Cover Hyrox is taking over Asia (Photo: courtesy of @hyroxhk/Instagram)
Hyrox is taking over Asia (Photo: courtesy of @hyroxhk/Instagram)
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The 2027 Hyrox World Championships are coming to Hong Kong next year between June 10-13 at the AsiaWorld-Expo. This marks the first time in the sport's history that the World Championships leave the West entirely. As Hong Kong athletes head to Stockholm for this week’s Hyrox World Championships, we look into how a city already obsessed with movement became one of the sport’s most committed outposts
The 2027 Hyrox World Championship is making its way to Hong Kong next year on June 10 at the AsiaWorld-Expo. This year, Hyrox World Championships are taking place from June 18 to 21 in Stockholm’s Strawberry Arena. The event is the sport’s season finale, its Super Bowl, its World Cup; the moment the entire Hyrox calendar has been building towards. The Swedish stadium is one of Europe’s largest indoor venues, and the crowd promises to be the biggest the sport has ever seen. Hyrox says that only the top 0.05 per cent of the million or so people who compete qualify for the world championships; that Hong Kong has athletes who qualified tells you a lot about how far the sport has come in this city. Hong Kong may not seem like an obvious candidate to become one of Hyrox’s most passionate and active markets. So how did it happen?
Despite our reputation for working hard, particularly at sedentary office jobs, Hongkongers like to move, and often top lists of most active populations. According to fitness tech company Garmin’s most recent global data, published in late 2025, Hong Kong led the world for the second consecutive year in average daily step count—10,663 steps per day, well above the global average of around 8,300. That figure is partly a product of the city’s infrastructure: the MTR, the footbridges, the density that makes walking between places not just convenient but unavoidable. And then there are the hiking trails, that many athletes choose to run on. The number of routes often surprise visitors to the city, who justifiably assume that this vertical, hyper-urban city is also home to some of the most spectacular trail running terrain in Asia: the MacLehose Trail, Wilson Trail and Dragon’s Back to name but a few.
There are also road running clubs, long-distance training groups, sprint tracks, and a fitness boutique scene that rivals any major city in the region. There are CrossFit boxes, functional fitness gyms, and an increasingly sophisticated understanding of what it means to train across disciplines rather than within them.
In short: Hong Kong didn't turn to Hyrox because of a lack of options, but because it already had everything—and Hyrox gave all of those communities somewhere to compete together.
Before Hyrox, Hong Kong’s fitness community was fractured into lanes. Trail runners took to the trails, gym athletes trained in gyms and runners logged their miles. Of course, people participated in more than one kind of sport, but there was nothing really that combined interests and communities. Hyrox changed that, with its combination of 8km worth of running and eight functional workout stations. The growth has been striking. Hong Kong’s Hyrox event has become the largest in the APAC region in terms of number of participants—a fact that carries more weight when you consider the competition. Singapore, Tokyo, Bangkok: these are not small fitness markets. That Hong Kong sits at the top of that table reflects not just enthusiasm but infrastructure. The city has the training culture, the community density and the competitive appetite to sustain it.
Above Clare Cheung, Taipei Mixed Doubles, February 2026 (Photo: courtesy of Pete Laverick)
Clare Cheung, Taipei Mixed Doubles, February 2026 (Photo: courtesy of Pete Laverick)
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Much of the sport’s success in Hong Kong comes down to the clubs that are building the community. Walk into DOP Training Club on Pottinger Street in Central and you’ll find a training environment designed explicitly around the hybrid athlete. Co-founded by personal trainers Dan Yeung and Mike Wu, DOP has built its programming around the exact demands that Hyrox requires—strength, interval work, endurance and the interplay between all three. They run a dedicated 12-week Hyrox preparation programme, with Thursday track nights at Aberdeen Sports Ground and Sunday long runs from Sheung Wan. Yeung says, ”A few years ago in Hong Kong, ’hybrid’ didn’t mean anything at most an F45 class, generic, lacking structure. Now you’ve got full systems built around it. People aren’t just saying they want to get fit anymore; they’re talking splits, debating Doubles versus Pro, lining up back-to-back races across the region like it’s their job.”
Then there’s Midnight Runners, the global running community that established its Hong Kong branch in 2019 and has since grown to more than 1,000 members. Their weekly Thursday bootcamp—run, stop, exercise, repeat—is, when you strip it back, a version of the same philosophy that underpins Hyrox: running is not enough on its own. The combination is the point. Midnight Runners may not market themselves as Hyrox training, but they are producing exactly the kind of athlete that Hyrox rewards.
These clubs are not isolated examples. They represent a broader shift in how Hong Kong athletes think about their training. The question is no longer ”Are you a runner or a gym person?” but' “how do you perform when you have to be both?”
Which brings us back to Stockholm.
The Hong Kong athletes going to Stockholm are part of a tiny minority; their winning a place at the World Championships is a statement about the quality of training, the depth of competition and the seriousness with which this city approaches Hyrox.
The Championships themselves are set to be the most ambitious yet in the sport’s short history, with more than 6,000 age-group qualifiers competing, as well as the Elite 15 field, in a venue built for 65,000. Australia’s Joanna Wietrzyk arrives in Stockholm having swept all four Majors this season and set a new women’s world record of 54:25 at Warsaw, the sport’s final European Major event of the season. The men’s record fell too, with Austria’s Alexander Rončević going sub-52 minutes for the first time. The bar has never been higher.
And yet Hong Kong has athletes on that start line.
Clare Cheung, a Hong Kong Hyrox athlete, says: “I started my Hyrox career in the Open Solo division at the first race in APAC—Hong Kong, 2022. Since then, I’ve raced 36 times and won 14. Typically, [I work] 50 hours a week and train for 14. Representing Hong Kong on the world stage spans far beyond me as an individual: if I can do hard things, others must know they can too.”
That, in the end, is the real story. Hyrox did not build Hong Kong’s fitness culture; Hong Kong’s fitness culture built conditions in which Hyrox could thrive. A city famous for trail running and harbour-front road runs, for boutique gyms and competitive instinct, for moving more than almost anywhere else on Earth—Hong Kongwas always going to embrace a sport that demands all of it, all at once.
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Pete Laverick is a sports and lifestyle journalist for Tatler Hong Kong. A former professional rugby player, he brings an athlete’s perspective to his coverage of the city’s sports and fitness scene. A committed fitness enthusiast, Pete is always testing something new—from Hyrox to marathons and triathlons—writing with the first-hand insight of someone who has lived at the top level of sport. He also has a standing invitation from Los Angeles Lakers owner Jeannie Buss to watch the Lakers at the Crypto.com Arena if he makes it to California.
