The Sevan Podcast - #696 - Dubai Fitness Championship Day 3 Recap

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

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Look for new value programs when you shop at Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions may Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions may apply. See in-store for details. This is the second one we're doing with you. Bam, we're live. Welcome back into the 2022 Dubai CrossFit Championships. They are announcing the winners on the floor right now,

and it is Damian Benito will take the championship here at the 2022 Dubai Fitness Championship. How close are you? This just happened two hours ago, right? Yeah. How close are you to Fabian? Are you standing pretty close to him? No, we're up on the in the like the booth overlooking the stadium still. OK. Let's go down to the floor. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Basically, at the finish line, you know, there's the seats behind them and there's a balcony up top. And on the right side was a DJ and the left side was the broadcast table and also one of the cameras that we use for the broadcast uh this is this is a pretty powerful moment here this guy's or this guy's like overwhelmed yeah i did talk i i just went out to dinner with some of the people who were down on the floor and uh i mean he wasn't just like he was sobbing. This was a very meaningful and emotional moment for him. What's this guy's background? Is this the biggest event he's ever won? Oh my God, yeah. This is the best day of competition that he's ever had and the biggest moment in his career so far. He's been close. A lot of people are often in this sport and,

and, you know, sometimes people get a breakthrough and sometimes they don't. He's been, uh, the last two seasons have been pretty tough for him. I think in terms of competition, he's 25 years old and he's had a, you know, a few hard events, a few setbacks, a few close calls and hasn't quite materialized into what I think he believes is possible. Um, I don't, I mean, he came into the day in seventh place, you know, we weren't even really and hasn't quite materialized into what I think he believes is possible. I mean, he came into the day in seventh place. We weren't even really looking at him as someone who could potentially win, especially when you have someone like Brent Fikowski holding down the top spot,

guys like Yonakoski that are in the way, and guys charging like Luka and Lazar Jukic. It was a competitive top ten this weekend,. He went first, first, second, and then edged out Fikowski and finished in exactly the place he needed to to hold off the charging Moritz Fiebeck. It looks like one of the most exciting final events in the history of CrossFit. Yeah, definitely. And when you realize how close that the points ended up being in the women's division for second, third, and fourth,

and in the men's division for first through third, It's definitely right up there, like you said. Does he speak English? If I play this interview, does he speak English? This is a very short interview, and they told him he could say something in Spanish. I mean, he could do a little English, I think, but when you're that emotional, it's hard to think at all, let alone in a second language. Let's get, let's give it a peek. Okay. Spanish. All right. Well, it was crazy. We will get back to that event. Let's go back a bit. There were four workouts today. You can either check them out.

Bar Bend has a pretty incredible spread of all the workouts, the results, and the times of everyone uh event by event it's an it's a pretty good breakdown and it's what i was uh relying on as i um i watched this after it happened i've been just cramming all of today's events into the last hour okay so we started with event five brian uh fast like an oryx am i pronouncing that right that's the name of like an oryx. Am I pronouncing that right? That's the name of that animal, oryx? Yeah, I think it's comparable to a gazelle. Yeah, we showed a picture of it the other day. It's like a fancy deer with fancy pointy antlers. Why did they choose that name? Is an oryx like a – is it an animal that's – is it a Dubai-ian animal?

Is it a UAE animal? I'm not sure i'm sure that it's you know more familiar saying here than it is in the united states i had not heard of that animal previously i know i know you can hunt them uh you can go to texas and uh and and hunt them they breed them there and they hunt them there so anyone who wants to put one of those down. Okay. Matt Fraser joined you in the booth for this workout? He came on for the men's heats for this workout, yeah. And like you said yesterday, he added a lot of valuable information. I thought it was interesting seeing you in this role, by the way, asking him questions.

I was like, holy cow, Brian's giving him just alley-oop after alley-oop, which was very cool of you. And like you said, he added a tremendous amount of insight to the program. Was that fun? Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you're aware or not, but kind of my upbringing or whatever in this space, I've spent a lot of time in live podcasts with one of the best question askers of all time. So I have a good mentor in that regard. Oh, that's fantastic. That's good to hear. Uh, yeah, you, you absolutely killed it. And, um, and that, and that was fun. And we'll get to some of the stuff that, uh, that Matt, uh, was, uh, sharing. Um, this was a, uh, a four hour, a four round workout. Let me see. This was a four-round workout.

Let me see. I apologize. I have no one working the back end here. Let me go over to the bar bend. I can talk about the workout while you're pulling it up. As we talked about last night and as I'm sure we'll talk about today, there were some changes to some of the workouts that were made last minute for a variety of different reasons. But this one stayed true to form. And from the first version of the workout that I ever saw of this until now,

it's been exactly the same. 10 shuttle runs, 10 burpee box clear overs as a buy-in. And then basically as many thrusters as you could do in the remaining time, two and a half minute interval, rest one minute, repeat four times. And hi, repeat four times. And hi, Chase. Hello. So we're over here on bar bend.

You can see the workout event five, day two, four workouts. Brian just went over the workouts, 10 shuttle runs. You had to jump over the box and then max dumbbell thrusters. Brian, you were saying that the third interval you felt like was the most important going into the workout. Why did you say that? And did you continue to think that after it was all said and done? Well, just in general, when you have a four-round workout, I think almost any of the time the third round is the critical round. I usually encourage people when we're coaching in the gym to stick with it through that third round,

because if you can get to the last round, almost every person is going to find a way to get through the final round. But that third round, it's painful and it's hard. This workout in particular had a little extra element in it, because if you were able to achieve 40 reps of the thrusters with the heavy dumbbells in three rounds, then you were going to have a huge advantage in the final round when you got to the lighter pair. Did you like the weights, Chase, for this, 70 pounds? I know Brian asked Matt Fraser about that also. The athletes handled them way better than I thought, which is usually the case the last couple of years of how you think it will go and then the caliber of athletes that we have now

in the game i thought they did uh really well and i know i'm with brian too and i would throw out the first round being hugely important because everyone's fresh and getting a huge chunk off the bat but not dipping too far in the red maybe pacing yourself in round two but we saw a lot of the guys that could get to those 50s in the third round and really buy themselves some good reps for the fourth. Brian, in the women, did only a handful get into the second set of dumbbells, but not until the fourth set, I think I saw? As far as I remember, only Claudia Gluck, who won the event, As far as I remember, only Claudia Gluck, who won the event, got any – made it to the – she made it to the lighter dumbbells in the third round.

Every other woman that got to them only got to them late in the fourth round. I thought the weights were – they were right. Like people got to the dumbbells right around where you thought they would with an opportunity for a fourth round if they really, really wanted to put in the work in that third round. I thought it was good. Brian, you did ask Matt Fraser why he chose those weights. Do you recall his answer? I know it was long, long five and a half hours you were just on. Yeah, I mean, I think that he, like he said, he tested this workout in a variety of different formats before settling on this. And it was not just the weights, but also the number 40. And actually, I don't know if it was on the air or off there when I spoke to him, but that was the thing he was most nervous about with this workout was if they'd picked the right number for that transition.

I think they'd flirted with 35 and maybe 45. They'd flirted with a lighter weight and having to get to 50 before doing it, I believe. I think he was, I remember after we got off the air, you know, he said, thank you for having me on these two days. And he goes, man, I'm, I'm relieved that that one's over because I was nervous that if we were going to get it right or not. And after watching it, I think we did. Ed, I, Ed, Ed Dos Santos makes a comment comment here ed i i hope you will take um you will not mind my poetic license um as i slightly alter what what you wrote brian you were fantastic this weekend i can't wait to see you and chase team up at the games uh this year and do the

individual competition did you click the commercial? I'm trying to make that sound. I thought there was a love song for me and Chase. Yeah, perfect timing. So, Ed, thank you. I also would love to see Chase and Brian, as the leaders in this space, team up. Maybe we'll even get three. Maybe throw Mr. Woodland in there, too.

