How Mat Lock Is Turning HYROX Into An Olympic Hopeful
Mat Lock has a unique vocabulary. As the HYROX Technical Director Elite Racing, he talks about “the sanctity of the race environment” and has the singular focus in his role to turn the fitness race into Tier 1 global sport. More than that, HYROX founder Christian Toetzke recently unveiled their Olympic ambitions. It’s a challenge that Mat is up for.
Interviews → Keith Barlow – 9th July 2025
HYROX, if you haven’t looked at Instagram recently, is something of a phenomenon. From a standing start to over 1 million participants expected in the upcoming 25/26 season, the fitness racing concept has gained global popularity in a remarkably short period of time. Athletes run 1KM, normally around an indoor venue, and then complete a functional workout. They do this 8 times, finishing with 100 wall balls before staggering over a finishing line with their names on the big screen. It’s a production setup not out of place in a WWE event.
Participants are roughly equal gender split, with different ways to race ranging from Individual Pro with the heaviest weights all the way down to the super-accessible relay format, in which teams of four take on a quarter of the race each.
As the sport has rocketed in popularity (just try and get a ticket in London…) for the mass-participation consumer, it’s also developed a professional racing scene. The Elite 15 (the 15 best male and 15 best female athletes in the world) compete in a series of global competitions for prize money, titles and increasingly lucrative sponsorship contracts. These events are streamed liv, creating huge exposure for the athletes. Over the last couple of years, more and more athletes have dedicating themselves full-time to a career as a HYROX athlete.
This year, HYROX made an appointment to a newly created position. Mat Lock, a 51-year-old Brit living in Australia, took up the mantle of Technical Director Elite Racing, a role focused solely on the further development of the Elite Racing division. We spoke to Mat to find out why his goal is to take the big dreams of the sport and make them a reality.
Maybe we could start with your background. What were you doing before this? I guess there was a career before HYROX, given how young the sport is?
I had a traditional corporate career before, working for a respiratory protection device manufacturer. It was a global role, so I was used to working with big teams and putting in place structures and organising them effectively. I’m a bit obsessive with efficiency and making sure we are doing things in a really streamlined way.
I’ve also always loved fitness and competition. I launched my own competition Down Under, which I ran for 5 years, which probably had some of the DNA of HYROX. But as soon as I saw the opportunity to join this juggernaut, I knew I had to focus 100% on it.
How did you find your way into HYROX, then?
HYROX recognised the future importance of the ANZ region and Christian Toetzke visited one of the UK races with me. It was obvious we shared the vision. Two years later and I have built a dedicated team we’ve scaled up and are now running some of the largest HYROX races in the world.
How did you go from the mass participation side of running a region to developing a passion for Elite Sport and this new role?
I think it was quite a natural development and this side of the sport is my passion. I’m still quite involved in the Australian team as we need to manage the succession of my role into our existing team members. Fortunately, we’ve got an incredible team there, and the market is so healthy I think the rolling transition will be smooth.
I had been involved in Race Direction for some of the Majors and at the World Championships in Nice. I think I probably created the space for the role through my approach to those races. One of the great challenges of HYROX is that the sport is growing so unbelievably fast in all departments that sometimes it needs someone to focus on one particular area and own it.
I’d had lots of interaction with elite athletes like James Kelly and when Tia Clair Toomey started to show an interest, I paved the way for her into the world of HYROX. In those conversations, you realise these athletes are obsessing about the minutiae of the sport and their training. We need to be matching and besting that obsession to stay ahead of the curve.
Can you explain the role? What are your main focuses?
So, my role sits in the Sports team lead by Mintra Tilly. I’m 100% focused on the Elite sport side of things so broadly my role is split into 3 core focuses:
1) Ensuring the consistency and sanctity of the race environment
This means how we can make sure that we are respecting every single athlete that takes part and ensuring they are racing with parity and equality. Whether that means establishing testing protocols for the sleds or making sure the rulebook fully captures in a straightforward way the intricacies of sandbag handover techniques. Ultimately, we want to get to a place where the sport is so well governed that the athletes only job is to turn up and race hard, because we’ve thought about everything else.
