The CrossFit Games are about continuity and escalation.
Like any good fitness program, the Games consider where athletes have been and where the best of them can go.
In 2009, athletes performed parallette handstand push-ups. In 2010, it was ring handstand push-ups. By 2012, it was deficit parallette handstand push-ups. In 2013, the deficit got bigger. In 2014, it was strict handstand push-ups with an increasing deficit. In 2015, it was a large deficit with parallettes back in play.
In 2016, it’s back to the rings, with the men expected to do a muscle-up first. Students of the sport might have seen that coming. Those who have been content with handstand push-ups on the floor or parallettes saw their rivals leave them in the dust in The Separator, Saturday’s second event.
After two heats, former gymnasts Camille Leblanc-Bazinet, Alethea Boon and Alexis Johnson had completed all the reps, as had former track athlete Alea Helmick.
Heat 3 added a number of athletes to the list, including Kari Pearce, who set the top time of 13:13:74. In total, 17 women reached the finish mat.
In the final heat, Kara Webb blitzed the first two movements, moving as fast as she could, looking for a top tiebreaker time. After the event, she said she wasn’t sure she could get a rep on the rings, and she was thrilled to lock out once to please the judges and stay in the 100-point category reserved for athletes who satisfied the minimum work requirement.
The final heat featured an exciting race between Katrin Tanja Davidsdottir, Tia-Clair Toomey and Sara Sigmundsdottir—last year’s podium.
Athletes struggled to find the minimum range of motion to meet the standards for the ring handstand push-ups, and no reps were common across the field.
Sigmundsdottir fell away slightly during the overheads squats, leaving Toomey and Davidsdottir to test each other’s will on burpees.
Needing only 2 reps to finish, the defending champ logged them with two singles. Toomey managed a double, but she had waited a moment too long and couldn’t catch up to the Icelander. Only 5 seconds separated them as they claimed second and third. Sigmundsdottir was fifth, behind Tasia Percevecz.
Anna Tunnicliffe said the event went better than expected: She only hoped for one handstand push-up.
“Somehow I figured out what I was doing on the rings once I got up there,” she said.
She added: “It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. It was still hard—don't get me wrong.”
Pearce, the event winner, is a former gymnast who wants as many body-weight movements as the Games can throw at her. She said ring handstand push-ups weren’t a problem, and she figured them out “rather quickly” after Games Director Dave Castro announced the movement. In fact, Pearce wants to play with the men and start the movement with a muscle-up.
“I was hoping we were going to do it today … . That will give me something to train for next year,” she said.
The best men’s time came in Heat 3, with Cole Sager punctuating his performance with a nice dismount from the rings with a flop onto his back. Earlier in the day, he had catapulted himself off the crash mat to speed his rope climbs.
“I played a lot on a trampoline when I was a kid,” he smiled. He had planned his leaps during Climbing Snail but said the rings dismount was just to save energy when his shoulders were fatigued.
The workout went according to plan, he said. He completed the ring work in sets of 12, 7-2 and 6, and he was always careful to stop 1 rep short of failure.
He stole the best time of the day from Christian Lucero by ripping through the last set of burpees. Sager said he has about 10-12 burpees with an afterburner that late in the workout, so “I made the burpees hurt.”
He added: “If you get through the skill … it was all about fitness,” he said.
Ben Stoneberg had the third-best time of the day, making the last heat slightly less intense after Mat Fraser and Josh Bridges pushed each other so hard that both acquired enough failed or disqualified reps to fall well off the best times of the day.
Still, Fraser finished fourth in the event and grabbed another 84 points. He now sits 180 points ahead of second-place Ben Smith on the overall leaderboard—the largest margin ever.
For complete results, visit the CrossFit Games Leaderboard.
