I wish I could remember exactly how this event came to be, but I don’t. In October of 2010, a few months after the first CrossFit Games held in the (then called) Home Depot Center, CrossFit HQ, Rogue, & Again Faster brought together over 20 of the biggest names in CrossFit for what was billed as the Tahoe Throwdown: a couple days of competition, laughter, & a whole bunch of video cameras. (If you’ve only started paying attention to the Games in the last few years, I can’t recommend enough deep diving into this whole series & wasting away an afternoon.)

I haven’t heard anybody mention this series as it relates to Grid, the CrossFit Team Series, or the CrossFit Invitational, perhaps because the parallels are too distant, but I think they exist, & I think it represents both the past & the future of these interrelated-but-disconnected sports.

CrossFit has always grown on the well-defined backs of their athletes. From the very beginning, there was Greg Amundson, Nicole Carrol, & Annie Sakamoto, & you’d be hard pressed to find anybody who started CrossFitting before 2008 who doesn’t cite one or all of them as major motivating factors. This makes sense, since being a CrossFitter in the early days could be a lonely experience, filled with strange looks & endless questions about why you were swinging back & forth on the Gold’s Gym pull-up bar.

Those CrossFit HQ videos served as a connection point to a bigger picture still developing.

Then came the 2009 CrossFit Games, the first “modern” event during which athletes needed to qualify to compete, during which the methodology was first fully tested, & during which we were given a glimpse into the humanity of the athletes. Before the 2009 Games season (and, arguably, the film Every Second Counts), our exposure to these athletes were almost as super-human beings, the pinnacle of performance, that which we strove to become. But in Aromas that year, amidst the dust & sweat, we saw failure, we saw tears, blood, drama, triumph. We saw this because there were cameras everywhere.

When that dust settled, we got Mikko Salo, the first true CrossFit celebrity because not only did he exhibit those super-human qualities, but they were colored by the stoicism of a silent man whose existence seemed defined by his time in the gym. He was, in other words, a personality, a “character” more fully fleshed out than CrossFit had ever given us. (I hesitate to say that only because you could make a case that Chris Spealler was the first. I vote for Mikko, though, simply because he won.)

It was the beginning of a shift toward personality-driven media, because for but a very few, people & stories are more interesting than thrusters.

Flash forward a little over a year, and we get to Tahoe & a slew of celebrity. The competition was still about proving the methodology, but it was at least as much about entertainment. In The Elusive Fan, authors Irving Rein, Philip Kotler, & Ben Shields write, “A critical factor in brand transformation is ensuring that there is star power in the end product.”

Watch either the CrossFit Games or Grid now, & it’s all about stars. How many professional sports allow cameras mere feet away from competing athletes? Not many, but both do because it increases our “access,” & adds a visceral element for the viewer. (It’s also worth nothing that few other sports were conceived of in the time of television, which certainly affects how they’re broadcast.)

To me, Tahoe is seminal because for the first time the artifice of competition was stripped away enough that we got an enduring taste of what it might be like to be one of these guys, to hang out with Jason Khalipa, to workout with Camille Leblanc-Bazinet. The informality of the proceedings — the lack of judges, the absence of color commentary, the hand-held cameras — made it feel like we were behind-the-scenes, like we’d been invited to something special.

CrossFit has stumbled into something that fundamentally affects the fervor around the yearly CrossFit Games, & that is it humanized its athletes to a degree that it made eliteness appear attainable. How many people think they have what it takes to play in the NBA or the NFL? Some, certainly, but the serious ones tend to at least be on track (& very tall). The rest of us acknowledge our reality without hesitancy. Yet, how many people think they can make it to the CrossFit Games (if only they train hard enough, if only they take the right supplements, & sleep enough, & get a sponsor), who have no legitimate chance?

This matters because the CrossFit Games, for all intents & purposes, should never have been this successful. It is because in the early days — the early-adopter days — we were given stories & personalities & heroes to latch on to. It is because, for the first time, there were small, relatively inexpensive cameras we could carry up & down those dirt trails in Aromas, & there was this thing called broadband Internet that let us stream the events live & post interviews or highlights you could watch on demand. Those cameras gave you David (Spealler) versus Goliath (Khalipa), they gave you Iceland Annie’s first muscle-ups, they gave you Mikko, & they gave you Tahoe.

They gave you something or someone to care about, & the CrossFit Games season became the venue through which you exercised those feelings.

The fundamental challenge the NPGL has is not money, it’s that it jumped to the 2012 CrossFit Games without having given us its version of Aromas, of Tahoe, of “Amanda” under the Friday night lights. It’s fundamental challenge is that co-opting that history in the form of cross-over athletes is proving incredibly difficult because CrossFit HQ is keeping its best athletes so close to the chest (see: Team Series, CrossFit Invitational, & increased prize money).

The fundamental challenge for the NPGL is to build teams & develop athletes people care about, & trying to do that by borrowing legacy appears to be akin to an inefficient movement pattern.

[Read more essays about the NPGL & the CrossFit Games, & sign-up for my newsletter, on my website.]