Former IRONMAN Race Director Says World Triathlon and HYROX Partnership is a “Win-Win”

Earlier this week Fabio Cabrera, who works for Club La Santa and was the race director of IRONMAN Lanzarote for many years, competed at HYROX Birmingham. He partnered with Reece Barclay, Lucy Charles-Barclay’s husband and one of her coaches. Each was pleasantly surprised with their performance after a busy October that saw Barclay return from a tough trip to Kona and Cabrera recovering after organizing Club La Santa’s Vuelta Ciclista event.

As Cabrera was returning to work at Club La Santa in Lanzarote, World Triathlon and HYROX announced that the two organizations had signed a “landmark term sheet entering into a strategic partnership.“

“This agreement establishes Hybrid Racing as a recognised discipline within the World Triathlon family, and HYROX as the operator of the Official World, Continental and National Championships for elite athletes of Hybrid Racing,” the press release on the new deal declared. “The agreement marks the culmination of a year of close collaboration between the two organisations and sets out a shared pathway toward Olympic and Paralympic recognition for the sport.”

Hybrid Racing will combine “running with unctional fitness workouts and will be contested across three formats: Ultimate, which mirrors the existing HYROX competition format; Fast, a shorter and higher-intensity version; and Ultra, an extended, endurance-based format. All three will be sanctioned and governed by World Triathlon and developed jointly with HYROX.”

HYROX will continue to run world, continental and national championships for athletes competing in the Ultimate format, and World Triathlon federations will have the opportunity to organize Hybrid Racing events in all three formats. The two organizations will also work towards getting “Hybrid Racing into Multi-Sport Games, with the ultimate ambition to gain inclusion into the Olympic and Paralympic Games.”

I reached out to Cabrera to get his thoughts on the new deal because he isn’t just a HYROX competitor – this year he worked with the company at all of its events in Spain. Combine that with his long-time involvement in triathlon (in addition to his years as an athlete and race director, he’s also a trained official), and Cabrera has some unique insight into the partnership between the two sports.

Slowtwitch.com: What did you think about the HYROX and World Triathlon partnership?

Fabio Cabrera: I think it’s awesome. This gives the sport another route into the Olympics, which is the aim of HYROX because it’s a sport that, as you’ve seen, has been growing like crazy since 2017. Take Spain. A HYROX event used to be only a weekend. Now we have events of five days, Wednesday to Sunday. In the UK or the States you have a full week of events, and across the week, Monday to Sunday, you’ll have 50,000 people participating.

The HYROX exercises and environment suit everyone who does triathlon, because, at the end of the day, it’s running plus mobility exercises: pulling, pushing and carrying … In my eyes, it’s good thing for the sport to grow and to have this kind of partnership.

Triathlon already has rules, procedures, standards and knowledge about how competitions work, and HYROX already has the participants, with its reputation growing more and more. So I think it’s a win-win for both, and for sport in general. From my perspective it’s natural that it goes into triathlon, because we do all these exercises in different ways and benefit from each other. It’s about making the sport bigger and the people happier. If it leads to a new discipline in the Olympics in the future, we’ll have something new to see.

I’m not super-familiar with HYROX, but you put on these events. How are they in terms of rules and officiating?

It’s very professional. The standard for HYROX worldwide is very regulated. Everything is clear, with the rule book as the bible of HYROX.

Everything is so standardized … when I started meeting the Spanish HYROX team, I thought “these people are so professional, so perfectionist.” And perfection is not about being rude. It’s about helping the athlete in the best way, making them do it right. They talk with the head judges to set the standards for the volunteers, and the volunteers are always nice while making sure athletes meet the standards … It impressed me seeing young people with that kind of responsibility in race direction. They have a very good organization chart, where everyone backs each other up. I think the success is also down to the people. I’m a team player, always, and when I see that kind of team, I want to be there. It’s a nice place to work, and it’s a team game. That’s why I’m going into my second year with that team.

I’m surprised HYROX didn’t want to create its own federation.

From my perspective, the most strategic move is to join an existing one. From HYROX’s perspective, it’s easier to join something that already exists. I’m a race director of triathlon, running, mountain bike, cycling and also HYROX. But I’m also an official in triathlon. This could open the door for me to transfer my knowledge of how to be a referee, not the triathlon rules, which are completely different, but the procedures. What I need to be looking at, the standards will be different, but the procedures will be the same.

And look, I can see behind you (Cabrera is referring to the gym equipment in my office) that you have different training materials. That material is used for HYROX, too. Everyone does the running in both worlds … which other federation could HYROX fit into? Athletics? That only covers the running part. In triathlon we do three disciplines …

This is a win-win for triathlon and for HYROX because they are now under a federation. It’s a good thing for the sports world, for people like us who love sport – we have something new. Im also looking forward to seeing the advantages of being under a federation as a participant – things like ranking and classification, so you have extra motivation.

How many people are participating in the events you’re involved with?

Barcelona could be close to 25,000. Bilbao is about 13,000. Madrid, 30,000. Malaga, 15,000. And that’s only the people competing, not the companions and spectators. It’s crazy to see one event drawing all this.

The way it works is they run in waves with heats of maybe 30 to 50 people, depending on the venue, starting every 10 minutes. So you start at 8 am and the last wave goes at 8 pm.

The events are done in big halls, between 7,000 and 10,000 square meters … in the middle you have the exercises, and you run around them.

And do people travel to do them?

Especially in Spain. Malaga is full of British people, for example. It’s the perfect excuse, like most sports events, to go on holiday. I could understand people travelling a lot for a triathlon, because you spend at least four hours doing the event, whereas HYROX is 90 minute, two hours at most. Travelling that far to do 90 minutes takes a big motivation. I think the motivation is they find it fun, they find it suitable for everyone with the right skills, and there’s a strong brand behind it.

I get the feeling this is a perfect event for the Olympics – you can put it in a stadium, it’s easy to televise and it’s indoors so you don’t have to worry about weather.

It’s so good for broadcasting. If you like this sport, everything is so easy to follow.

Next Steps

Cabrera is quick to note that there’s still a lot to be figured out with the new partnership. At this point event organizers still only have the rule books for the current HYROX format, the Ultimate. They’re still waiting to hear from HYROX on how the Fast and Endurance events will be established and run.

All that will likely have to wait or the “Long Form Agreement” this week’s announcement has promised that will “set out the full operational, governance and commercial framework of the partnership.”

In the meantime, athletes will continue to enjoy this booming new sport that has, since its inception in 2017, exploded from the 650 competitors at the first event to more than a million participants worldwide today. No doubt World Triathlon is happy to have access to all those competitors, and, as Cabrera points out, there are upsides for HYROX that go beyond trying to get into the Olympics.

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