An Athlete Died at the Crossfit Games. What Does This Mean for the Exercise Craze?

The atmosphere at the closing ceremony of the CrossFit Games last week at the Dickies Arena, a 14,000-seat venue in Fort Worth, was decidedly solemn.

Ordinarily a triumphant moment for the men and women named the “fittest on earth” after participating in a four-day competition involving grueling feats of physical strength and endurance, the festivities this year were overshadowed by the death of a competitor on the first day of the contest. Lazar Dukic, a 28-year-old athlete from Serbia, died during an 800-meter open-water swim in Marine Creek Lake.

Mr. Dukic’s death was the first in the 17-year history of the Games. His death has raised many concerns, some longstanding, about the safety of CrossFit as both a workout regimen and a high-level athletic competition.

When Greg Glassman, a personal trainer and a former gymnast, founded CrossFit in the mid 1990s, he took an approach to exercise that was radically different from the bench presses and dumbbell curls that prevailed at gyms at the time. His methodology combined elements of Olympic weight lifting and gymnastics with movements involving kettlebells, rowing machines and skipping ropes — a program of “constantly varied, high-intensity functional fitness,” as Mr. Glassman originally described it.

Early fans of CrossFit’s workouts included members of law enforcement and the military, associating it with grit and mental toughness. Mr. Glassman did not exactly stifle that perception: Speaking about CrossFit to The New York Times in 2005, he said, “If the notion of falling off the rings and breaking your neck is so foreign to you, then we don’t want you in our ranks.”

But part of CrossFit’s appeal was that the workouts, though sometimes extremely demanding, could be adapted to accommodate almost anyone: while one athlete might be asked to jump onto a 30-inch box, another could step onto a raised platform, achieving the same stimulus with different intensity.