Opinion | CrossFit Games 2020: Did the five-athlete, three-day format produce an entertaining competition for ‘Fittest on Earth’?
- Covid-19 forces CrossFit organisers to amend format to allow the Games to go ahead and ultimately it creates a gripping contest, even if the winners ran away with the titles
There’s been a lot of talk about the five men and five women who competed in the 2020 CrossFit Games, but not much has been said about the effectiveness of having a field that small, a scoring system with such big point jumps, and whether this format accomplished what it was supposed to.
From a logistical perspective you would think the small field frees Dave Castro and his crew to be more imaginative and creative with the programming. However, according to Castro, the test we saw in Aromas, California, was more or less the same we would have seen if the top 30 men and 30 women had been able to compete. Even though it may not have changed, there are questions that must be asked about this format.
Was a field of five entertaining enough?
At the end of stage one, when 30 men and 30 women were whittled down to five, I thought the cut was too drastic. The point margins were so thin between fifth and 10th after all seven events that it felt as if the leaderboard was screaming for them to take 10 athletes. Of course, this was not to be because the Covid-19 pandemic forced the organisers to restrict the field.
