Rogue Invitational organisers are in talks to bring the elite CrossFit and strongman/woman event back to Aberdeen in 2025.
Caity Matter Henniger – who owns United States-based gym equipment manufacturer Rogue Fitness with husband Bill – says they are “working on” a Rogue Invitational return to P&J Live next year and “hope to be back” in the Granite City.
This year’s three-day event in Aberdeen, from November 8-10, was the sixth annual Rogue Invitational, but the first to take place outside of the US.
It saw the planet’s fittest male and female CrossFitters, and the world’s best strongmen and strongwomen, battle it out for not just coveted Rogue Invitational champions belts, but first-place prize purses of 283,000 US dollars (£219,000) for CrossFit and 122,000 US dollars (£94,000) for strongman/strongwoman.
Athletes including Iceland’s Hafthor “Thor” Bjornsson – “The Mountain” in TV’s Game of Thrones – took part, while Australian women’s CrossFit winner Tia-Clair Toomey-Orr – the seven-time CrossFit Games champion and now four-time Rogue Invitational winner – said afterwards she would “absolutely” want the event to return to Aberdeen.
Rogue’s chief sales officer Henniger detailed the success of bringing the Invitational to Aberdeen, and she hailed the fans from across the world who travelled to the sold-out P&J Live arena for producing an “out of this world” atmosphere for competitors.
Henniger, who revealed they are now targeting to be back at the north-east of Scotland venue next October or November for the 2025 edition, said: “That’s definitely something we’re working on and we’d hope to be back.
“Hopefully we can make that work.
“We had an amazing time and I couldn’t speak more highly of the venue, or the city and the country.
“But it also needs to make sense for us to come back, and and hopefully if we make that decision, you guys will welcome us with open arms again.”
The Rogue Invitational 2024 competitors were each given a kilt made from one-off tartan (produced by Inverurie Highlandwear firm Mitchell Scott), while other local touches to the event in Aberdeen included a strongman/woman challenge inspired by the Inver Stones.
Henniger is confident, should a return to Aberdeen in 2025 be finalised, Rogue will find other ways to “ingrain the culture of Scotland” into the weekend.
How did Rogue Invitational 2024 end up in Aberdeen, Scotland?
While, Henniger says, Rogue Fitness had thought for “years” about taking the Rogue Invitational to the UK or Europe, their link to the north-east was a key factor in Aberdeen being chosen – and despite site visits to “a couple of venues down near London”.
She explained: “We have a friend that actually helps run the Rogue Invitational, Rob Lawson, who owns CrossFit Aberdeen.
“I’ve known Rob for a long time. He’s on seminar staff for CrossFit, he’s also been a judge at the CrossFit Games, and been an athlete. And then he’s been on our Invitational staff since the inception and (we) just really (know him from) working hand-in-hand with him.
“He’s our head judge, but – like most of our leads – they’re more than kind of their position… (they’re) raising the bar of where we’re gonna go with the event.
“I was coming up to visit him and his family, and we just thought: ‘Hey, there’s this new arena there. Let’s go visit it.”
Henniger says it took “probably two minutes” of being inside P&J Live to decide “this is it. This is the place” for the 2024 Rogue Invitational.
Lawson’s local presence and knowledge on the ground “if we needed anything or just him to go look at things” helped convince them it was the right call – with P&J Live staff (“the best we’ve ever worked with”), the area generally and Scotland’s historic stone-lifting culture also giving Henniger good vibes.
She added: “You want to have a partnership with someone that understands your vision.
“But also just the city was great.
“The first time I visited, it was raining and overcast, so I didn’t even get to see the beauty. then, multiple times coming back, just understanding more and more about about the city and things like that, is what really drew us in.”
From big Ohio shipping effort to Rogue Invitational which ‘exceeded expectations’
Shifting a previously US-based strength and fitness extravaganza to Aberdeen for 2024 was an “amazing feat” of logistics, says Henniger – with Rogue shipping 15 40-foot containers of equipment out across five mid-August days to ensure around 2,000 pieces of kit (which also included five lorry loads from Rogue Fitness Europe’s warehouse in Belgium) reached the Granite City in time for the early-November event.
Henniger insists it was all worth it as the 2024 Rogue Invitational “exceeded expectations” – with 6,000 daily spectators from 39 different countries across six continents, more than four million live stream viewers, and more than 18m views across event social media platforms.
She said: “The way that the floor looked and the lighting, and the way that we were able to transform the arena… it’s one thing to see it on paper and to kind of walk through the drawings and know what it could look like, and then actually when you get it all set up and you start to see it come to life – that’s always the beauty of it, when that all comes together.
“Then you add into it, you know, you’ve got the top-20 (male and female) CrossFit athletes in the world. You’ve got your top-10 strongmen and strongwomen.
“They go out there and do their job, and then the spectators were kind of out of this world – they were just so involved and into the event.
“That’s what really kind of pulled this whole thing together – the whole experience of (bag)pipers when people were coming into the building every morning, and what it felt like when someone was finishing a workout and the noise in the venue. That really stands out to me.
“I thought we’d get a pretty raucous crowd – and that definitely happened.
“I think the passion for strength sports, specifically in the UK, brought a lot of really good fans into the building.”
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