CrossFit Open: Menorca snapshot
CrossFit Némesis Menorca sent 20 athletes to this season’s CrossFit Open, and the reporting notes the international Open included more than 106,000 women participants—evidence the Open still moves significant grassroots scale. (menorca.info) With the competitive phase past, many boxes are already back to regular programming—think handstand‑walk skills, bike intervals and max push‑up work—so community training remains the story. ( )
CrossFit’s biggest annual contest is over for 2026, and the most revealing number may not be who won. It is who showed up. On Menorca, the affiliate CrossFit Némesis Menorca sent 20 athletes into this year’s Open, a small island snapshot of a much larger machine that still pulls ordinary gym members into competition every spring (menorca.info). Worldwide, the women’s individual Open leaderboard alone runs to 2,115 pages, which implies well over 100,000 entrants in that division, and CrossFit’s own registration language still describes the event as drawing hundreds of thousands of athletes across three weeks (games.crossfit.com, games.crossfit.com). That scale matters because the Open is no longer just a funnel to elite sport. CrossFit’s 2026 season structure makes clear that the Open is both the first qualifying stage for the Games and a mass-participation event open to anyone, regardless of fitness level (games.crossfit.com). The competition ran from February 26 through March 16, with one workout released each week and scores due the following Monday (games.crossfit.com). After that, only the top 25 percent of individual and age-group athletes moved on to quarterfinals (games.crossfit.com, games.crossfit.com). That split helps explain why a local report from Menorca feels truer to the state of CrossFit than the final podium does. Yes, the Open crowned Lucy Campbell and Colten Mertens as worldwide winners on March 20, and the elite season rolled forward almost immediately into quarterfinals at the end of March (games.crossfit.com, games.crossfit.com). But once that phase ended, most affiliates returned to what they always do: train the people who are still in the room. You can see that reset in the programming now circulating around the ecosystem. CrossFit’s own Open prep materials focus on repeatable skills such as toes-to-bar, handstand push-ups, double-unders, chest-to-bar pull-ups, bar muscle-ups, ring muscle-ups, and pull-ups, which is another way of saying the sport feeds back into daily class training (games.crossfit.com). On April 7, CrossFit posted a workout built around handstand-walk practice, a bike interval, and a max set of push-ups, while CrossFit Enduro’s programming for the same day centered on structured bike work and running volume (crossfit.com, crossfitenduro.com). So the Menorca story is not really about a remote affiliate brushing against the CrossFit Games. It is about the opposite. The Games season still works because it gives thousands of boxes a reason to turn regular members into participants for three weeks, then hands them back a fresh set of numbers, weaknesses, and small ambitions to train around (games.crossfit.com, games.crossfit.com). On Menorca, that meant 20 athletes entering the Open. A few weeks later, it meant going back to handstand-walk drills, bike intervals, and one more all-out set of push-ups (menorca.info, crossfit.com).