I think that would be, I think you guys are ready for three, if I may be frank. And then, you know, I hope this isn't an insult, because I mean it as a compliment, and then get Bill Grundler on the field like they do at the UFC or in the NFL and have Bill roaming the sidelines, uh, interjecting and, uh, grabbing athletes. I think that would be a fantastic foursome. I am a huge fan of threesomes, but I'm not opposed to the occasional foursome. Um, I, I want you guys to really look at, at, at this, uh, for everyone. What the fuck is going on over here? Brian, can you talk to someone over there at Barbin about that? I muted it. You see I put the little X through it?

What do I do here? Maybe go to a leaderboard that doesn't have that on there. I want you to see this. Look at this score. This is where Fabian, this is really important here. One rep.

One rep to win the event. I want to go back and watch the finish, the last maybe 10 or 15 seconds of this heat of men. Because on the floor, we thought that Anil Akai had won the workout. And the reason why we thought that is because he put the dumbbell down and took a bow to the crowd. But if my memory serves, he did that with like five seconds left in the workout. And if he actually had five seconds left and hadn't done that and had done two more reps, it would have been enough to beat Fabian, which would have prevented Fabian from winning the competition at the end of the day. Yeah, it's crazy and

then also look down here where did where is brent in this one um he's 10th 10th and brent is one rep notice this one rep imagine if brent here would have gotten two more reps that would have jumped him over one two three guys These are all easy to look at. The way that the scoring works, those guys that got seventh, I think they all get the points for seventh. Okay. I think that they would all have gotten 65, and then he gets 50 for 10th. So that was actually 15 points on one rep.

Yeah, crazy. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I got to double click it. Okay, and then Brian, what happened down here with Simon Montilia? Why did he withdraw? He had withdrawn yesterday.

It was for personal reasons. Oh, this is the boyfriend of... Correct, correct. Con Porter personal reasons um oh this is the boyfriend of of uh correct correct okay okay okay and con porter also withdrew after this workout okay we'll get to that go ahead do you want to say why did he injure himself yeah i mean everyone pretty much saw it on the um on the clean workout yesterday and he actually was joking around about it this morning and showing me this the still shot of it i mean receiving the clean and like this position with like 170 kilos on the bar was kind of a miracle he wasn't more injured than that but he told me at breakfast this morning

that the only thing that really bothered him was the eccentric the deloading of a weight from overhead and we had that twice today first with the thrusters second with second with the barbell furious workout that we'll get to, and it just wasn't warming up and it wasn't feeling good. He barely did any reps in this workout, as you see, and I think just in the interest of preserving next season, he figured it wasn't worth it for him to continue on today, but he was in good spirits. He was walking around, interacting with the crowd,

taking pictures and being this genuine and fun con porter despite having to withdraw. And what was hurt, the elbow or the shoulder? Yeah, elbow. Elbow, okay. All righty. And then we go down here to the women, Claudia Gluck, Lena Richter, Jamie Simmons. Yeah, Claudia Gluck, she, Lena Richter, Jamie, uh, Simmons. Yeah.

Uh, Claudia Gluck, you know, she actually had a phenomenal day today. Uh, she started the day, I think in 16th place. And by the end of the day was all the way up in seventh place. So a huge surge for her, obviously winning an event always goes a long way. She'd done well on the jigsaw workout at the low lands throw. And I think she finished third in that one um and similar style workout here and she was able to you know obviously obviously win the event which helped her make that big move and she was uh from what i think i heard you say in the commentary she was the only woman to get all 40 reps with the heavier weight at the end

of the third interval so she got to start the fourth interval with the lighter dumbbells. Yeah. And she likes, you know, being that low in the, in the rankings at the start of the day, I think I got that wrong. She was in 12th and moved up to seventh, but being in the second heat to start the day, she had set that mark to beat. I figured that some of the, because she was able to do it, that some of the women in the last heat like Jimmy Simmons or Ayanna Moya or

some of the others might also be able to do it. when that third round came to the end they were all still a couple reps short uh there was also some insight you got from matt fraser in regards to why they use the box clear instead of just the box over the distinction being you had to actually jump over the box without touching it versus just traversing the box yeah he said he said, he said some stuff about the, the, the diaphragm and whatever else, but basically what I heard him say was it spikes the heart rate more than a box jump over that little extra effort to get over the box. It's not an unfamiliar movement to do a burpee and get over a box, but it's just slightly more challenging. And I thought it was, I thought it was a nice little wrinkle in the workout. Chase, when I would see people jump over the box, we see this a lot.

The big example was when you watch Danielle Brandon jump up on a box at the games. It really starts showing who is a, for lack of a better word, athlete. Yeah, I was going to say athlete. Or who is a real mover. athlete or who is a athlete or who is a real mover right the example i always use it was remarkable watching uh brooke entz and tia toomey one time at crossfit hq do burpees next to each other bar over the burpees and tia just looked like it was all the burpees look like just one movement like she's like someone's just pouring a cup of water back and forth and whereas brooke who was great at it but it was more like a robot and it was like segmented

and shit like each thing was happening separately yeah um by the way i hate driving with people like that who they switch lanes and it's like dude just flow just flow with your driving yeah and use your blinker for crying out loud yeah thank you what there were some athletes out there that look like they had never practiced the box clear like they were they were jumping over it and landing like basically on their heels and shit and then there were other other of these women who were just like flowing mid-flight turning and then bouncing back and it just looked like more like those things that swing underneath you know a grandfather clock like a yeah isn't that something to code isn't that your coach supposed to be like hey uh let's do five of these and let me assess them uh before you go out i mean you'd

like to see that but like you said is that if we're talking about an athletic advantage which is somewhat natural based off you know some of these athletes like they've kind of tapped into their athleticism potential at this age right this is something that's developed since you were like five and six. All right. So am I going to teach someone how to be more athletic in the, in the warmup area? Probably not. Can I teach them to be more efficient in the warmup area?

That's a better, better chance as far as the coach's impact going into the event. It's crazy. What movements you see exposed athletes shit. Like you don't even expect. Did you notice that Brian, was it pretty obvious? Like you're like, Ooh, that don't even expect. Did you notice that, Brian? Was it pretty obvious? Like you're like, ooh, that's not going to work for you.

Just the way that that workout was going, I didn't really have the best opportunity to assess technique as much as just kind of see who was able to make a move where. There wasn't a really easy way to necessarily count the reps on the thrusters, so I was trying to get as good of a feel as i can of of who is making moves on um each of the separate implements then and keep that in mind round to round oh we're talking about uh the first event that happened today the final day of the dubai fitness championships uh matt fraser was in the booth today uh for this uh for the one of the men's heats and he shared a lot of good stories one of the things's heats, and he shared a lot of good stories. One of the things that he said is

he really sung Koski's praise. He basically said that he held Koski basically on a pedestal for his conditioning. I'll start with you, Chase. What is it like? Because you hear people say, oh my God, Tola is so strong, or oh my God, Daniel Brandon is such a great athlete.

Or, holy cow, Sam Briggs can really run. What does it mean when he says, yeah, at the very top of the mountain, if you talk, what is conditioning? I don't even know. What was Fraser referring to? Probably what you think, just like anaerobic conditioning or aerobic capacity is that. or aerobic capacity is that being able to do long distance at a high intensity for that duration. And Koski's always been traditionally very good at that. You know, the event ones at the CrossFit games that were either had a swim event in there, obviously his swimming background, just with his background alone and how successful he was and how long he did it for,

swimmers have an amazing like aerobic capacity just based off the sport and the training which they do for near a decade and that's what koski's background is take that and bring it into the crosser world you're already walking in as one of the most aerobic condition athletes in the game and now it's like coming in with a weightlifting background for matt is like matt didn't really have to focus on weightlifting anymore. He just had to lift like a normal person so he could pour all of that into the other side. So it's a huge weapon to come in with that capacity.

