‘Strong is beautiful': the unstoppable rise of Crossfit
LONDON. KAZINFORM - About 250 of the world's strongest women flew home from Houston, Texas, last week after competing at the 2015 Weightlifting World Championships. Among them were dozens who, when they took up the sport, were told by a concerned relative: "Don't do it! Weightlifting is not for girls. You'll end up looking like a man."
Katrin Davidsdottir, from Iceland, was among them. She said in Houston: "When I told my aunts I was weightlifting they said, ‘Don't do it. No, it's not feminine, you can't do that.' But look at the girls here - they're strong but they're beautiful. They're still girly." None more so than her friend and teammate Annie Thorisdottir, known to her half a million followers on social media as "Iceland Annie" or simply "Annie".When she completed her sixth and final lift of the competition, Iceland Annie was very girly indeed, bouncing up and down on the stage, clapping her hands and shrieking "Ha-ha!" before she raised her arms in triumph, The Guardian reports. The crowd of 300 - a good turnout considering it was gone 10pm and this was the fourth division of the women's 69kg class - cheered loudly. When it was all over the Icelandic pair, who had never competed at such a high level and finished way down the field, went off to tell their fans, and the media, all about the experience. "It was awesome," said Annie. "I just loved it. Six out of six!" Why so much interest in two 69kg weightlifters who did not make the top 30 at the World Championships? Because the "glamour girls", as rival coaches labelled them, have a combined following on Instagram alone of more than 515,000, having added several thousand more during their Houston adventure. They are also very big on Twitter. "They can't walk more than five yards here without someone stopping them to take a picture with them," said their coach. The main reason is Crossfit, which has been arguably the biggest fitness participation phenomenon of the 21st century. These two have both won the Crossfit Games, an annual contest for which the first prize is $275,000, a fortune in sponsorships and the title "fittest woman on the planet". Last year the number of entries, male and female, was more than 200,000. Crossfit does not operate within the formalised world of sport or the corporate gym establishment. It features contests involving sandbags, tractor tyres, ropes, weights and surprise challenges. It promotes itself on social media, and is rarely written about in newspapers, except in the business pages. Ten years ago there were 13 Crossfit gyms in the United States, where it started. Now it has conquered most of the world - it has a presence in Mongolia, Fiji and Kazakhstan - and there are 11,000 Crossfit affiliates. Forbes magazine valued the brand at $4bn. Full story