Joma to sponsor Fetri’s Hyatlón, federation cousin to Hyrox

The Spanish sportswear brand Joma has signed on as technical sponsor of the first Hyatlón world circuit, the Spanish Triathlon Federation (Fetri) announced on July 2. Four events are scheduled for the discipline’s debut season: Madrid on Oct. 10, La Nucía on Oct. 24, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria on Nov. 14 and Zaragoza on Nov. 28, all this year. (“World” is here a bit of marketing hyperbole.)

As a sport Hyatlón is not new. It is identical, station for station, to Hyrox, the indoor fitness race that has boomed like few other sports over the past several years. What’s new is the governing body: Hyatlón is Fetri’s implementation of Hyathlon, spelled with a second H. The latter discipline is recognized by World Triathlon, the sport’s international federation.

Fetri’s press release frames Joma’s move as aspirational: as a wish to get in ”desde el origen” (from the start), in hopes that the emerging discipline will attain Olympic status. We’ve found no statement from the brand itself.

Joma’s position, and its retail logic

Joma has a standing connection to Hyathlon’s counterpart, Hyrox. Last September it signed Roberto Viciedo, Hyrox’s reigning Under-24 world champion, as an individual athlete, making its self-described “debut in Hyrox.” That arrangement sits outside Fetri’s new circuit and outside Hyrox’s own official sponsorship tier. Why has Joma sponsored an individual athlete?

Puma, which has been supporting races since 2017 or ’18, shut the door to other brands in 2023 by engaging in an exclusive global apparel and footwear partnership with Hyrox, and in January 2025 it signed an extension through 2030. The deal covers title rights to the Hyrox World Championships. That exclusivity forecloses brand-level deals for every other apparel maker.

Back in 2021 Nike signed Dylan Scott, who has since become Hyrox’s reigning World Champion. Adidas, meanwhile, has entered through product alone, launching the Adizero Dropset Elite for the hybrid-fitness category, forgoing any brand tie to Hyrox or its athletes. In August the Swiss brand On will be releasing its own hybrid-racing shoe, developed with Hyrox record holder Alexander Rončević.

In this setting Joma’s Fetri deal looks less like a bet on Hyathlon over Hyrox than like the taking of an opening that presented itself. Puma’s exclusivity shut the door on the commercial circuit, so Joma invested in an athlete. Fetri’s federation-backed circuit had no incumbent, so Joma took the founding sponsorship.

From Fitness Racing to Hyathlon

The road from Hyrox to Hyathlon, from branded sport to discipline recognized by a federation, began long before Fetri’s announcement. In July 2025 World Triathlon, having hired Deloitte for the purpose, published a report titled From Global Connector to Commercial Catalyst: The Future of World Triathlon. As the report recounts, Deloitte consulted unnamed people in the industry. Its sole reference to the category in question is a lowercase, generic one: “functional fitness races,” listed alongside indoor circuits and gym-bound competitions as formats the federation might consider. Hyrox goes unnamed.

At the Hamburg summit where the report was presented, in July 2025, Hyrox co-founder and CEO Christian Toetzke made a commercial case for cross-disciplinary formats and urged the federation to take note. Whether he had already expressed that view to Deloitte or was echoing it days after publication is not in the public record.

That same month Toetzke put his case to World Triathlon’s Executive Board in Budapest, proposing Hyrox’s inclusion as a discipline, with an eye toward the Olympics. Both sides agreed to work toward a memorandum of understanding. No account of the meeting states which side proposed it.

Incidentally, Toetzke is no newcomer to this institutional world. Before founding Hyrox he built Upsolut Sports AG, the company behind the original World Triathlon Series, and later ran The Ironman Group and Lagardère Sports.

World Triathlon’s Congress in Wollongong formally recognized the new discipline that October, naming it “Fitness Racing” and crediting it, by name, as developed and popularized by Hyrox. The capitalization is notable: Hyrox has billed itself as “The World Series of Fitness Racing” since at least 2023, before the federation adopted the phrase. A generic, descriptive term resists trademarking, unlike the coined word “Hyrox.” This might explain why the federation adopted it. Use of “Hyrox” presumably requires a license.

By February 2026 the federation had renamed the discipline again, this time to Hyathlon, saying the change built “a differentiated identity under its own governance” after internal review. The new name keeps the “Hy-” of “Hyrox,” setting itself apart but still trading on Hyrox’s popularity.

The most recent public comments, from June, suggest that the arrangement remains informal. The outlet in question, TRI247, described a “growing relationship” rather than a signed agreement. World Triathlon President Antonio Arimany put it as follows: “we can recognise Hyrox today, because it has its endurance part.” Fetri ratified its own national rollout of the discipline back in March, ahead of any final agreement between the two organizations.

Note that Fetri is a national federation and World Triathlon the sport’s sole federation recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). National bodies such as Fetri answer to the international federation, not to the IOC.

Clarification

A financial-advisory release covering Infront Sports & Media’s investment in Hyrox describes Infront as part of a group that “also comprises” World Triathlon Corporation. That entity is the separate, for-profit owner of the Ironman brand, owned by Wanda from 2015 to 2020 and now owned by Advance Publications. It has no relation to World Triathlon, the nonprofit federation at the center of this story. The two organizations share just a name.