RAF launches COSfit Games, its own CrossFit-style team competition

The RAF turned RAF Cosford into a proving ground for its own CrossFit-style team race, and the setup left little doubt about the formula it wanted to borrow. Eight teams and 32 participants tackled a 1-repetition maximum Olympic-lift complex, strict pull-ups, a pool-based Hydro Event and a team chipper workout as Corporal Jessica Stewart, an RAF physical training instructor, launched the inaugural COSfit Games in Shropshire.

The event leaned hard into the same ingredients that made CrossFit travel well beyond its original gym-to-gym audience: measurable tests, mixed modalities and a team format that rewards both strength and stamina. The lifting piece asked competitors to build the heaviest successful complex in 16 minutes, starting from the ground to shoulder, then two front squats and three shoulder-overhead movements. The Hydro Event shifted the challenge to the pool, where athletes had to cover SkiErg distance work, depending on category 5, 6 or 7 kilometres, then repeat 30-metre sprints to the water, 15 squats, swims back and forth, and five heaves on the side of the pool before tagging a teammate.

That structure fits neatly with the way CrossFit has long sold its own identity. CrossFit defines fitness as work capacity across broad time and modal domains, and it describes its methodology as scalable and modifiable. The sport has also kept close ties to the military for years through Hero workouts honoring service members since 2005, which makes COSfit Games feel less like a novelty than a military branch adapting a familiar competitive language for its own ranks.

The RAF has been explicit about why that matters. Its Directorate of RAF Sport says unit sport is a critical part of how the service builds operational capability and “warrior spirit,” and the force says it now has 54 sporting associations. RAF Cosford is a logical place to stage the experiment: the base is home to the RAF School of Physical Training, which delivers specialist training to RAF Physical Training Instructors and Personnel Branch Officers throughout their careers.

The wider trend is bigger than one base or one day’s workout. Australia’s Defence Force endorsed CrossFit as an ADF sport in 2023, saying the move brought funding, chain-of-command support and the ability to build teams and compete under the ADF banner. RAF PTI recruitment materials add another layer, describing PTIs as the RAF’s only professional instructor trade group, with specialist training at Cosford and pay starting at £26,300, rising to £35,500 after specialist training. COSfit Games looked like branding on the surface, but the structure suggested something more durable: CrossFit’s competitive model has become influential enough that even the RAF wants a version of its own.