2) Championing the exploration and application of technology
It’s an incredible time to be in this sport. We’ve never had more technology available to us and we are obsessed with bringing a modern approach to the sport. We launched our digital wall ball targets last season, which are an incredible piece of kit. They were custom-made and are the largest sensor of that sensitivity in the world. We can now switch from a mass participation to an elite sensitivity which tightens up the accuracy level needed and lets us see every individual ball strike with accuracy down to a fraction of a millimetre. We have a really ambitious road map, which you will start to see this season.
3) Providing the elite athletes with a communication channel
Again, the sport has grown so quickly that we’ve needed to evolve. We used to be small enough that people could have informal conversations with any member of the team and issues were solved that way. We now have a very specific communication channel for elite athletes within our elite team, which means the athletes know who they should speak to and that the person on the other end is an expert who is only focused on elite racing and will have the answers and ability to service their needs.
What are the big changes we can expect to see coming this season?
We’ve been experimenting with specialist venues for the Elite 15 Major races with a built-for-purpose course that ensures it’s exactly the same racing environment for the elites in every venue we go to. There will always be variation, temperature, humidity etc, all of which play a role in the performance of the athletes and things like the friction coefficient for the sleds, but that’s just racing, we want to be able to control all the variables we can whilst acknowledging there will always be variation at every race.
We’ve launched our elite community working group, which is amazing. It’s a peer-voted representative panel of athletes and coaches we meet with once a month to discuss the sport, the pressing issues and our developments. We’ve always sought to take on board feedback from the athlete community. Now we are doing this in a more formal and structured way.
That’s actually a large part of what I’m doing - taking a really close look at the things we’ve have in place already and ensuring we’re putting best practice and procedure into play to ensure it’s being done based on rules and protocols. To ensure consistency and that everyone involved knows what environment they are operating in.
Do you have a big picture vision? What would be the boxes you need to tick to be satisfied with where the sport of HYROX is?
Well, the sport of HYROX is much bigger than just the elite side and I really want to emphasise that we need the mass participation side to be thriving in order for Elites to continue to grow. What’s great though, is the lessons we learn at the cutting edge of professional sport help to guide best practice in mass participation.
From an elite sport side, I’ve explained my three core focuses, so obviously I want to exceed expectations on all of those. But specifically, I think when we’ve got to the point where there is a really clear long term pathway to elite sport in HYROX, from age groupers through to the Elite 15 and a really healthy professional circuit with maybe 30 full time athletes both male and female, we would feel we had done a good job in creating the platform from which these athletes can create careers.
I’m also personally a huge sports fan, whether it’s tennis or golf or F1. Our product ultimately has to be an incredible viewer experience beyond just those who are competing in HYROX. I work very closely with Mo on our broadcast approach, and when we’ve got people watching who aren’t competing, we will be starting to move into this Tier 1 sport territory.
The Olympics have been mentioned a few times now. Is this a serious ambition?
Yes.
Could you give us a little more?
It is a serious ambition and one we are working hard on. The Olympics are the grail for a sport like ours and we think we bring a package which is potentially very compelling. It’s a delicate process, though, so I don’t want to go into too much detail. But our plans are in place, and we are pursuing this directly.
What have you found to be the biggest challenges in taking on this new role?
Businesses which scale this fast are usually software or a physical product; scaling people and complex in-person events is incredibly challenging. We’ve got Majors on every continent on the planet this season, each one is a huge undertaking, dealing with international partners, different working cultures, and different languages. We have to be incredibly good with people management and communication every single day. We need to make sure these millions of individual actions and contributions come together to allow our elite athletes to race for just under 60 minutes.
Thanks, Mat. Great to chat.
