The HYROX European Championships took place in a snowy Maastricht, Netherlands on January 21st, 2023, at the MECC Maastricht. This event featured the first of three Elite races for the season, where the top 15 Pro division athletes competed for prize money, and a spot in the Elite race at the World Championships in Manchester in May.
Qualification for the Elite races is earned via athletes’ performances in regular season races in the Pro category. Invites are handed out based on the fastest Pro times of the season up to 10th December 2022 and, if and when, invites are not accepted the offer is rolled down to the next fastest athlete.
Prizes in the Elite races at these European championships go to the top 5 finishers, and the top 3 automatically qualify for the Elite races at the World Championships. So there was plenty at stake! The prize money is distributed as follows:
1st Place 7,000 USD
2nd Place 3,500 USD
3rd Place 2,000 USD
4th Place 1,500 USD
5th Place 1,000 USD
To qualify for the Elite races, athletes must perform well in regular season Pro category races. Invitations are given to the fastest Pro times of the season and, if not accepted, are offered to the next fastest athlete.
Women
Before the Women’s Elite race, much of the attention was on two athletes who are new to HYROX this season: Swedish athlete Mikaela Norman and American Megan Jacoby. Mikaela currently holds the women’s Pro world record after her incredible HYROX debut in Hamburg towards the end of 2022, where she had taken it from Megan Jacoby (who had set the record in Chicago just weeks earlier).
Ultimately though, the race was won by Lauren Weeks – a HYROX veteran – who dominated the race pretty much from start to finish and completed it in a fantastic time of 01:01:12.
That time was just 27 seconds slower than the world record, despite it being a reasonably slow course caused by a special set up for the Elite race which inevitably slows the athletes down to a certain extent. This is because they perform all of the functional stations essentially in the same area and lanes, and there’s a lot more turning around – on exercises like the lunges – than there otherwise normally would be.
Lauren is a former HYROX world champion but only gave birth 6 months ago which makes this performance even more impressive. She actually competed in the HYROX World Championships in Las Vegas in May 2022 when she was 7 months pregnant, and managed to finish 9th that day, which is unbelievable. Bearing that in mind maybe more of us should have been expecting this win in Maastricht now she’s not carrying a baby around with her! If this is what Lauren can do six months after childbirth, she’s going to be very hard to beat this season.
As for those who had been fancied before the race, Mikaela did mention on social media that she had some kind of injury during the race which had slowed her down, and she was quite ill afterwards, and Megan Jacoby actually ran an extra lap during the race (which probably cost her around 80 seconds), but it was still a dominant performance from Lauren, and she’d have been incredibly hard to beat if the race had gone smoothly for both Megan and Mikaela.
4th in the race was American, Alandra Greenlee, with a great performance, and 5th was Mirjam Von Rohr – whose shoe became loose just after the lunges and she had to stop to tie that back up which probably lost her a valuable 30 seconds.
Overall, the results looked like this…
Unfortunately, another athlete who had been favoured for the race – Linda Meier – also a previous world record holder and second in last year’s World Championships – didn’t take part, but is expected to feature in Chicago at the North American championships on 11th February 2023.
Men
In the Men’s race, a competitive field of athletes, with close qualifying times, was expected to make for an exciting event.
Tiago Lousa came in ranked 1st with his 57:54 time in Frankfurt – the fastest time clocked this season. Former world champion Tobias Lautwein also featured, making his return to Elite racing having missed last year’s World Championship race due to illness.
Ultimately though the race was won by probably the most consistently high performing athlete in HYROX history – Alexander Roncevic.
Alex has placed on the podium at every HYROX World Championships, the only man to do so, but had not yet secured a major HYROX title. He emerged victorious in this race, completing it in a time of 57:26 and beating out Tim Wenisch in second place and Michael Sandbach in third.
Alex was kind enough to send over his thoughts on the race, which you can see in the below video:
Alex, Tim and Michael all now qualify for the Elite races at the World Championships. 4th and 5th, in the race, were Tobias Lautwein and Florian Gast, who don’t automatically qualify for the World Championships, but do take home some prize money.
The finishing positions all looked like this…
The next Elite races will be in Chicago on February 11th 2023 at the North American championships. By all accounts we will be seeing many of these athletes again, including the top 3 men. They won’t have it all their own way though as the race will also feature Ryan Kent, who finished second at last year’s World Championships and who must be one of the favourites for the title this season. It’s sure to be another great race.
Elite Live Footage
Up until late on the Friday before the race there was no livestream planned to show the Elite races. Fortunately, last minute, that got resolved, with good coverage from both the The OCR Report, and Race Brain (where I joined Rich Ryan, Dylan Scott and Matt B Davis in commenting on the race).
I know the powers that be at HYROX often read these articles, so I think I speak on behalf of the whole HYROX community to say that we want live streams of these races and it would have been a huge miss if we couldn’t have watched them. I found it fairly amazing that nothing had been planned until the very last minute. I appreciate HYROX are planning a “post production 30 minute episode” for people to watch – which is great – but we also want to see the events live, not only once the result is known. The live streams ultimately had thousands of views from true fans of HYROX, who are excited about this growing sport, and are excited to see the best of the best battle it out. So please, plan for live streams for future big races like this one!
World Records
It wasn’t just the Elite athletes competing on the day though. There was no Pro division – presumably for logistical reasons for HYROX – but some incredible performances in the Open and Doubles categories. In particular, we saw the following age group world records broken:
Men’s Open (16-24) – Oscar Adrian Melheim – 00:59:25
Men’s Open (25-29) – Thierry Willigenburg – 00:58:32
Men’s Open (30-34) – Erik Woodward – 00:56:41
Men’s Open (50-54) – Ismael Mateo – 01:02:02
Women’s Open (40-44) – Sonja Roman – 01:04:40
Men’s Relay – Christian Nolde, Pascal Hetz, Janik Hoffman, Benjamin Neumann – 00:54:34
Mixed Doubles (50-59) – Peter Lechner and Sabine Lechner – 01:05:23
Summary
So yes, all in all a pretty amazing day – well done to HYROX for putting on another great event, and well done to all the athletes and spectators who helped make it so.
We have surveyed the Elite qualifiers to find out how fast they can run, ski and row, and how much they can lift. It’s brought up some really interesting results that we have written up in this article. If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to be able to compete at this level, you’ll find it a really interesting read.
If you need any help with training for your next event, head here, and if you need help from a performance nutrition perspective, head here.
Main blog photo(s) credit to Amber Ruddle.
