JPKab, I liked the first part of your response. It was accurate and based on fact. Good stuff. Mark's break from the crossfit community is well documented. And also with good reason. You and others have captured it well - olympic lifts executed at high volume carry significant risks.

But the rest of your post is garbage. "Monetizations schemes" and "racket"(s)? Two things here:

1/ Any intelligent person that starts a crossfit "box" could start a big gym that appeals more widely and make significantly more money. True, they would need more initial capital for the equipment. True, they would have to operate on far lower margins. But at the end of the day they would make more money signing up 1,000 people for $25 a month than signing up 100 people for $200 a month. Gym memberships are nothing more than a subscription service which is subject to the decaying population problem. It is about scale here.

2/ The majority of the crossfit community really, really buy into the entire thing. And nothing associated with that "thing" is about money. It is about fitness and community.

The vast majority of people that start crossfit boxes are doing so because they love crossfit. Not money. Please don't respond here with the handful of boxes that are about money because at any scale you will find outliers and these outliers don't represent the norm.

Crossfit people are fanatical about fitness and community. Not money. They prescribe to a very specific workout methodology. If you don't like crossfit then attack it for the faults that are at its core. Like functional movements (including Olympic movements) executed at high intensity. Somewhat insane, yes.

Don't create additional issues that could be potential found in a minority.

Here is a request for you. Feel free to ignore but if you are serious in terms of your views then try it out. (And if you aren't then just announce your troll status and be done with it.) Visit 12 crossfit gyms. You don't have to do the workouts there, don't pay a dime, just visit them and watch the class. Then ask yourself the following question, "If I wanted to make more money (that is if I were really an industry that devolved from a 'movement and then into a business and then finally a racket' - paraphrased from you) what would I do differently?"

If you can come up half a dozen answers to this question then I submit to you that your statement "it started as a movement, turned into a business, and then devolved into a racket" is wrong.