The Crossfit Games are happening in 2020, though in a different format. The first 7 events will be completed by the athletes (30 men and 30 women) at their home gyms. The field will then be cut to 5 men and 5 women, who will travel to “The Ranch” in California to compete in-person.
I’m planning to post visualizations of the results, with 2-3 workouts covered per post. The event descriptions can be found here.
Most of the plots will be made using Plotly, so you can mouse/hover over the points to get detailed information.
Event 1: Friendly Fran
The most surprising aspect of Friendly Fran is how far the top competitors are above the runners-up. On the men’s side, you could fit a nice line to finishers 2-29 (excluding the outlier of Pete Shaw). But this line would completely fail at predicting Mat Fraser’s blazing fast time.
A similar story holds on the women’s side, with Tia-Clair Toomey and Kara Saunders together pulling well away from the rest of the field.
An important aspect of the competition to keep in mind when comparing these finishes is that the competitors did not know other finishing times as they completed their own workouts.
Event 2: 1RM Front Squat
This is again a story of outliers - the most noticeable being Griffin Roelle with a massive 490 lb front squat. Tia-Clair Toomey is again an outlier on the women’s side, especially when we consider bodyweight (after all, it takes mass to move mass):
I don’t know how up-to-date the listed bodyweights are, but Toomey is listed as the second-lowest bodyweight among the women at 128 lbs, which makes her winning front squat even more impressive.
It is interesting to look at both men and women on the same plot comparing bodyweight and front squat 1RM (remember that you can mouse/hover over points to see details):
Height also matters, so I’ll next show a measure of “linear density” by taking bodyweight divided by height. The intent here is to roughly estimate how much muscle someone is packing into their available height.
Here Toomey’s result is even more impressive - she has the lowest “linear density” among the women, but the highest front squat. The runner-up, Laura Clifton, has the highest linear density, and a max front squat 11 pounds lower than Toomey!
