While the verification process is still ongoing for National Champions, CrossFit HQ made official the top 20 worldwide athletes from the 2019 CrossFit Open. With that they announced the a number of penalties — one which caused a massive social media uproar among fans and athletes. More on that in a minute.
© 2020 CrossFit, LLC CrossFit, Forging Elite Fitness, 3.2.1.Go!, Fittest on Earth and Sport of Fitness are trademarks of CrossFit, LLC in the U.S. At the moment, CrossFit has affiliates in roughly 162 countries. What this means is that after the Open, 324 people, one male and one female from each country, will get an invite to the CrossFit Games? This model is rife with holes. First off, the CrossFit Games purports to want to find the fittest person on earth. Athletes and teams competing in the CrossFit Open film videos of the five workouts for the five-week competition, and upload the videos to the CrossFit Games website for verification and validation. Athletes have a four-day window to submit final scores to the CrossFit Open leaderboard for each of the five workouts.
- The Open leaderboard is set and everyone above the blue line has officially qualified as a top 20 worldwide athlete.
- This part might seem confusing. There are a good number of national champions above that line. They will qualify as national champions and not the top 20 worldwide. For example, Mathew Fraser is national champion for the U.S. and Jacob Heppner is qualified in the top 20.
- A couple of the big male names: Jacob Heppner, Cole Sager, George Sterner, Rich Froning, Scott Panchik, Jason Carroll, Streat Hoener, Travis Mayer, R. Paul Castillo, Sam Kwant, Logan Collins, Alex Vigneault and Dean Linder-Leighton.
- A couple of the big female names: Brooke Wells, Kari Pearce, Amanda Barnhart, Mekenzie Riley, Katrin Davidsdottir, Carolyne Prevost, McKenzie Flinchum, Alexis Johnson, Tasia Percevecz, Kristi Eramo, and Haley Adams.
- Rich Froning, Tasia Percevecz and Alexis Johnson will probably decline their invites to compete on teams. Technically neither Mayhem nor Team MisFit (Johnson) has qualified as a team yet but that could change starting this weekend at Asia CrossFit Championship. It wouldn’t surprise us if Haley Adams, who is set to compete at the Asia and Reykjavik Sanctionals, accepts and competes as an individual.
Deep dive: As we noted earlier this month, CrossFit HQ began reviewing more videos week-by-week and assessing steeper penalties during the Open.
- CrossFit is holding a tighter standard in the review process with these score corrections.
- Every athlete we’ve spoken to has agreed with an increase in video verification to ensure that only the best are ending up in Madison, especially since the Open is a direct route to qualification now. If you’re a Games athlete and don’t agree, feel free to drop us a note.
- CrossFit Games’ General Manager, Justin Bergh, said that this type of review will be the new norm: “This is what top athletes should expect going forward.”
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Which is what makes this next part so controversial and has CrossFit Games athletes speaking out.
Devin Ford, a six-time East Regional athlete, was assessed a “major penalty for performing only 40 handstand push-ups in 19.3.” He missed the required 50 handstand push-ups by 10 reps.
- The “major penalty” was 1 minute, 10 seconds added to his original score of 8:24, which sent his 19.3 score from 15th to 131st worldwide.
- This amounts to approximately 7 seconds per missing handstand push-up. Comparatively, Rich Froning was assessed a 3-second penalty per missed double-under in 19.2.
CrossFit Games’ explanation: “Ford logged a time of 8:24 and submitted a video of his second attempt at 19.3 for official review that was found to be missing 10 reps. Later, Ford submitted a video of his first attempt with all reps completed and a time of 8:49. Rather than accept the original score, or modify to match his first attempt, officials issued a major penalty on his original submission, resulting in a time of 9:34.”
How Games athletes are responding: Devin Ford posted to Instagram for the first time since April 2015, saying: “I’ve always hated social media. Chicks taking pictures of their ass, dudes showing only their best lifts, and everyone posting fake ass pictures…So no I will not be posting lame ass pictures… I’ll be documenting how I became one of the fittest in the world using science, nutrition and bio-hacked my body to compete in a ring I had no genetic business to be in.” This got a few responses from top competitors.
