@cale_layman_ is no longer on Instagram. At some point in the last 12 hours or so, Cale Layman deleted his Instagram page. The move comes as many have recently questioned his scores from the last two years of the CrossFit Open.
So how did we get to this point?
Let’s walk through the timeline of events…
In 2024, Cale Layman, an HWPO athlete, finished 7th in the CrossFit Open. His performance resulted in an article being written on BarBend and an interview with Talking Elite Fitness. However, he followed that up with a 634th place finish in Quarterfinals.Â
This year Layman returned and improved upon his Open performance, finishing 5th in the world. Then, after a late withdrawal, the Mayhem Classic invited Layman to backfill the open spot. According to Rory McKernan, Layman accepted within minutes.
Things did not go well for Layman at the Mayhem Classic. Layman took last place on every single event. In many cases he was well behind 19th place.
It didn’t take long, like it was still Sunday night after the Mayhem Classic, for Andrew Hiller to begin questioning the authenticity of Layman’s Open workouts.
Later that week Hiller made a video about Layman’s performance at the Mayhem Classic. Hiller also did the final workout of the Mayhem Classic where he beat his time.
The day after the video above was published, it was rumored that Layman had suffered rhabdomyolysis (“rhabdo”) while competing at the Mayhem Classic. While that could partially explain his performance at Mayhem, there were still calls for him to share his videos from the CrossFit Open.
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While Hiller was making videos, Grant, aka Kipping It Real, started his own research. After realizing Layman’s designated CrossFit affiliate was Black and Gold CrossFit was different than the gym he did the workouts at – CrossFit St. Robert, he got in touch with the owner of CrossFit St. Robert.
The affiliate owner told Grant that he did not see Layman do the workouts, but that he does have 24/7 access to the gym. He did say, however, that Layman’s judge, Sklyer Johnston, was not a member of CrossFit St. Robert.
Between making skits of the situation, Grant kept in contact with CrossFit St. Robert owner. The owner event checked archived security footage of the gym to see if he could see Layman inside the gym doing the Open workouts.
However, he couldn’t find anything.
Then on April 15, Hiller said he would give Layman all $693.95 of his YouTube ad revenue if he could provide video evidence of him doing 25.3 in under 10:00. Grant followed suit, saying he would match that, bringing the total to almost $1,400.
A few days went by, still nothing.
Then CA Peptides jumped in an added another $700…bringing the bounty up to $2,100 for a video of 25.3.
Still…crickets.
This past Monday Dave Castro shared that CrossFit started looking into it. Castro said they began a formal inquiry as to Layman’s Open scores.
Grant, not waiting for CrossFit to complete its inquiry/investigation, spent 10+ hours building out a statistical model in ChatGPT to see if math would predict Layman’s scores.Â
Yes, he wasted spent three days doing this.
The result? ChatGPT estimated Layman’s scores to be much worse than what is shown on the leaderboard.Â
That video was published yesterday morning.
Now, today, Cale Layman has nuked his Instagram account. A search for @cale_layman_ results in the following return…
Does this mean Cale cheated? Does it mean CrossFit has invalidated his Open scores? As of right now, Layman is still 5th on the leaderboard. But by deleting his Instagram account it doesn’t look promising…
The question I want to know (and I’m sure most everyone else does) is, what actually happened with these Open scores? Did he do them and fudge the numbers? Did he do them but skirt the standards? Did he even do the workouts at all? Or is it possible he actually did the workouts legitimately and just doesn’t have video evidence?
Bottom line…we just want to know what happened.
