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What Hyrox World Champions Actually Wear

By Mathias Berger · Last updated 2026-07-09

The verified sponsor deals and race shoes behind Dylan Scott, Alyssa McElheny, Roncevic, Wietrzyk, and Jacoby — and whether copying them helps you.

Overview

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Copying an elite athlete's shoe is one of the most common — and most misleading — ways beginners shop for Hyrox gear. The five fastest verified athletes in the sport right now don't wear what they wear because it's the best shoe for a 75-minute Open race. They wear it because a shoe brand pays them to, and because their stations, pace, and body weight look nothing like yours. That doesn't mean the gear is irrelevant — it tells you exactly how far the carbon-plate arms race has gone, and where it stops mattering for the rest of us.

We track every Hyrox race, so the times below are pulled straight from our own results data, not press-release rounding. Here's what's actually confirmed about what the champions wear — and what isn't.

The Champions

Dylan Scott won the Elite 15 Men's world title at the 2026 World Championships in Stockholm in 53:47, with 17 seconds covering the entire podium. Nike's own in-house magazine profiled Scott this June, confirming he's a signed Nike athlete who trains out of the brand's Oregon facilities. What Nike hasn't confirmed publicly is which specific shoe he races in — third-party trackers are split, some pointing to the Vaporfly 3, others to the Zoom Fly 6, and neither claim traces back to a statement from Nike or Scott himself. Take both as informed guesses, not fact. The Vaporfly 3 is the shoe most associated with Nike's roster of fast Hyrox men, for what that's worth.

Alyssa McElheny took the Elite 15 Women's title in the same race, 56:59, in just her fifth solo Hyrox ever — a 2:34 marathoner and Olympic Trials qualifier who'd barely raced the sport before Stockholm. Adidas's own account publicly congratulated her by name as its athlete, and adidas launched the Adizero Dropset Pro the same weekend the championships ran. Adidas's launch coverage promotes the shoe for HYROX training broadly but doesn't name McElheny as the athlete wearing it — nobody has confirmed she raced in that specific model. Treat the pairing as circumstantial: the timing of her signing and the launch lines up, but that's an inference, not a sourced fact.

Alexander Rončević, Austria, holds the men's individual world record at 51:59 — the first sub-52 in the sport's history — plus the men's doubles record. He turned down a Puma offer and signed with On instead, and On's own press release confirms he broke both records competing in a prototype of the Cloud X Tempo Pro, a shoe On built with his direct input. This is the cleanest sourcing of any pairing here — a named athlete, a named record, a named shoe, from the brand itself.

Joanna Wietrzyk, Australia, holds the women's individual world record at 54:25, set in Warsaw during a season in which she swept all four Hyrox Majors. Puma names her directly as one of its ambassadors, and a published account of the Warsaw record states plainly that "the performance came in the PUMA Deviate NITRO Elite HYROX." She finished runner-up to Wietrzyk's own event at Stockholm in 57:14, for context on how tight the women's field has become.

Megan Jacoby held the women's Pro world record at 1:01:56 in Chicago before Wietrzyk broke it, and is Puma's 2024 World Champion — named directly in Puma's own roster announcements alongside Roncevic and Wietrzyk. Her shoe deal is real but the specific model isn't named in anything we could verify — Puma's HYROX footwear line spans three silhouettes (Deviate Nitro, Deviate Nitro Elite, and Velocity Nitro), and Puma's own sponsorship announcements confirm Jacoby as an ambassador without naming which one she races in. What is confirmed, via Amazfit's own press release, is that she races and trains in the Amazfit Cheetah Pro as a signed brand ambassador.

The Pattern

Strip away the individual deals and one thing is obvious: every verified champion above races in a carbon-plated super-trainer built for road marathons, not Hyrox, then retrofitted with a grippier outsole for the sled. Puma alone now sponsors more than 60 Hyrox athletes on a deal running through 2030 — Nike, adidas, and On are all buying into the same category because the shoe brand that owns the podium owns the marketing. None of these shoes were designed station-first; every one of them is a running shoe wearing a Hyrox costume.

The other shared trait has nothing to do with shoes. There's a real, documented case for gloves over chalk at the sharp end of the sport: HYROX's own rulebook now restricts chalk to two stations and event-supplied chalk only, chalk ran out entirely at the 2025 World Championships in Chicago, and racer James Kelly has said publicly that repeated chalk stops cost him a shot at the world record. Gear retailers who sell racing gloves (a real conflict of interest worth flagging) push this data hard, but the underlying facts — the chalk rule, the Chicago shortage — check out independently. What we can't confirm is glove use by any of the five champions named above specifically; no source ties any of them individually to racing in gloves. Treat this as a real field-wide trend, not a claim about these five athletes. Our Hyrox gloves guide covers the rulebook clause and grip options in full.

Should You Buy

Mostly, no. A carbon plate built for a 53-minute men's Pro race or a 55-minute women's Pro race behaves differently at your pace, and the narrow, high-stack geometry that helps an elite athlete run fast can actively hurt your wall-ball and lunge stability if your station mechanics aren't already dialed in — a tradeoff even shoe reviewers who love these models flag constantly. If you're chasing your own percentile rather than a podium, fit, grip at the sled, and durability across training volume matter more than whichever brand happens to be paying an Elite 15 athlete this season. Use our percentile tool to see where your actual time lands across 224,008 recorded races before deciding a $200+ shoe changes your outcome.

For the real buying guidance, see our best shoes for Hyrox and best shoes for Hyrox women breakdowns, and our dedicated look at Puma's official Hyrox lineup if the world-record-holder shoe above has you curious what it actually costs and whether it's worth it. Once you've settled on gear, our race-day kit checklist covers everything else to pack.

Faq

Do Hyrox champions wear the same shoes as everyone else in the Elite 15? No single shoe dominates. Puma, Nike, adidas, and On all have signed Hyrox athletes racing in their own carbon-plated models, which is why the five champions above wear four different brands between them.

Does Hyrox require or ban any specific shoe brand? No. Hyrox doesn't mandate footwear brands for any division. Sponsor deals determine what elite athletes wear; the rulebook doesn't.

Will wearing a world-record holder's shoe make me faster? Not on its own. These shoes are tuned for elite race pace and often trade stability for speed — a bad trade if your wall-ball or lunge mechanics aren't already solid. Fit and grip matter more than the label for most finishers.

Where can I check how my own time compares to the champions above? Our Hyrox percentile tool benchmarks your result against 224,008 recorded races, and our Stockholm results page has the full 2026 World Championships breakdown.

Official References

RoxUpdates is an unofficial fan site. For authoritative information, consult the official sources below.

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