How Many Athletes Could Each Semifinal Send to the 2024 CrossFit Games?

Crossfit released its updated Worldwide Rankings earlier this week reflecting points awarded for athletes’ performance at the 2023 NOBULL CrossFit Games. The rankings, implemented this year, are used to determine how many qualifying spots to the CrossFit Games are awarded to each Semifinal.

Using the D’Hondt method, regions are awarded the unallocated 12 qualifying spots. This past year those 12 spots were only distributed to the two North American and the European Semifinal.

Now with the updated rankings and combined with the fact that the points awarded for the Open and Quarterfinals don’t materially impact the points, we can begin to calculate and estimate the number of qualifying spots coming out of every Semifinal next year.

So with that, let’s take a look…

WOMEN

In 2023, Europe and North America East Semifinals each received 11 invites to the CrossFit Games. North America West received 10. The other four Semifinals only received their minimum allocation (Oceania with 3; Asia and South America had 2; and Africa received 1).

The published Worldwide Rankings have the following distribution for the Top 100 women:

These are based on the regions they competed under in 2023. It also does not include top athletes such as Tia-Clair Toomey-Orr, Haley Adams and Lucy Campbell, all athletes who did not sign up for the individual Quarterfinals this past season thereby removing them from the rankings.

Once they do register for the 2024 Quarterfinals they will be added back to the Worldwide Rankings, bumping out those near the bottom of the list.

And Oihana Moya is still ranked #46 in the world despite testing positive for a banned substance at this year’s Semifinals. She has yet to be officially sanctioned, but even with a reduced two-year sanction she would be removed from the rankings.

Assumptions

Alright, so to make estimate of the allocations to the 2024 Games as accurate as possible I made some adjustments to the Top 100. Here’s what I changed…

• Added Tia-Clair Toomey-Orr, Haley Adams and Lucy Campbell back into the Top 100.
• Removed Oihana Moya from the rankings.
• Dropped Julie Hougard Nielsen and Valentina Rangel from the Top 100 rankings (since I added a net two athletes to the top 100 above).
• Changed Ellie Turner’s region to North America West and Tia-Clair Toomey-Orr’s region to North America East. Turner’s application was denied in 2023 but it should be approved in 2024 due to being in the United States for two years. Toomey-Orr has previously indicated that she would prefer to stay in the United States to compete if given the option.

Results

After making the adjustments based on the assumptions above, the Top 100 breakdown by region is as follows.

When applying the D’Hondt method based on this Top 100 breakdown, the allocation between the three big regions is similar, but not the same.

As you can see above, despite adding Tia-Clair Toomey-Orr and Haley Adams, North America East will likely receive one less allocation than this past year. That allocation shifts over to the North America West Semifinal.

Caveat

One of the assumptions is that both Ellie Turner and Tia-Clair Toomey-Orr would apply for an receive an exemption to compete in one of the North American Semifinals. If both end up competing out of Oceania in 2024, Oceania would receive 4 spots to the CrossFit Games. That additional spot would come out of the North America West region, leaving it with only 10 (the same as in 2023).

If only one of those women, Turner or Toomey-Orr, stays in Oceania next year, the allocation will remain in North America West and Oceania will continue to receive the minimum three Games spots.

MEN

Time to shift over to the men’s Top 100. Compared to the women, the men don’t have as many changes to the Top 100. But we will get to that in a moment. First, looking back at 2023, the smaller regions received the minimum allocations and Europe received 11 spots, just like the women. In North America, however, North America East received 12 qualifying spots while North America West earned only 9.

When updating for the Games, the published Worldwide Rankings have the following distribution for the Top 100 men:

Assumptions

Now let’s take a look at the assumptions I needed to apply to the men’s rankings.

• Removed Jason Smith from the rankings following his failed drug test.
• Removed Willy Georges from the rankings as he will likely go team, if he competes, and will not do the individual Quarterfinals.
• Added Michael Wesolowski to the Top 100. With only one year of competitive experience, he is currently ranked 294th. With gaining points in the Open and Quarterfinals he will have enough to break into the Top 100.
• Added Nikita Yundov to replace Georges.
• I did not remove Noah Ohlsen and Chandler Smith from the Top 100 list. While both are expected to go team next year, I can also see them doing the individual Quarterfinals for “fun” like several other team athletes did this year.

Results

After making these adjustments, there will only be one shift in allocation from Europe to North America West, leaving both with 10 allocations to the Games next year. All other regions would be expected to remain the same.

Here is a comparison of this past season to what I expect to see in 2024.

SUMMARY

As I anticipated right after the calculations and methodology was published by CrossFit for the Worldwide rankings, not much is expected to change next year. Unless Oceania is able to “retain” Turner and Toomey-Orr (and we already know Ellie didn’t want to compete there this year), the allocations will continue to just shuffle around between the three big regions.

And while the analysis conducted above is based on some assumptions that could change, it does not appear that it could change enough to push a Games spot to one of the smaller regions. The closest region to gain an extra spot is South America, with four men in the Top 100. But I still don’t see a path until possibly next year with the perfect scenario where they can get five athletes into the Top 100 to trigger the D’Hondt method in their favor.

So with that, here are the number of Games spots from each region that I anticipate to see next year: