If you’ve read this far, congratulations, you’ve read further than 90% of people who’ve gotten angry in the comments section.
A lot has been made about training camps lately. People (mainly me) have compared their success at various points of the season based off how many made it to Semifinals, how many made it to the Games and so on.
This time, I (Barclay Dale) worked out how each training camp fared on the points system used in Madison. A simple comparison made by adding up the points of each athlete from each camp to get the totals and then dividing by the number of athletes to get the average scored by the group, looking only at Open Individual competition.
First up, let’s just look at the totals. Highest overall total was hit by Mayhem Athlete with a combined 3,891. Paige Powers, Roman Khrennikov and Lazar Dukic were Mayhem’s top 10 finishers and, together, accounted for over half of that with 2213 points.
Behind Mayhem, sit PRVN over 100 points back with 2,838. The bulk of those points were made up by Jay Crouch’s 728, Will Moorad’s 598 and Olivia Kerstetter’s 545.
Brute Strength follow in 3rd on the total points table with 2,761.
HWPO finished in 5th with 2,483 despite having the second largest roster in Madison with seven athletes to Mayhem’s nine.
Now, when you move away from totals and shift towards averages, there’s a big change in who’s up top.
Leading the averages is Ben Smith’s Blueprint with Laura Horvath earning 996 points and sharing that average with, well, nobody. Same for Caroline Lambray and Jeffrey Adler in second on the average with 953. Laura and Jeff were 11th and 12th on the overall points table, respectively, which is pretty impressive in itself considering they operated solo.
Another solo athlete sits in 3rd, Arielle Loewen on 883, followed by Deka Comp’s Pat Vellner, who also doesn’t need any “mathing” to get the average with 837.
The top 8 scores on the average points table come from Blueprint, Caroline Lambray, Arielle Loewen, Deka Comp, Kritsof Horvath, Only Training, Invictus Athlete and Kyle Rolfe, or, Laura Horvath, Jeffrey Adler, Arielle Loewen, Pat Vellner, Gabi Migala, Brent Fikowski, Chandler Smith and Emily Rolfe. The trend? They were all solo athletes at the Games, no average to split, no shared attention.
The larger groups all finished middle of the pack in the averages. PRVN in 18th, Mayhem in 23rd, HWPO in 26th.
So, what are the takeaways from the efficacy of Training Camps at the 2023 CrossFit Games? Are there any? Was I just bored and wanted to write something? Or is there something to the points?
Basically the inverse of ‘If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together’ – if you’re a really good athlete then keep your coach to yourself and reap the rewards. If you’re a coach then bring one real good athlete to the Games for a better average score.
