Brisbane will host Australia’s first-ever major female sporting health and fitness festival next year, with Her Roar founder and CEO, Alicia Fistonich, claiming it will include strength events that are the first of its kind worldwide. 

The event will be held on April 2nd and 3rd 2022, at the Gold Coast Convention Centre, boasting a range of sports, including; crossfit, bodybuilding, strongwoman, powerlifting, and BJJ.

Across the weekend the expo will aim to empower and inspire women through 40 exhibitors, inspirational speakers, seminars, meet and greets, as well as healthy food and drinks and networking opportunities.

Her Roar founder and CEO, Alicia Fistonich, told the Ministry of Sport, that she created the event in light of the fact that to the best of her knowledge, no other all-female multi-sport festival existed on the same scale as Her Roar. 

 “There was no real event that properly showcased, supported, and uplifted all of the different aspects of women in sport and fitness,” Fistonich said.

“Or an event where we could bring them together and simultaneously, support and celebrate them, and that women could compete,” she told the Ministry of Sport. 

The event comes at a time where women in sport are excelling to new heights, with the most recent Tokyo Olympics comprising a record-breaking 49% female participants and thus being coined as the first-ever gender-equal games.

 “The messaging it sends is that women in sports are not going away, it’s getting stronger,” Fistonich added.

“The whole environment and the whole cultural part of it is growing.

“We don’t have to sit in the shadows anymore, and that we can do the things that we were traditionally and historically not able to do.

“We’re providing a platform for women to be able to share their stories and their journeys, and that’s really critical, there are so many different audiences that just don’t get heard,”she said. 

Fistonich said the Her Roar expo will be the first invitational strong woman and female division in the world. 

“We’ve chosen to really focus on the strength part of it because of the imagery that it portrays, yoga and pilates are not the center point for us for this event,” she said. 

A large focus for this festival is also to support female athletes and groups that generally aren’t well remunerated, enabling them to reach bigger audiences and strive for commercial success. 

“That’s a really big part of this conversation,” Fistonich said. 

“I know it’s only one event, it’s one brand, and that’s only one piece of the puzzle.

“But it’s a little piece of the puzzle that can help, even from the sporting side of things, we’re really making sure that the prize money that we give the women is competitive and making it very much worth their while.

“We really want to push the narrative that, we’re important, we’re here, we deserve to be seen, and we deserve to be where our counterparts are,” she concluded. 

The event will be in partnership with the domestic violence awareness and support foundation RiseUp, where a  ceremony night will take place to present awards to both amateur and professional athletes and raise funds for the charity. 

Both donations and ticket purchases can be made through the Her Roar website.