I think it's a lot easier to develop. I would say it's a bit easier to develop that aerobic capacity than it would be, say, someone who's really, really weak coming into CrossFit. Like strength gains take a long, long time to develop. Yeah, you know, Brian raises his hand. I'll raise my hand. I still haven't got there and I've been doing this for almost 15 years. I mean, look at someone like Haley Adams,

elite aerobic capacity, but she's gonna have to focus on strength and really, really focus in singular that. And we see her doing that now just to get herself just a notch up from the bottom. And let me take a stab in the dark here when it comes to swimming. One of the byproducts of swimming, whether you are intentional about it or not,

is learning to regulate your breathing, right? Yes. And so not only are you building this massive aerobic capacity and this conditioning, as Fraser said, but you're learning to really pay attention to your breathing and not be sloppy with your breathing. And that is, I am actually shocked that you picked that up because that was something that was a huge weapon. I'm offended. I'm offended. I'll talk to you. Okay. That's fine. But it's, it was a huge weapon for me. It wasn't, so I swam in college. So I had a good, um, aerobic background coming into CrossFit. But my biggest weapon was my ability to control my breath under maximum fatigue in high heart rate.

And that comes from the nature of swimming. You're holding your breath and releasing air through your nose constantly, throwing maximum intensity movements. So when you think of something like a wall ball shot, how do you breathe freely during a wall ball shot? Some people don't know how to do that. They hold their breath and then like take breaths intermittently during the rep instead of breathe freely. Can you do that while you do squats? Can you do that while you do kettlebell swings? Can you do that while you do box jump overs? And yes, it's a huge,

huge weapon for swimmers because that is basically what they've been working on. And it's one of those things that isn't really picked up on a lot in the fitness community about how easy it is for swimmers to breathe freely during maximum intensity efforts. And it's a huge, huge weapon for people that does need to be practicing trained, I think, and is vastly overlooked in a CrossFit training. Fair. It's a good pickup. I'm proud of you, Sivan. Thank you, Brian.

Were you going to say something? Yeah, man. Yonikosi has been able to leverage that skillset into other aspects of CrossFit. We've seen him at the Rogue Invitational and also in this workout today and in many workouts throughout his career, be good at moving a lighter,

moderate weight for high volume of reps because like chase is talking about he understands how to breathe through that stuff it's also he has hobbies that are like good for maintaining that he likes cross-country skiing he likes going for long bike rides and so that's not even something that he's necessarily doing to try to improve his fitness it's just a fun thing that he does on the days he doesn't have to be in the gym and you know he's got four top 10 finishes in his career at the CrossFit Games. He's only 27 years old. That's a pretty notable stat, and Matt Fraser recognizes that. Victor Machado, I've seen this question a few times.

It said that the shirts were CrossFit championships. Do you have any insights into why it didn't say Dubai Fitness Championship? Yeah, they had ordered and printed them before that decision was made. Oh, okay. All the names and stuff on them are like heat pressed on or something. The shirts had been ordered a long time ago. Dubai will be hearing from the general counsel at CrossFit. That's not true.

I know. council at that's not true i know because uh dubai reached out and and talked to crossfit about that and alerted them that that was it was the situation and they they worked or you know they worked through it together great dudes um uh you asked matt about why uh he chose to just have the athletes on the shuttle run cross the line and then return as opposed to touching the line. I thought his answer was fantastic. I mean, yeah, the shuttle run was introduced to the global CrossFit community this past season during the CrossFit game season.

And in every iteration of it, you had to get both feet past the line and reach down and touch the ground. He basically wanted to make it easier on the judges, as simple as it could be. And I think that that's a good recognition of the circumstances that you're in. There weren't a ton of judges there. And so to make it a little bit easier on them and the fact that we couldn't have a judge on both sides of the floor, that was an easier standard to uphold. Brian, was it 10 judges who worked the entire day today, the same 10 judges?

I don't know for sure. That's what Matt had said on the broadcast. Yeah. And that's pretty impressive, right? It's rough. Yeah. I mean, it's, uh, like you said about the broadcast earlier, it's like five hours or whatever it is. And there is a little bit of downtime between, but that's a lot of heats. hours or whatever it is. And there's a little bit of downtime between, but that's a lot of heats. It's a big time competition. You know, the races were tight and it's a lot of responsibility if you don't get a break every once in a while. Were the judges told to be, were the judges briefed on, on, on movements like, Hey, if you're not sure if there's hip extension give them a warning first or it seems like i just didn't see a lot of no reps and by no means is that a criticism maybe

it's just all the athletes were amazing or but i'm suspecting that the judges were brief like hey don't interfere with the competition unless it's flagrant? In the buildup to the competition and competition days, I always try to be as tuned into everything as I can, but it's impossible to be everywhere at once. What I do know is that there were athlete briefs both days, two hours prior to the start of competition, and that the judges were present for that. And then additionally, after the athletes left to go start and get ready for their competition day, the judges stayed behind with the head judges for a further meeting. So they were definitely there for both the athlete brief and the judge's brief to follow what was communicated at the judge's brief. I wasn't able to be at because

I had other things to do. There seems to be the least complaining about the judges. So I guess this is a prop to the judges that I've heard in a long time coming out of an event. I haven't heard any complaining. I think because it was, regardless if you think it was lenient or not, it was at least consistent. Right. We didn't have a lane five judge out there that was different than everybody else. Right. You're just like, oh, I got lane three, which is a skinny one. But you weren't worried about what judge you're getting possibly. Right. So I think when it comes to that, it's like,

as long as we're all playing by the same rules, if everybody gets soft lockouts on their dumbbell thrusters, as long as everybody gets them and we're all doing the same thing, you're not going to hear a lot of complaints. But if one person is getting hammered by one judge and it's different than everybody else, that's where you see the complaints and the frustration start to rise up. As an example, not to... Yeah, let's do it. You know, Fraser has talked about this in the past also, where he thinks that there are certain movements that are very difficult to judge in competition. In particular, he has said in the past that a box jump should no longer be programmed, especially in an online competition. Make them do a box jump over because it's very clear.

You start on one side and you get over it. The hip extension at the top of the box jump becomes a gray area that people are going to nitpick to the end of time. He chose the burpee box clear over, even less room for error in that really. You got to jump all the way over the box. What else are you going to do? Jump over it. And of course, there's certain movements like dumbbell thrusters,

like ring muscle-ups where you could have those little nuanced things that people have been pointing out throughout the season. But like Chase said, until there's something obviously different or noticeably strange compared to everything else happening on the floor, then things just go on as usual. And the consistency wins at the end of the day. So maybe some kudos also to the programmer, HWPO. I think that Matt is, you know, there's a lot of factors going into it. You know, he wants to program

the best competition that he can. He wants to factor in, is this a balance test? Am I hitting the time domains? But he has a fixed window of time that we can have the competition. There's prior times he has to consider. There's limited equipment available.

And all of those things factor into that. I still think that they did a fairly good job of choosing movements and movement patterns. And I was really happy with the workout flows. There were some things that we had to change because of the size of the floor. We wanted to advance the barbell from the cleans to the front squats, the shoulder to overhead, but because of what had happened with Lazar Jukic and bumping into a barbell in a previous day, they decided to do the stagger start and let them do them all in one spot. But in general, the flow of the workouts I thought was really easy for spectators and on site and at home to follow. And I think all of those elements are a testament to the attention to detail that that team put in.

Brian, was that chip timing or was it all hand time? Only for the Burj Khalifa challenge? They should have gone the width of the field then. The width of the field. Yeah. Why does that matter? Chip versus timer? Well,

chip timing has a, usually has a line in the competition floor that you cross to trip the chip timer. But if there was all hand timing, the lanes are irrelevant when it comes to the end of the day. It's just, where do we start? Where do we finish? And in the clean front squat or the power clean front squat overhead, well, if that's the case, then line them up one through 10, the length of the floor going the width, and then you could advance your barbell. I'm just making something up after the fact. Obviously this is like armchair quarterback stuff, but if you really did want to advance the bar make the call just go the width of the field

advance every two lanes and then you got a finisher oh it's hand timing so it doesn't matter you're not screwing up any uh chip finished i didn't understand why you would do that but you're saying use the lines like that well if you want to see the bar advance that's right that's all i'm saying right we had talked about a few different options no one had brought that one up we'll get to this in a bit um liz i just want to say uh liz all right i'm impressed seeing the head judge nowhere at fukowski yeah that was a forty thousand dollar thirty no from fifty to ten i think yeah i think third's twenty thousand i thought it was ten thousand as well but i went back all right i think it's $20,000. I thought it was $10,000 as well, but I went back and looked. I think it's $20,000. The $30,000.

