“I’m So Excited” — Inside the 2024 Adaptive CrossFit Season With WheelWOD’s Kevin Ogar
Kevin Ogar has been busy. After the Oct. 2023 announcement that CrossFit Adaptive divisions will no longer compete at the CrossFit Games, the owner of CrossFit WatchTower and the co-owner of WheelWOD is also serving as the Event Director of the 2024 Adaptive CrossFit Games.
As the 2024 season unfolds, Adaptive athletes across 15 divisions will be competing to showcase their fitness at the Adaptive CrossFit Games by WheelWOD in San Antonio, TX at the end of September, less than two months after the CrossFit Games for Individuals and Teams wraps up in Fort Worth.
BarBend got on a call with Ogar a month before the Open to chat about the 2024 CrossFit season. We’ll lay out what he had to say about everything from programming across 15 divisions to the future of Adaptive athletics in CrossFit.
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[Read More: 2023 WheelWOD Games Results — The Champions Have Been Crowned]
But first, a bit more context:
Ahead of the 2023 season, Ogar shared his vision that WheelWOD could lead the entire adaptive season — which is exactly what happened after the season came to a close. Here’s what we learned:
- In Oct. 2023, CrossFit HQ announced that the Adaptive and Age Group divisions would no longer compete at the CrossFit Games. Instead:
- Masters athletes will compete to be crowned at the Legends Championship.
- Teens will duke it out to finish their season at the Pit Teen Throwdown.
- Adaptive divisions will aim for the crown at the Adaptive CrossFit Games by WheelWOD.
But it’s all the same CrossFit season, Ogar explained: “They’re gonna get CrossFit Games medals,” he said of athletes in the Adaptive divisions — because that’s exactly what they’re going to earn.
That search to crown the fittest in each division will begin with the CrossFit Open, starting on Feb. 29, 2024.
Here’s the full conversation:
Editor’s Note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
What Is WheelWOD?
BarBend: For fans who might not know, can you take us through what you view as the essence of WheelWOD and the most important aspects athletes and fans should know about?
Kevin Ogar: WheelWOD was started because there was no place for me and a guy named Chris “Stouty” Stoutenburg to express our fitness from a wheelchair. Stouty started adapting Open workouts going back to 2011 and 2012, and I joined him after my injury in 2014. We wanted to create a space for people with disabilities to show off their fitness, all while making it as fun, fair, and inclusive as possible.
Flash forward to the present day, and WheelWOD has hosted the WheelWOD Games for 11 seasons. While Adaptive athletes only competed in the CrossFit Games between 2021 and 2023, WheelWOD has been hosting competitions for a broad range of divisions for years. Starting in 2024, WheelWOD will host the entire CrossFit season for athletes in adaptive divisions.
The point of WheelWOD and these competitions is not just to find out who the fittest is — although we do — but to show a lot of people who are struggling with their identity or what they’re capable of post-injury that you can do these amazing feats if you decide to try.
Our goal is to show the adaptive and disabled populations what’s possible.
It’ll also be really good for the affiliates. I’m looking at the everyday person, rather than just the Individual athletes, being able to watch the championships and have people realize that anyone can do this — it’s not outside my realm of possibility.
Changes to the 2024 CrossFit Adaptive Season
BB: Let’s get into the 2024 season changes.
KO: There are some big differences for sure this year, but a lot of the fundamentals are going to be the same.
2024 Adaptive CrossFit Games by WheelWOD Location
BB: Where and when are Adaptive athletes going to gather for their championship? How did that change come about and what will it be like?
KO: The Adaptive championship will be in San Antonio at the end of September, which we’re really excited about. San Antonio is one of the biggest hubs of adaptive non-profits and programs. To my knowledge, it’s got the only accessible theme park built for people with disabilities in the U.S. And, it’s got a huge veteran population. So we’re very excited for that.
But it’s not going to be a separate system. When we announced the change, people assumed CrossFit was sick of dealing with us; wanted to sweep us under the rug. But it wasn’t like that. They wanted to give these athletes the space to grow the sport and show off what they could actually do by giving us our own events.
We have huge support from CrossFit — more than I could ever dream or probably would have asked for.
So we’ll be crowning the fittest, for sure. We’re giving the same medals as the Individual athletes get. These are gonna be CrossFit Games champions — they’re gonna get CrossFit Games medals.
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[Read More: 2024 CrossFit Games Season Schedule Revealed]
2024 Adaptive CrossFit Schedule
Editor’s Note: Here is the season outline, per WheelWOD’s Instagram.
The Open
- Starts Feb. 29
- Virtual competition and video submission required
- The top 20 from each division move on
Semifinals
- Starts May 8
- Virtual competition and video submission required
- The top 10 from each division move on
Adaptive CrossFit Games by WheelWOD
- Starts Sept 19
- San Antonio, TX
2024 Adaptive CrossFit Divisions
BB: Talk to us about the divisions we’re going to get in the 2024 season. Any formatting changes we should know about with all these divisions?
