In previous posts, I’ve presented on the range of Open workout placings athletes have and its impact on CrossFit Games Regional qualification. These results were posted in a series entitled “Predicting regional competitors from single open workouts” and can be found here:
I believe these results partially counter Dave Castro’s statement during the introduction to Open workout 14.4 (around minute 37:00 here):
We wanted the best of the best to be able to finish it and get back to the rower. … You should not go to Regionals, you should not go to Regionals if you don’t have a basic move like the muscle-up. Period.
The Open is changing year-to-year, becoming more competitive and more challenging to qualify for Regionals, but one thing my posts have illustrated: there is a lot of variation and a single Open workout is a poor predictor of regional qualification.
So how can Castro make this claim? Have muscle-ups been a deciding factor in Regional qualification in the past?
No.
In fact, muscle-ups have been featured in the past two Open competitions during the Karen-esque, miserably painful 12.4 and 13.3, and there were plenty of Regionally qualifying women who didn’t perform a single muscle-up during these workouts. Indeed, 39 in 2012, and 5 in 2013 just from my sub-sampled data set (described in my first post).
The range in scores for 12.4 and 13.3 for Regional qualifiers (overall place is less than 60) in my data set: 240-270, and 240-273, respectively. This means that an athlete needed to complete double-unders, (the workout was 150 wall balls, 90 double unders, then muscle ups), but muscle-ups were optional…
But… the Open is becoming more competitive. It was much harder to get to Regionals last year than in 2012 without muscle-ups (i.e., 39 athletes in 2012 versus 5 in 2013 in the sub-set I’m working with).
So Castro might be right this year: Perhaps no one will qualify for Regionals this year that doesn’t compete a muscle-up in 14.4. We can only, anxiously wait. But the way I see it: CrossFit is more than a muscle-up, and the Open generally does a good job of demonstrating it.