The $30,000? No. Okay, so in that event, Fabian wins with 63 reps, then Janikowski and… Anyola Kai. Anyola Kai, thank you. And then for the women as… Oh, shit.

Is that going to happen every time? You know what would have been a terrible tiebreaker, Brian? Your first round of dumbbell thrusters. Terrible and the painful essence, yeah. It's so great. Claudia Gluck, Lena Richter, and Jamie Simmons. And then we move over to event number six. Let's see if I can push the right button here.

And we go to heavy-handed. And it's four-time double-unders with a heavy rope. How heavy is that rope? Four pounds? Maybe. Okay. 100-foot sandbag carry, 200 pounds for the men 150 for the women i really like that 50 chest a bar and then another uh sandbag carry for 100 feet 200 and 150 pounds and then finish

with the maybe four pound uh heavy rope chase is there a standard for for a heavy rope depends you can have heavy handles you can have thick heavier, heavier cables. You can have both. There's a lot of different ways you can make it heavier or tougher to spin around. Fraser had originally wanted to do this workout with drag ropes. They were unable to get the drag ropes, so they went for the heavy rope. He was a little bit disappointed in that, and he explained to me that the drag rope is going to have a more fatiguing effect on the shoulder, whereas the heavy rope is going to be more fatiguing on the grip. Given the whole, the context of the day and how much shoulder stability was required in the final workout, which was also due to a forced change, I think that this actually worked out well. And I liked, if that is the case, I'm not

good enough really to double unders to use either of those ropes very well. But if that is the case that it taxes the grip, then I really like this workout even more. Because as you saw, not all the athletes could grip all the way around the sandbag. And obviously, you need your grip to do 50 chest bar pull-ups. What's a drag rope? Chase? It's like a soft cable. Think of it like a really long shoelace uh-huh is that the best kind of way to describe it brian it does i've seen one before in the games they used it at stage one

of the 2020 games i believe for the uh the final event it had the uh it was basically like ghd annie with some power cleans in there and it doesn't have it doesn't have a ball bearing so it doesn't spin you have to you have to turn it over physically twice each time, which, as Matt was saying, it's more fatiguing on the shoulders because you actually have to get the whole body in there, where if you've got that ball bearing and a heavy-weighted rope, it's just still from the wrists, a little bit more in the biceps, but it definitely is more grip-intensive. Can I Google drag rope? Is that like an official name?

Yeah. I think – does RX Smartgear make those? Oh, okay. I see it it it's an old it's it's a yeah it's kind of an old school looks like your child's jump rope that you'd get them for funsies yeah now they've made them all fancy and pretty looking yeah no we were we were uh just a piece of actual roaming we're brainstorming names for these workouts this morning. Was this yours? Which? Well, we were struggling with the drag rope. We'd come with a lot of options there, and it wasn't very good. When we found out we had to use the

heavy rope, I thought of heavy-handed instantly. That's a good name. There are some good names this weekend. There are three that I can take credit for. Okay, so I've seen this heavy rope before. I think I own this and it's never been used.

It's probably never been unwrapped. This is the one with the steel cable. This thing is basically like a fucking weapon. Yeah. That Zeus rope. You'll see a lot of those. Is, is this what,

is this what Matt was hoping for? No, no. Matt was hoping for the drag rope. Is this what they used did you did it look like a steel cable like this it had a yellow casing on it um but that may have been what was underneath yeah 55 bucks for a jump rope piece of steel uh just about what they all cost i guess i guess you're right what a great what a great business to be in the jump rope business. Oh, why did,

what happened to Taylor? How, why did she pull herself out of the competition? Tendonitis is what I was told. I did see her this morning. I was in a hotel here, icing her wrist and her hand a little bit. She said she had a few niggles after yesterday and you know, it's a very similar to con porter just kind of in the interest of the rest of the season uh it wasn't feeling better when she got into the flow of the workout so she just decided to call it for today uh phil mccracken phil mccracken her sandwich is ready on table six um and and man man man and uh anganese i saw her standing out there

and then she didn't go and then i thought maybe she had pulled herself out and then in the first men's heat i saw her join the pack one has that what happened and two have you ever seen that before where they they ran a woman with the men i was trying to think about that on the air derrick was saying this may be the first time that i've ever this has ever happened and something in my mind is telling me that i've seen it before but i want to place it you remember when it was i mean they would run 10 men and 10 women at the same time during the same event but i mean but i mean have you ever seen it like say something goes wrong like you go out there and your rower doesn't work and so they're like fine we'll just stick you in the men's seat i mean they're lucky that it was all the same that like i thought that was a cool

move that at least let her be with people to compete against sometimes you just see him okay run it on your own and but it's no fault of her own to be by herself so i thought that was a classy move what happened uh brian what was her rope broken she was just standing out there looking at a rope and then she went over to her head judge yes as far as i could tell i had i didn't see her after the competition i didn't think to ask the judge about it but it looked like she picked up the rope and the handle in her right hand just fell off oh i'm not 100 sure of that but that's what it looked like to us and i thought as i've been saying about the about the athletes, I thought she handled this situation very well. She called over the head judge. I mean, there's obviously nothing you can do at that point other than let the judge know and trust that they're going to make a decision that gives you the best opportunity. her into the back i think to resize the rope or give her a new rope and then i was thinking about it i'm like because originally i thought what chase said they'd just have her go on her own

but it turns out that there was an empty heat a lane for the men because of simon withdrawing the previous day and i thought that was a great decision to let her do it with them and i think she ended up actually taking fifth in the workout uh bruce wayne as soon as she went to do jumps, the rope came off the handle. There we go. Good times. Heavy-handed Matilda Garns, who I can't remember. I think it was Brian said needed to be watched all weekend. Takes first place.

Then Emily Rolfe. Then Andrea Solberg. And a name we just keep hearing all week, Karen Frey. Any surprises here here guys? I would say of those four, uh, Emily Rolfe doing well on this workout was the most surprising to me. You know, Matilda Garn's upper body pulling is phenomenal. The same with Andrea Solberg actually was quite impressed with how she handled the sandbag in this one. And like you said, Karen Frey is pretty much good at everything. Uh, Emily Rolfe also had a pretty good weekend, but amongst those four, she would be the one that kind of just stuck out to me.

Have we reached this sort of, are we in a sandbag era? You see games trends tend to trickle into the off-season competitions afterwards. So Capital with the sandbag, H husafel carries in the you know it you see that trend i feel like we see that a lot right something happens at the game i mean shoot look at shuttle runs or sometimes it's what what about yes shuttle runs also yeah what about this could it be the other way around that sand do do things ever filter from the we're talking about

it's sort of a top down effect maybe the sandbags have been around and and it was just the games that finally caught up i think the first sandbags we really saw come into play was probably i mean in carson they had to throw those bags up over the wall maybe that was in 2010 but before that they had to run out the hill at Aromas. It wasn't the same kind of sandbag, but we've seen sandbags throughout basically the entire history of the CrossFit Games. Anything like the 2017 finals

really got that on the map? What was that workout? It was a bike, cowl, buy-in into burpee box jump overs, and then 10 sandbag cleans to the finish line that's what really got i think sandbags pumped in there pretty hard when it was 100 2016 yeah all right and so that that finale was based off that so maybe it was 2016 that really got it moving because then they just really had d-balls and then the strongman bag came out in 2017 which is really like a d-ball you could sweat and use i think you know having that um fabric

makes it a lot easier to use in in workouts than a d-ball does uh it's you're suggesting this is when the fabric gets wet it's it's it's it's worse where the d-ball it's no i think it's better right the d-ball gets really slick if you're sweating but like the fabric's just going to soak it up so it's a lot easier to manage under fatigue or while you're sweating in a workout uh and here we go again uh fabian benito takes his uh second consecutive first place victory brent fukowski stays close to him in second place uh caravos Second place, Kerevos in third. And Anol. Anol Akai. Anol. When am I going to get that?