KO: This is the most exciting part — we’re moving from eight divisions to 15 divisions.
Editor’s Note: The divisions are here (each division is split into women and men):
- Upper Extremity 1 PT
- Upper Extremity 2 PT
- Lower Extremity AK
- Lower Extremity BK
- Lower Extremity Minor
- Neuromuscular Minor
- Neuromuscular Major
- Vision (3 sub categories)
- Seated 1 (without hip)
- Seated 2 (with hip)
- Seated 3 (Quadriplegic & no hip)
- Intellectual Division (2 sub categories)
- Standing Diagnosed
KO: We’ll have a lot more freedom for programming to really showcase what these athletes can do.
One thing I’m extra excited about this year: People will have an option to do the scaled version of every Adaptive category. We’re really trying to create the fairest, most fun, and most inclusive side of CrossFit that we’ve ever done.
There will be a scaled option for all Adaptive categories in the Open.
Yeah, we wanna test for the fittest, but we want this to be for the community. Those scaled options for every division and every workout in the Open let us do that in a big way.
And we’re not doing this in a bubble.
CrossFit is giving us as much help as we need while also providing the freedom we need to run things the way we know we should.
Even though the Individual and Team championship will be in Fort Worth in the beginning of August and the Adaptive CrossFit Games by WheelWOD will be in San Antonio in late September, it’s still one CrossFit season.
Through CrossFit, we’ve been chatting with the Pit and Legends owners to share best practices together. With our different competitions that spotlight our athletes, we’re able to leverage the CrossFit name to help smaller competitions get what they need in terms of partnerships and working with different companies for competitions and our athletes.
2024 Adaptive CrossFit Registration and Leaderboard
BB: What differences should athletes and fans expect in the 2024 season?
KO: There are a few big changes here. The first one is that the registration and leaderboards are going to be in different locations. This will facilitate moving from the eight Adaptive divisions represented in CrossFit last year to the 15 divisions this year.
Adaptive athletes aren’t going to register on games.crossfit.com. Instead, they’ll go wheelwodgames.com to register for the season.
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[Read More: 2024 CrossFit Semifinal Dates and Locations Revealed]
In terms of athletes classifying into their divisions, it’s the same system that WheelWOD’s been using for a few years. But some athletes might need to reclassify since we have essentially double the amount of divisions that we’ve seen in the past in the CrossFit season.
For the leaderboard, we’re moving everything to Competition Corner [which hosts the Wodapalooza leaderboard] to allow as much freedom as we need to run this year.
2024 Adaptive CrossFit Livestream Coverage
BB: We know that Adaptive and Age Group livestream quality — both in terms of camera angle and commentary — has been a big shortcoming to many at the CrossFit Games. What’s the plan to improve livestream access and coverage for fans who can’t join this year’s competition in person?
KO: To give the best coverage to our athletes for all the fans at the event and also for those watching at home, our goal is to be on par with what you see at the Games for Individual athletes.
If you want to get excited about our 2024 livestream, go check out our livestream from 2023 WheelWOD. Lots of people were super pumped because we were able to give full coverage of every single event.
That was our first year being able to do that, so in 2024, it’s going to be that, but better. We’re bringing people in to run the livestream and get all the information on the screen for people to follow along at home.
Programming the 2024 CrossFit Adaptive Season
BB: Talk to us about the value of division-specific programming across 15 divisions instead of eight or three. What are some examples of different programming options we might get now that just couldn’t happen in CrossFit seasons previously?
KO: Now that we have 15 divisions instead of just eight, we can program to really have everyone express their fitness to its fullest potential.
Workouts can be programmed to athletes’ maximum of capabilities (and maybe even slightly past that maximum) to push the athletes further than they think they can go — that’s the idea of CrossFit.
By refining our divisions, we won’t be programming to correct any potential unfairness or to level the playing field — we’ll be programming to push each athlete to do things they’ve never been able to showcase on a stage like this.
[Read More: 2023 CrossFit Games Adaptive Division Results]
A big part of that comes down to our ability to now split categories according to how many points of contact upper and lower athletes have.
At the Games in the past, athletes have been divided into Upper Extremity and Lower Extremity — but there’s more diversity in there that we couldn’t program for. Now, athletes are split into one and two points of contact (above and below-elbow) divisions for upper extremity, and at-the-knee, below-the-knee, and minor divisions for lower extremity. With these nuances, we can program so that our athletes can truly express their fitness to the fullest.
Let me give you a great example — most of our upper below-elbow athletes can do pull-ups, chest-to-bars, and muscle-ups. It’s not fair to program that when they’re competing with athletes with one point of contact. Now, we can throw gymnastics movements at all categories — including one-point-of-contact athletes, who can push themselves to do the movements in a fair way when they’re not being scored against athletes with multiple points of contact.
