Confirmed: Changes to the Crossfit Games

Ok, the cat is out of the bag: the CrossFit Games are changing:

CrossFit-sanctioned competitions are replacing CrossFit’s Regional events and will become a direct pathway for the top men, women and team competitors to receive invitations to compete at the CrossFit Games. The Dubai CrossFit Championship is the first sanctioned event to be announced. CrossFit anticipates that additional sanctioned events will be announced in the coming months.

This basically confirms half of the previous rumors, Regionals are no more. There is no word on the Open, or the time schedule for the Games qualification overall.

My points from the last article still stands: Nothing changes for 99% of the crossfitters out there. If you participated in the Open before, you probably will do so again – even if you’re not expecting to go to Regionals or the Games or any other competition. The Open basically is an event for the Boxes, now even more so than before.

If you’re a games athlete, it’s a completely different topic. I think Jacob Heppner talks about good points in one of his videos: Will there be an off-season for the athletes? Probably not when they really want to qualify and have to do multiple of the qualification competitions. And now it’s a competition where you have only one shot, just like Regionals – with the advantage that you can maybe qualify for multiple of them and not just one.

We’ll see how this will work out and how the athletes will spread out over the competitions. But for the average crossfitter, all of this doesn’t really change anything.

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