Nice. Anol. I know. When am I going to get it on my own? Anol Akai. It's better than what you were. Takes fourth. Brian, how many of these guys speak english when you're when you talk to them

of these 20 oh um fabio benito not so much obviously fukowski yes yorgos can get by and y'all speaks pretty good english he's also doing a master's of psychology program right now and although he's kind of emerging as a competitive crossfit athlete he has intentions of of continuing on with a career in that field after continuing finishing any studies more it speaks english great alex catullus is all right yona's very good so more more more do speak english than not okay and same with the women all right i just have to look at the leaderboard i think it's i think it's probably like 75 of them english pretty good okay uh. Of the men here.

We just happened to get two champions that are on the lower end in terms of – it's not just that they – it's one thing. Both Fabian and Karen Frey would do better in a conversation with you in private than they would in front of a crowd with a microphone. Right. Okay. And down – is this playing out? Oh, Comporter's out here. Oh, what happened to this out? Oh, Comporter's out here. Oh, what happened to this guy? Oh, we talked about him already.

Okay, okay. Does this play out the way you think it would? When you see Lazar and Luka down here at the bottom, are you like this nail in the coffin kind of? I have to talk about those two completely separately this weekend. I don't think Lazar ever really recovered from what happened to him Friday morning at the Burj Khalifa. I'm not sure if it was, you know, at this point, just looking at the totality of work that he did, I'm not sure if it was the best decision for him to continue on.

You know, he loves being out there. His parents came to watch his competition. I think he was a pretty, you know, but it just didn't look like the same guy that we've seen at the games the last two years. And now we've seen unfortunate situation happened to my rogue followed by this. So somewhat of a of a bummer of an offseason for Lazar. And so I want to I'm not weighing this too heavily. I just think he didn't recover well from whatever that incident ended up really being. So you're going to give him he gets a pass for this. that incident ended up really being so you're going to give him he gets a pass for this you're not going to let this influence your your future thoughts no no i mean kind of like we have to

wait and see still we don't have enough data points to find out if he's toast oh we no i mean look he won the semi-final in europe last year he won the madrid championship in september he placed eighth at the crossfit games like there's plenty of good data points for him this season breaking your ankle or rolling your ankle whatever happened at the rogue invitational is a is a freak thing and this thing that happened to him at the burj khalifa the only thing that's kind of notable about it is and he talked to me about this is it also happened in the capital workout where he just went in you know beyond uh the line too far and paid the price for it. And so I think that he intends to try to maybe do some work with a nutrition coach

or get some blood work done and see if there's anything going on there so he can prevent that from happening in future competitions. That would take us to event number seven that gives us uh two two events left and event number seven is barbell furious uh 10 cleans 10 front squats 10 shoulder overhead all with the same uh oh i didn't share it sorry uh 10 10 cleans 10 front squats 10 shoulder overhead all with the same, uh, Oh, I didn't share it. Sorry. Uh, 10, 10 cleans, 10 front squats, 10 shoulder overhead, all with the same bar, 220 pounds for the men, 154 pounds for the women. I was pretty darn impressed. I was pretty darn impressed with these guys. This was nuts. Uh, were you surprised at how fast these times were? I was surprised by how fast Karen Frey's time was. Yes. Come on.

This was crazy. So I, I actually did this exact workout with, uh, 165 pounds, which I'm not exactly sure what the kilos ended up being, but it was pretty close to this. And I finished it in 225, I think, or 235. Karen Frey was done with 20 reps in 49 seconds. Crazy. And this is a typo here, right? Her name, it's not Frey, it's Karen Frey, not Freyova, right? No, that's her real name. She just goes by Frey when she competes. And you look at number two there, Dana Peran, Olympic weightlifter and in her former athletic pursuits. So we thought this might be a good workout for us. Sure enough, it was. And those two women were, you know, well clear, 40 plus seconds clear of the third place finishers.

Those scores from Karen and Dana, like that makes me wish that Laura Horvath and Tia Clartumi were in this field just to see how elite those times actually are. Yeah. She did it in half the time of basically Jamie Simmons, Burke, Sahar, Maria, Lena Richter, Amy Kringle, Andrea Solberg, and Valentina Magulati. Oh, shit. She did it. She almost did it in one-third the time of the 18th-placed athlete. Yeah.

Someone asked me this week on Thursday, which event is Karen Frey going to win this weekend? And I said, Barbell Furious. She may do well on some other ones, but that one's going to be a slam dunk for her. And even having said that, I was not expecting a sub-130 time. that i was not expecting a sub 120 130 time uh chase so so that's not only she's strong she's conditioned well but her technique is impeccable her shoulder to overhead were absolutely beautiful and when you say that what do you mean what do you see well the the thing that you when you want to see good technique and good positioning,

car and fray has amazing. Justin Medeiros is another one of those athletes has great positioning overhead, but if you get to watch it again and see how hard those reps actually were for her to do. And she was only capable of that because of the technique that she had. It was, it was unbelievable. I don't think anybody,

I think she went unbroken through the front squat right into the overhead and nobody else did that not one person so she did she do the entire thing unbroken i think she did some uh what i saw a lot of athletes do in her specific is like come out with a set of unbroken touch and go power cleans once that started to get tough a couple quick singles but i think she went right into her front squats from her last her 10th power clean and coming out of that 10 shoulder overhead the last three all looked like maybes but with her power and technique and good positioning she was able to get those last three reps it was unbelievable brian did anyone go uh unbroken in the men or the women? I think she was the closest to doing that, but no, I don't think so.

And look, the original version of the workout we said with the advancing the barbells, they would have had to drop it and roll it in between. The fact that they ended up doing it this way allowed for her to show a different level of strength and capacity that we would have seen otherwise. And I'm actually kind of glad that we got to see that. capacity that we would have seen otherwise. And I'm actually kind of glad that we got to see that. And Reggie Fossil attempted on, he won, but he attempted on broken, right? But failed his first rep shoulder overhead. Yeah, but he, he, that's exactly what happened for him. And in the meantime, Fabian Benito dropped after nine front squats. His judge was standing there holding one rep and he cleaned it and started doing, he did two shoulder to overhead reps before he realized what was going on. He didn't drop the bar. He did a front squat, then did, I think two more dropped it, re picked it up and finished up

and still finished second, despite making that mistake and doing two extra shoulder to overheads. And we talked about how little nuances from the previous workout might've changed the overall outcome, but if he'd just not made that mistake and then those two extra reps he might have gotten points back here against reggie fox we're not sure yeah that is uh that was pretty amazing to see that they're separated by five seconds exactly and i'm guessing that that cost him the win that he did that that was really hands down yeah yeah so basically he did two reps the ref said hey you didn't finish the front squats he had to put the bar down again right and then do the front squat well he he had done two and he was he saw the rep like waving his hands he did another one then he brought it down and he's like you're one more front squat he did the front squat he might have

done one or two more but at that point he had to break because he although although he'd done three or four reps, it only counted as two reps. We'll just say. And then once he picked it up, he was able to finish the remainder of the set and still take second place in the workout. And it was actually the second workout in a row that he made an execution error on the floor. He'd done only 74 heavy double unders and had ran five feet forward. His judge sent him back to do one more rep and he still went on to win that workout. So even though he had a first and a second in this workout, he didn't have a clean run in either one of them.

Janikowski 145. That's pretty impressive. Pretty damn impressive. Was the weight actually 220 pounds? No, 220. What did I say? 100 kilos is 220. Okay, so it was 220 pounds? No, 220. What did I say? You said 220. A hundred kilos is 220. Okay, so it was 220 pounds.

God, I would have thought that would have been heavy for him. Well, you know, remember what you were talking about with Yonah Kosey earlier. He's not a one-trick pony. We saw him do heavy DT with a spin at Rogue extremely well also. And, you know, clearly this is still not heavy enough for him to have an issue with the barbell cycling uh down here uh in sixth place not that far down we have brent fukowski tons of range of motion for him he was i saw this on the previous event no not the first one of the day with the dumbbell thrusters and he just has a slower cycle rate especially on the squats if you go back and look

at the difference between him and fabian they were right next to each other and a lot of that is just strength and some of that is control like brent's a very control oriented dictating athlete um if you go back and look at his dumbbell thrusters they were really really slow reps he wasn't just dropping into the bottom he's very deliberate with his movement and that could be with just making sure the dumbbells don't get out of position so for brenda didn't look like it was there's anything wrong he just didn't have the same pop like a lot of the other athletes did, especially in the front squats, which can take a lot out of your legs for the overhead at the end. I would say this, Sevan, to your point. Fasa, Benito, Koski, Fiebig, Kerevis, the guys that beat him, on average, Brent is probably six inches taller than them.