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[Read More: Adaptive Athletes Logan Aldridge and Casey Acree Take on CrossFit Invictus Comp Class]
Take Casey Acree, who’s a below-elbow athlete. The guy can do handstand walks and muscle-ups. But we’ve had to dial back programming for Casey depending on who he’s competing with to make sure we’re keeping the playing field as fair as we can. Now, we don’t have that programming problem. And I’m so excited — I’ve wanted to program handstand walks for uppers for a while.
And I’m really excited to have the world see the other categories that have never been on the world stage. I might be biased, because I’m in this category myself, but Seated athletes are the freakiest athletes I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
We’ve got competitors knocking out sets of five to 10 muscle-ups without legs, snatching over 150 pounds without legs.
And in Short Stature, we’ve got Mikey Witous, squatting around 400 pounds. It’s wild. The world is going to be able to see that now.
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[Read More: Adaptive Powerlifter Marybeth Baluyot Is Not Your Inspiration Clickbait]
We’re going to be able to showcase out-of-this-world, blow-your-mind feats of fitness that we’ve never been able to before across all the categories.
Adapting CrossFit Workouts
BB: Take us into the room with you when CrossFit drops a workout and you only have a short while to customize it for each division. How do you prepare, logistically and creatively, to be able to say, “Okay, here’s a swimming event — get me a plyo box and a free-running treadmill?”
KO: Thankfully, it’s not just me adapting the workouts. Stoutenburg is just one of the smartest programmers out there. He has a flair for programming. He’s called me many a time, saying:
“Hey, I just woke up and had this idea for a workout or movement. You need to go test it — tell me if you die.”
Chris Stoutenburg
He’ll text first thing in the morning about workouts, with new ideas, really amazing stuff. Some of that’s rubbed off on me.
I’ve also gotten a lot of experience from owning a gym. There is not a single piece of equipment in my gym that I haven’t figured out how to use.
We got an Assault Runner — my wife wanted to do a Half Ironman, and she’s an adaptive athlete as well, so it’s hard to get running outside consistently.
When she got the Runner, I was like, “Whoa, I need to figure out how to use that.” I started messing with it, and cracked it — now, we call it the Assault Paddle.
Editor’s Note: We started talking about this creation specifically because at 2023 Wodapalooza Miami just this past month, athletes used the free runner for a swimming workout, lying on their stomachs on a plyo box and “paddling” with their arms on the treadmill. Check it out on undefeated Seated champ Tom Miazga’s Instagram below.
[Read More: 2024 Wodapalooza Miami Adaptive Results]
KO: Between Chris and I, we’ve got close to 40 years of fitness and CrossFit experience, and we’ve logged thousands and thousands of hours watching Adaptive athletes move. That’s how we handle things creatively.
Logistically, we have people who help us with the floor plan and logistics — but you always have to prepare for that to change at the last second. It’s CrossFit, so it’s about embracing the unknowable unknown. Sometimes we’ll have the most beautiful plan in the world, and we’ll lay it and say, “Ugh, we can’t do that.”
And sometimes there’s plenty of time to make changes, but other times we’ve got to change things on the fly. Anyone that’s run a competition for CrossFit knows exactly what I’m talking about.
Defining Success
BB: Let’s fast forward to the end of the 2024 CrossFit season. What factors will make you reflect back and say, “Yes, this was a success?”
KO: Everything we do, we ask ourselves if it is beneficial to the community. Does this help the adaptive community and the CrossFit community grow as one community coming together? That’s what we’re going to look at.
We’ll also evaluate success as, “Did we crown the fittest?” And we’ve been doing that. In past years, we’ve done the best that we could with what we had, with the divisions we were able to run. We’ll be tasking ourselves this year and in the years to come with continuing to crown the fittest in each division.
Success is also going to be whether or not I’m so tired and dead that I never want to do it again, or if I feel energized and like I can’t wait to get into the following year — like I felt this season. Does my wife still like me at the end of the season? That’s a good marker of success, too.
In terms of the athletes and the community, we have the potential to have 300 athletes competing at the highest level this year. It’ll be a culmination of people training all year, getting to experience the CrossFit Games the way able-bodied athletes have — with the red carpet rolled out and having companies approach them about sponsors.
We’d love it if our top-tier athletes can start making a living off of being what they are — pro athletes.
The Future of Adaptive CrossFit
BB: Big picture: what is your vision of the future in CrossFit for Adaptive athletes?
KO: The future of adaptive CrossFit is just to be CrossFit. I’d love it if we could have just the CrossFit community, not the adaptive CrossFit community.
In our gym, we just have our CrossFit community. We’ve got adaptive athletes, 17-year-old athletes, 70-year-old athletes, and everyone in between. I want the adaptive side of it to become so commonplace and run of the mill for affiliates that we get to stop saying that we have an adaptive program — we just have CrossFit, for everyone.
Featured Image: @kevinogar / Instagram
The post “I’m So Excited” — Inside the 2024 Adaptive CrossFit Season With WheelWOD’s Kevin Ogar appeared first on BarBend.
