watching becomes a compliance officer. So the second you flip off a rival on a trail run, someone in the replies is doing math on your soul. That is not a complaint about religion in sport. That is people using a man's stated standard as a stick.

He handed them the stick, and he picked it up himself at the press conference. That is more accountability than most champions offer for anything.

Where the critics are not wrong

A champion has a microphone and a captive room. There is a real difference between saying what carried you and implying the leaderboard is a verdict. If God delivered 1,318 points, what does that make Dallin Pepper's 1,291? Sprague has not said that. But the discomfort is not imaginary, and dismissing it as anti-Christian bias is the easy exit. Faith that only shows up on the podium is a testimony with a bad sample size. The version worth respecting is the one that sounds the same in fifth place, which is roughly where Ricky Garard finished this year with 1,100 points and no shortage of things to say.

So, is there room?

There is already room. There has been since 2011. The sport built its most durable brand on a Bible verse and a man from Tennessee who never pretended otherwise.

What has actually changed is the audience, the clip length, and a decade of institutional damage that taught this community to brace when God enters the chat.

Sprague is 24. He is going to say the same thing every August for a long time. You are allowed to scroll past it. He is allowed to say it. Both of those can be true, and neither one requires a comment section referendum on whether he earned the right.

He earned the title. The rest is between him and the one he keeps thanking.

Dr. Vickie Duncan, PhD, is the founder of Be Limitless, a functional nutrition and functional medicine practice for professional women in perimenopause and menopause. She’s a little sassy, sometimes funny, tracks everything and regrets nothing.

This is education, not medical advice or a diagnosis.