Yeah, it looked, I can't tell if he moved slower than them or if it's just so much further to go that it looks slower. You know, he's running 40 yards, they're running 20 yards. Yeah, but Brent is, even though the workout's only taking a minute and 48, 50 seconds for him, whatever, he's still meticulous in his approach. He wasn't, and at no point did he look rushed through the workout. He didn't have any no reps. He's maximizing his opportunity on that workout, and the sixth place finish, I think, is very good for him in this workout.

Cruising to the final event. Very, very close race with everyone. Do you want to add something before we move over there, Brian? I'm just tired. So I was, I was thinking we hadn't talked about the women yet on that one, but we did,

uh, event eight, uh, result. That's my job to forget shit like that. Please don't do that. Uh, event eight results walking with the devil.

Was that yours too? This one was mine. It was a, uh, I can't believe we allowed that. Well, it's the last minute change. Was that yours too? This one was mine. I can't believe they allowed that. Well, it's the last minute change. So this was not the original intent for this workout. I think it ended up working out in our favor because, as we talked about earlier, of the drama at the end of the finish, it was supposed to be a yoke carry at the last part of this workout. But because of the lane situation the they weren't wide enough with the plates on the yokes so we called an audible and did the double dumbbell

overhead walking lunge the distance that we ended up using was in contention even during the athlete briefing today but we wanted to use the full floor so we went with the longer of the two options knowing that it would be unlikely to see anyone do it unbroken but hoping that it would create some dramatic finishes which obviously was the result and was a decision that everyone who was involved in it felt really good about at the end of the day so you're telling me there were 10 yokes at the venue 15 but But they didn't fit in the lanes. Yep. I like this better.

I like it a lot, but I just want to say something that's kind of obvious. Didn't they need to figure that out before they made the lanes? You know what, Sevan? Come on over next year and experience some of it. I'm no Andrew Hiller. I just have questions. I can't do anything better than anyone. We'll take good care of you here. We'll take you out. We'll show you a royal experience in Dubai. Jethro Cardona, great coverage. Thanks to Brian and his knowledge of commentary. Seve for setting it up and Chase for showing up with his beard.

Just tell my wife that. She freaking hates this thing. Yeah, that's how I got your $10. You need to call Chase. Last night I was very enthralled by your beard. Today I'm intrigued by your shirt. Oh, this whole thing? Baseball tee. He's regularly rolling out new versions of the OG swag.

Dense pressing on day three really made the overhead walking lunge a great finish movement uh burpee thruster handstand walk a ring muscle up devil's press devil's press be careful there's seven yeah i know i almost i almost swerved into danger zone uh okay so we know that uh contributor and there's no chance that that's what he would be referring to. Not in Dubai. Unbroken handstand walk, but it wasn't. No, it wasn't. It wasn't unbroken. So because the yoke was originally supposed to be there, they couldn't have traversed the entire lane.

And so we were going to have them do a down and back. Each section of it would have had to be unbroken. When they changed it to the full thing, they abandoned the unbroken nature of it. So the whole thing, so you could fall 10 times and do it and not go back to the beginning? Yeah, just like they were doing with the lunges, they would just mark the spot where you last had your hands on the ground, and then you'd have to start beyond that and continue forward. Okay. You're pulling this from the Bar Bend website. This is somewhat on me. Those changes, these changes were made so late and they're pulling this information from a document that

I'd created. So I didn't have a chance to go and edit that, that little nuance of it. Um, the a hundred feet became 90 feet. So there were just some small things. So I apologize for that. And, uh, when, when these things happen, what's the protocol? Do you guys talk to Fraser? It'd be like out of at least a courtesy, like, hey, Matt, we don't have the yoke. What would you like? Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.

We had a conversation. That was Fraser, O'Keefe, Marconi, Harry Pally, Saud, and myself, Rowan, and Craig, the head judges. All of us were involved in that conversation and how we wanted to, you know, implement and require the necessary changes based on the current situation. Everyone cool? Anyone get like huffy puffy and dramatic? Or is it like, yeah, we're going to do this. Everyone flows. workout in testing with the yoke. I did bar muscle-ups instead of ring muscle-ups, but otherwise I did the women's version of this workout and meaning the 35 pound devil's press. And then the yoke, I couldn't even do the original weight for the women. I did a 400 pound yoke, but, and I loved it. So when I heard that that was the case, I was like, no, they're not taking the yoke out of it. But as soon as they told me why I realized there's no, there was no other option.

We'd already explored going to hits of five instead of ten. But with the time constraints at the venue, that wasn't a possibility either. And when they mentioned that they were going to do this instead, I was thinking, actually, this is probably going to be a pretty cool finish. So let's go with it. So I went from the handstand walk to the 20-ring muscle- ups to the devil's press to the dumbbell overhead walking lunge. This when they were setting up the rings, they said that they allowed the athletes to pick from a variety of heights. Is this something new at events that sort of been adopted or has it been around? No, you're shaking your head.

No, you're saying a lot of events have done this in the past. Chase allowed. I mean, it's probably i don't know maybe what 25 you'll see some have it's it's a luxury it's a luxury to have the time rarely would you be able to see something like this maybe at like a wadapalooza where there's just so much going on the timeline is so tight the cross of 500 athletes right i think it's more like 1,700, but it's a lot. I think it's over 2,500 in recent years. Is it 2,500 now?

Jesus. But you see that at Rogue. They can take the time and make sure everybody's set up. So you'll see that at some events that they have the availability to it. And it depends on the rings, right? Is it the straps that you zip up through the little clips? Or is it the competition ones where they have designated heights i really like that they did this for the athletes me too so the the um this

is the process that they that they went through here what you know what should we do about the rings we want to try to create an opportunity for everyone to get the full momentum of the full kip uh they're currently at 94 inches. There's two factors in play. We have one riser from Rogue per lane. Are there any women that are unable to reach the 94-inch riser? And what are we going to do about that? And are there any men who won't be able to get that full kip?

And if that's the case, we want to give them the option of 98. So we gathered all the men, and there were five or six guys that said that they wanted to do that. Fraser said, okay, you guys come with me and show me. And all of those guys showed that their feet would hit the ground with their normal kip. So they made a note of their names because this was the final. So they wouldn't know even what heat or lane they would necessarily be in. And then they just said, when we find out what lane Brent Fikowski is in, we'll know that Brent Fikowski is one of these six athletes that's going to have an adjustment to his rings. I think there was only one woman who was having an issue with that and they came up with a solution for her as well. And everyone was happy with it. I think the athletes were appreciative

of the fact that HWPO took the time to make sure that everyone had a fair opportunity on the set of 20 ring muscle-ups. And then it just was, you know, one guy with a ladder. He went out there and made, I think there were two changes in the first seat of men. They've changed them back for the women. And then I think four changes in the final heat of men or three, because Con Porter had been one of those guys as well. And so everyone was able to do muscle ups as they normally would. So you couldn't just say, make the rings shorter for me. You actually had to show that your feet drag on the ground.

I think every event should have three heights marked out on the rings. And you just get to choose. Yeah, I mean, when the yoke was in play for this workout, they had three height options for the women. Right, if you do it for a yoke, which they've done at the games. Yeah.