- Patrick Vellner: “Don’t forget using blatant rep cutting techniques! ?? #hacktheopen”
- Brent Fikowski: “@pvellner I hear this fitness stuff gets a lot easier if you ignore rep schemes and movement standards.”
- Travis Williams: “Stick to the ass pics and selfies dude. Nobody respects a cheater.”
- Lukas Esslinger: “You should start a youtube channel. First video should be: My best tricks to do less work in less time.”
- Adam Klink: “As a coach, fan and competitor of the sport, I feel like the ‘sport’ of CrossFit is losing its credibility. I put the word ‘sport’ in quotes because CrossFit lacks a key element; a specific set of rules for competition…At best, the rules of the ‘sport’ are vague, allowing for CrossFit HQ to handle individual situations in a manner of their choosing as these situations arise…As for those individuals qualifying from the Open, I believe all five videos should be reviewed, but maybe that’s just me…I want to see the continued success of The Games, but at this moment in time CrossFit HQ is jeopardizing the future of the ‘sport.'” Full statement.
- Dakota Rager: “@adamklink I only skipped the last 7 reps of the workout. Can I re-input my score to finish at 15:24? I’ll even allow a small penalty.”
- Jason Caroll: “@fikowski@pvellner wait…so we were not supposed to do all the reps? And if so don’t lock them out? Shiit i gotta re do all 5 workouts…”
- Tim Paulson: “HQ needs to be the ones to rescind the invite if they want this sport to be taken seriously, and the Open to be seen as a legit qualifying ground and not a place filled with questionable performances.”
Pay attention: Eight top athletes, seven of which are Games veterans, are openly speaking out about this. This is a bit unprecedented. Top athletes are seriously upset about this.
Adding fuel to the fire: Two-time Games athlete, Tim Paulson told us one of his comments on CrossFit Games’ Instagram post was deleted. We scrolled through and couldn’t find them. He shared the original posts with us:
- “@CrossFitGames can you explain to us all – if an athlete showed a propensity for poor movement or cheating, were all of their videos requested? Also, any comment why choosing not to perform the workout as prescribed (altering rep count) is a penalty and not an invalidation?”
While we’re on the topic.
Crossfit Games Cheating
- Someone clipped Ford’s 19.3 video before it was taken down.
- But here’s a video of Ford doing Diane and it shows very questionable reps throughout the video.
7:55 AM: This story was updated to include a link to Ford’s 19.3 video.
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Crossfit Games Open Cheating Games
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This 2013 Crossfit Games Open qualifier season has brought a new phenomenon: The 5pm last minute rush to post scores to the Games site (games.crossfit.com).
Why? Competitors and gyms are making the only sensible move when they’re faced with cheating. If you have a team in 31st place, many gym owners would easily add a couple of reps to put their team over the top and go to the next level. It’s sad, but true.
The current Games Open system can be easily changed to make cheating more difficult, if not impossible. Here’s what to do:
Require video submissions of every workout for competitors who go on to Regionals or directly to Games. This is not hard to carry out as the Games site already has video submission feature. It’s not too burdensome on the athletes either as most of them videotape their every move anyway. However, I think we need to evolve the video standards: specify how the videos are to be shot in detail. Require adequate lighting and quality. Specify the angle and distance from where the video camera should sit and its distance from the athlete. With these little changes, it becomes virtually impossible to cheat in the slightest.
Make the movement standards easier to judge. A great example is the box jump hullabaloo with several videos from workout 13.2. Instead of “locking out” on the box, make it a jump over the box movement. Or, require folks to jump while on the box to jump to a target 6″ overhead. It’s been done already with push-ups by including a hand-release standard in competitions.
Crossfit has become a big business so cheating is not surprising. For an affiliate, the difference between sending an athlete or a team to Regionals can mean big dollars. Good news is that the cheating is super-easy to remedy for 2014. In the meantime, we’ll all look forward to seeing how Regionals shakes out when some of the more questionable qualifiers will be performing live.*
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Crossfit Games Open
Note: The video section of this post was expanded based upon some ideas I read on reddit. Thanks, peoples. — MG