Tommy's 17.4 Report Card

March 23, 2017

Tommy Marquez

Tommy Marquez grades 17.4 performances. 

It wouldn’t be the Open without a repeat workout, and the 17.4 announcement in Mexico City gave us just that.

Week 4 of the 2016 Open was copied and pasted into Week 4 of this year’s Open. It gave the community at large a great opportunity to compare, contrast and hopefully improve. (I unfortunately did not … gravity sucks sometimes).

Grade: Perfect Score

Sam Briggs: The only repeat athlete on my report card so far and for good reason, Sam Briggs won her record-extending 10th career Open workout worldwide. She is now the first athlete with double-digit Open workout wins, and was 1 second away in 17.1 from having another one.

The numbers that stand out to me are how well Briggs has performed percentage wise. She has competed in 31 Open workouts across her career. She has won 10 of those workouts, and has finished another 10 inside the top five worldwide. That means Briggs wins roughly one out of every three Open workouts she performs, and finishes two out of every three inside the top five worldwide. Her track record in the Open is second to none. Bravo, Briggs.

Grade: A+

Travis Mayer: Travis Mayer may be the fittest individual from 2016 that most CrossFitters couldn’t pick out of a crowd. That’s not a knock on him whatsoever, but he’s an athlete who—in a world of social media and self-promotion—sticks to the basics: work hard and get better.

Get better is precisely what he did in 17.4, improving his score by 10 reps from 2016 and finishing third in the workout overall on the men’s side. Even when Noah Ohlsen, Alex Anderson, and Jacob Anderson were live-streaming their workouts to the world, Mayer was very casually throwing down the best score on the other side of the gym.

Mayer enjoyed the best year of his career in 2016, finishing the Open third worldwide, and taking 10th at the Games. While his Open ranking isn’t what it was last year, a stellar performance in 17.4 let’s me know that his capacity is still in the right place as he heads into the final week of the Open and looks ahead to Regionals.

Camille Leblanc-Bazinet: It would be easy to assume that massive improvements in CrossFit are treasures reserved for those still new to the sport and methodology. People just starting out often see considerable jumps in many of the 10 general physical skills, but for seasoned athletes at the top of the sport, it is far less common to see similar jumps.

That’s what makes Camille Leblanc-Bazinet’s 325 reps in 17.4 seem so outstanding. The 2014 Reebok CrossFit Games champion improved by a whopping 62 reps from her 16.4 score. Not only was the score good enough for third worldwide in the workout, she was two shakes of a lamb’s tail away from finishing the second round of wall-ball shots. In contrast, she didn’t even finish the second round of deadlifts in 2016.

Heading into the final week, Leblanc-Bazinet is on pace for her lowest point total ever in the Open. It would be a good momentum builder for her moving forward in the season, and something she would hope to build upon going into Regionals and presumably the Games.

Grade: A-

Lisa Osborne: The overall leader in the Masters Women 50-54 category, Lisa Osborne may not have won 17.4 in her division—she took third—but a closer look at her score yields an impressive tidbit worthy of a good grade this week.

Osborne, 51, finished 17.4 just 6 reps shy of completing a full round. What’s more impressive is that her tie-break time getting off of the rower was 10:35—she did 49 handstand push-ups in 2:25!

Let’s be real here, though. The likelihood that Osborne finished the row and was immediately upside on the wall is about as high as Pat Sherwood’s vertical jump, so a more reasonable assumption is that she did her handstand push-ups somewhere in the 2:15-20 range. Laurie Meschishnick, and Kelly Garber, the two women ahead of her in the workout, both beat her to the wall by more than a minute. When it comes to handstand push-ups, Osborne is a certified G, and a bonafide stud.

James Sprague: In the Teenage Boys 14-15 Division, only two athletes were able to get back to the wall-ball shots in Round 2. James Sprague was one of those athletes, laying down the top score in the division with 292 reps in 13 minutes.

Sprague’s division was assigned slightly modified weights, but the total output in the workout is astounding when you consider his turnover rate. He averaged a rep every 2.7 seconds for the full 13 minutes.

Considering that Sprague had to move through five forced transitions in the workout, his actual working rate is much higher. His 292 reps beat out a handful of veteran games athletes including Lucas Parker and Dan Bailey. Right now he sits in second overall going into the final week of the Open, and if his performances remain steady, he could be getting his first invite the CrossFit Games in 2017

Grade: B

Cody Anderson: Cody Anderson has made a living for the last three years dancing around the bubble in terms of qualifying for both Regionals and the Games. Each of the last two years, Anderson has finished sixth at the West Regional, missing the Games by just one spot.

In 2014, when Anderson qualified for hsi first CrossFit Games, he finished 45th in the Open in the North West and was the final athlete guaranteed an invite to Regionals. After taking 41st in the North West in 17.4 he once again sits squarely on the bubble in 20th overall in the region.

Anderson has consistently filled the underdog role as an athlete—similar to Chris Spealler—since he became a fan favorite at the 2014 Games behind some gutsy performances in the Clean Speed Ladder and Muscle-up Biathlon. He’s been painstakingly close to returning to the Games since, and I hope Week 5 goes smoothly so he can have another shot at the West Regional.

Grade: C

Jenn Jones:  Jenn Jones has almost dug herself out of the hole that she found herself in after 17.1. The four-time CrossFit Games qualifier, and fifth fittest woman in 2013 finished the first Open workout in 116th in the South Central Region.

Three solid finishes in the subsequent workouts have put her in 22nd place overall heading into the Open finale. She’s currently not in a spot that’s guaranteed an invite to Regionals, but even if she stays in 22nd, chances are high she’ll receive one after the initial round of invites are sent out and some athletes decline.

Last year, Jones sat out from the season to rehab a nagging injury. She seems to be on the right track to where she left off in 2015. She still has some work left to do in the Open to guarantee herself a spot a Regionals, but her track record leads me to believe she’ll be just fine.