You should do it for some rings. Matilda Garn garns once again uh crazy uh impressive uh 702 finish beat the rest of the pack by 30 seconds uh really impressive is she going to the games has she been to the game she went to the games last year last year 18th at the games last year karen fray 20th at the games last year so matilda beat karen at the games will obviously get to the overall results but karen beats Matilda here. And yeah, we talked about Matilda Garns. Upper body pulling strength, especially for a woman of her size, I think she's about five, six or seven, is phenomenal. And she separated herself from the entire women's field on those

ring muscle-ups. I think she had gotten at least five, if not 10 reps of the devil's press done before anyone else was coming there. And she of the devil's press done before anyone else was coming there. And she was halfway through the lunge before anyone else even thought about touching the dumbbells. Um, so being in that position, she was kind of able to compose herself. I think that if she needed to, she might've been able to go a little bit faster on the lunge, but the event win is the event win at that point. What country? Norway. And it's actually Garnes. It's not Garnes. We've been saying Garnes. Yeah. Matilda Garnes. Garnes. Yeah. And Bella Martin was the one who advised me of that. She learned that from her at a previous competition that she'd emceed earlier in the season. Does the new pathway to the games, the adjustments made to the path to the games affect her in a positive or negative way?

path to the games affect her in a positive or negative way to be determined i think that she would have been relevant either in either of the scenarios um what remains to be seen is how many spots are going to be given to europe if they get more than 10 spots which i believe that they will uh then that's a good thing for her because one semi-final or two it makes it easier for the you know top 10 women which i consider her to be one of them in Europe to qualify. All right. Fair enough. Has she done team before? I don't think so. Someone is sending me screenshots of their OnlyFans right now.

I appreciate that. Maybe you could hold off and tell them after the podcast. I'm careful with that screen share. good point very good point i better just close that out okay thank you chase that's looking out because i run some of my podcasts aren't games related i cover a variety of subjects and uh the only fan stuff getting crossed over. Brian, team in 2018. CrossFit MaxPulse. Oh. Okay. How many affiliates are there in Norway?

What's going on over there? Let's see. Erasing Norway. Affiliate. Map. CrossFit. Damn, I shouldn't have typed in Norway. Shit. Norway's in Asia? Just kidding. It's in Eurasia.

Norway. 2, 4, 6, 25 plus 13 is 38 plus 18 is 56 plus 7 is... Oh shit, there's more up there. Uh, let's say 62 plus 16 is 88 plus seven.

I may have fucked that up. 95 affiliates there. God, it looks like, wow. So that whole regions, I wonder how they're doing. Well,

uh, there's a guy, Roger Grios, who puts on several, several different variations of good, really well-run competitions in Norway every year. Obviously, the Norwegian athletes participate in those very well. But Matilda Garns, Sahar Kaya, who trains up there, Lena Richter, who was in this competition, they're all part of the Krieger training program, which is kind of led by Kristen Holta, among others. And so while there are a ton of affiliates across Norway, as we're starting to see in Spain, in Russia, there's these congregations in Iceland of athletes coming to one location, the high-level athletes, and doing a lot of their training, even if they're not doing the same training in the same facilities. God, look what's going on in France. Crazy. Holy shit.

France is exploding. I remember when no one did CrossFit there. Nuts. 820. God, Africa's booming too. Just kidding. China. China. God, you's booming too. Just kidding. China. God, you guys could use some CrossFit.

Okay, where were we? Got distracted. Got distracted. Final event. We were talking about how great Matilda Garnis did from Norway, 702. Hannah Carlson, who I've been looking at the whole week. I say this with peace and love, shit the bed. That's just not even nice.

Everyone shits the bed. Everyone shits the bed. It's just a matter of when. I guess that's the case. And she's maybe not the only person. If you look at, you know, the totality of her events, she had six of the eight inside the top 11, a 15th on heavy handed, which had the chest of our pull-ups in the middle being the critical component of that workout for most of the athletes and 18th on the walking with the devil and she again gave away a majority of the ground on the ring muscle-up so while matilda garnis is excelling

at that hannah carlson has been you know shown to be her one weakness this weekend relative to everything else the upper body pulling uh she took 18th place which was last place uh but and i say this with uh all all peace and love. Even look at Lena Richter. If you do good at something and we get your eye, then the bad shit you do, the places you struggle, sorry, not bad, are also going to be highlighted. She has a, Brian, for Lena, it looked like she had an overhead positioning deficiency.

Who's this, Hannah Carlsonson no lena rector oh um she just didn't look like the most you're talking about barbell furious where she took 15th uh okay all right i'm saying what it looked like right wow good dig chase you've you've snitched something out um yeah she's not she was not coming into this weekend at 100%, and she had mentioned that the overhead stuff would be the most difficult for her. And so she still had a pretty good weekend finishing right in the middle of the pack there. But yeah, I think that in the case of the heavy snatches, the shoulder overheads in Barbell Furious, the dumbbell thrusters, and then the overhead lunge, that that overhead, a little bit of instability based on maybe not competing at 100% was exposed in half of the workouts okay

Simarat Singh when I think of CrossFit I get hard oh that's cool and to Singh's question earlier there's 847 affiliates in India no shit are there really hey that means there's 32,000 knockoff gyms

well people who aren't shit are there really hey that means there's 32 000 knockoff gyms well no people people who aren't paying the dues but using the methodology i don't believe there's 800 in india no that's not right that was added with france and norway i believe there's six in india let me do that over again there's certain countries that will never pay that will never that it's culturally not easy watch out people It's culturally not appropriate to pay homage to when the rest of us think it is. Okay, going over to the men. That's a big difference. let's go back let's go back to the so karen fray dominated she finishes the competition takes the 50 50 g's uh 705 points um garnis uh with uh second place tied with emily rolf why does she

get second did she have an event win and emily rolf didn't is that i think she had two event wins yeah matilda garnis won both heavy handed and walking with the devil no event wins forever emily rolf matilda garnis was in sixth place coming into the final workout and we talked about on the broadcast how everyone down to that was still in contention for the podium she was going to need big points to have a chance but she also needed a lot of things to break her way both jamie simmons and oyana moya who were the two of the women that she needed to overtake struggled on that one which allowed her to not just climb onto the podium but it's a tie emily rolfe and beat her on the tie break for second overall and she like you said i mean she destroyed

the pack yeah very impressive workout for her somewhat on par with what karen fray did in the barbell furious relative to this field it's just that I think they're that I'm not like I said I would love to see uh Horvath and Toomey do that that barbell furious workout and know just how good that time was from Karen Frey she did it in seven minutes and last place did it got capped and in 11 minutes yeah uh it's two two people is this the only workout where we saw people get capped and in 11 minutes yeah uh it's two two people is this the only workout where we saw people get capped all week i mean even so there were two women capped there we saw one person get capped on the uh legless rope climbs and the men i think there were you know just very few caps in general this weekend i'm a huge fan of not capping. Huge fan. We switch over to the men.

And what an incredible race. This one, as much as it pains me to go back and dig through a five-and-a-half-hour feed, you should go back and watch this final event of the men. It is something else. And even though we're going to spoil it for you, you'll still want to see it. Fabian Benito takes first more it's uh oh sorry in the in the workout fabian takes first uh moritz takes third brent fikowski seventh yanukovsky no no that's a clean letter oh sorry sorry sorry sorry thank you guys uh heavy-handed here no keep going keep going we're looking for walking with the devil. There it is. Okay. Sorry. Moritz Fiebig first, Janikowski second, Alex Kachoulis third.

You know what's really cool here? Yeah. Tell me. This is a workout where the men and women had to do the same number of ring muscle-ups, and the winning time was basically exactly the same. Now, Chase will know that the 35-pound dumbbells will favor the women compared to the 50s, but as a whole, the workout ends up balancing itself out really well across the men and the women's field. You're saying that because notoriously men, that's the place where they're stronger in terms of the muscle-ups. Yeah, I guarantee you that the men were faster through the first two parts of the workout on average you that the men were faster through the first two

parts of the workout on average and the women were faster through the last two parts of the workout but when we look at it as a whole we have the top times being almost exactly the same did any men get capped in this no okay uh the the thing is here and we kind of have to go scroll all the way back so you can see. We have to go back to the totals for – this is how the men's event finished. Fabian took first with 625. Moritz took second with 625. And Brent took third with 620. And basically, Brent and Fabian were neck and neck

and Brent was supposed to win. And, you know, there's his first, he had his both hands overhead as he did the final lunge over the line. And then before that back foot could cross the finish line, one of his arms came down. I don't know if it was a fatigue issue, a issue but it could not have been any closer no and we talked about all these little things across the weekend that could have uh you know happened and so coming into this workout well

actually in the first heat of the men's workout. It was a really, really tight between Victor Hoffer and Yorgos Kerevis. And Victor Hoffer had some instability on his last overhead walking lunge. The rep, the ref, the judge on the floor gave him credit for the rep. Derek and I both kind of thought and addressed this in the broadcast that that probably should have been a no rep call on the field. We weren't necessarily sure what,

what they had done. I went down to the floor after that and found the head judge and asked him about it. And he said that they had assessed him and no rep there. They were retroactive. I think they ended up giving him a five-second penalty for it. Who was this? What was the guy's name? Who was it?

Victor Hoffer. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. And so that Yorgos Kerevis actually had had the time to beat at that point. And I just encouraged him. I said, look, in the finals, because it went men, women, men, women. So we still had two weeks to go. The final heat of women, the final heat of men.

In the case that that happens again, one of you two head judges has to be out there and send them back. We can't have this unknown element of someone finishing when they shouldn't have finished. And they said, okay, we'll do that. And they did that. And that's what Liz was talking about earlier. And I spoke with, Rowan was the guy,

the head judge who'd made that call after the competition. I said, hey man, that was awesome that you did that. And it's a hard thing to do. Like they're well aware of what's on the line and how hard these guys are fighting and how tight the race is and how big the gaps in prize purse are. But everyone was watching knows that wasn't,

Brent knows that that was a no rep, but he knew he had to go for it. And that's what he did. The judge on the field wasn't sure what to do. The head judge made the call, sent him back. He finished the workout. Fabian was able to edge him out. But still, no one really knew what the overall result was because Moritz had won the workout, and he wasn't that far behind them.

So people were telling Fabian that he won. Moritz was looking at his coach who was holding his shoulders up, I'm not sure, and we were waiting for the dust to settle. And all three men were unclear where they'd finished on the podium. And the reason why Fabian wins a tiebreaker is he had at least three first-place finishes, right? Correct. And Justine here is saying that if Fikowski hadn't have missed that lunge and would have won, Fibig – he wouldn't have won. Fibig would have.

Is that because Fibig had more first places than Brent? Yeah, I think he won one workout. I don't think Brent Fikowski had any event wins on the weekend despite being obviously very consistent. Absolutely nuts. the weekend despite being obviously very consistent absolutely uh nuts um do we know fukowski's arm came down because of fatigue or mental error it just looked like fatigue to me like that that's like i don't know yeah i mean listen not to bring up old Fikowski failure at the end things, but like once his shoulders go, like we've seen it on overhead squats at regionals that kept him out because he just had massive shoulder fatigue and could not sustain the barbell overhead anymore. And that was just a fatigue play. And he pushed himself beyond the limit to try to get to the finish line,

which is, you know, you're three steps away. I mean, look how close that he had dropped. And then Fabian had been maybe a step or two behind him, so he couldn't really see where he was. And, you know, there wasn't a lot of time. I said this on our text. It was like if you just look back for a second just to see where he was at, give him that extra second to maybe take a breather but as we said before is that fukowski would have had to have beat another person because even if he did

touch him out he would have lost that tiebreaker five big doing his best uh lowlands impression right brian it was a risk he had to take uh more it's just going out and winning to get him back back in the uh on the final yeah yeah more if low uh seven if him back in the, uh, on the final. Yeah. Yeah. More if, if low, uh, seven, if you didn't know more,

it's one, the final workout, the lowlands throw down to jump from eighth, I think to fourth and get to the CrossFit games this past May. Wow. And, and he was, uh,

you know, he, and he almost, and he won the final event here as well and almost took the, the win. I mean, it came down to a tie break. Guy has no equipment.

From stirring a little controversy here, DeanR92, has anyone seen the reps? I have an update on this. Fabian got away with in the hang clean tiebreaks. Can you remind us what the hang clean tiebreak was? Yes, and can you pull up the one rep max hang clean workout on the leaderboard so we can look at what the final results ended up being? As I said yesterday… I thought you were going to tell me the video. I was panicking. No, as I said yesterday, the results from Saturday were mostly complete, but there were still things that were being reviewed.

And when you sort by the men in the Hang Clean ladder right there what you're going to see is a tie for first place oh wow the reason being is that we you know it came to our attention that Fabian Benito had not finished the last rep of his five rep squat clean tie break against Reggie Fossa and so we pulled up our footage which is the only footage that we were ever referencing throughout this competition for something like this and it was very clear that he did in fact only stand partially up before dropping the bar, jumping over and going to the finish. But Reggie Fawcett did the same thing. And as a result of that, since they'd both hit clean the same amount of weight, they'd both missed on the same barbell. They'd both done four squat cleans before doing a no

rep on the last one. We them both 100 points and twenty five hundred dollars each instead of three thousand and two thousand wow they both got twenty five hundred well it would have been three thousand for first two thousand for second since they tied for first they just split the total of the five thousand between them do you want to do an unfair question yeah do it just to screw things up should they go back and see how long it took brent ficalci to do that last no rep and assess the same time to the uh hopper offer the offer oh um potentially uh i'm not i'm not actually sure where they came up with the five seconds i just i believe it was a five second i'm just saying you have an exact replica of what was

supposed to happen and you get an exact time of how long it took. Wait, I'm not sure what you're referencing. So I guess they gave Hoffer a five-second penalty after the fact of a no rep that didn't call on his last lunge across the finish line. Oh. Brent Fikowski, actually, that all took place. So you actually now have a time of how long it actually takes to step back and put your dumbbells down and pick them up and lunge over again wait so let me ask you this how they so there was a that guy victor hoff across the finish line got a time who don't doesn't but then they

took some added some time to him because that's not how the instant replay works though you're not supposed to get punished right you're only supposed to be able to challenge if it's not much different than what they did with carl saunders at the cross of games in 2017 at the overhead squad event yeah but i thought you realized when you realize something when you realize that something happened on the field of play and it was obviously incorrect i think it's appropriate to go back and check and see okay is what we think happened actually what happened and what can we do about it i mean they already did it i'm just saying now get an exact time not a guess yeah and i think if if it wasn't the last event there may have been more time to to reflect on that but in the heat of the moment there's a lot of time result between

and when the results come i'll tell you about that another time jace yeah we'll do that off the podcast when you get back um justine responds uh so there you go dean uh let's answer that he didn't get away with both him and fast uh got no okay okay great yep uh what brian said yesterday okay fair okay everyone's cool everyone's happy everyone's happy i know like i said it's an unfair question but i i love it okay uh on a side note i was looking to see how much uh i just quickly typed into google and i know this doesn't mean jack but i looked up the average amount of money someone makes in spain in a year and it was like 25 000 euros i don't know how much that is let's's say $35,000. And so he got a, that's a pretty nice payout, a 50K. Yeah. And this is, I don't necessarily want to say life-changing for him,

but career-changing for him. It's nearly $60,000 when you factor in the individual event prize purses, which is, like you said, on average, a two-year salary there. And for a guy who's felt like he was good enough and has been really close a couple of times and just had not quite had things go his way, obviously the emotion of winning the competition, but the addition to that, the money that he'll earn is going to give him a little bit of freedom going forward in his training to probably only improve. Or he'll get into heroin and the whole thing will go take a dump because he'll lose the discipline. One or the other. Yep. Yeah.

It's here every time. Wait, what does this mean? And it's tax-free. How is that? Justine, hello. I don't know the – He's going to launder it through Cameroon. I think there's no income tax in UAE maybe or Dubai. She might be a friend.

You have to pay something. The Spaniards are going to want their cut. Their pound of flesh. And let me see. Who was the winner with the women? Karen Frey. Where's she from? Oh, Norway.

Norway? No. Slovakia. Let me just do a quick little check here. Average year income, Slovakia. All I have is 2020 and it's 16,000 euros. I mean, so these are good payouts for these people. 2020 and it's it's 16 000 euros i mean so these are good payouts for these people i mean it's like 47 000 and a half euros is the conversion for the 50 000 or 60 euros less than a dollar oh yeah because she that's when she also had three event wins yeah this is cool yeah so that's if that's in fact the case that then she's looking at nearly three and a half or four years worth of income this weekend. Did you see Rich Froning's competing at Guadalupalooza with Tyler Christofal and Samuel Cornway?

Mm-hmm. Ryan? That'll be fun. Yeah, I mean, I've known about that for a month or more. I just learned about it today while looking for stuff about this event. Couldn't have been any closer, the men's race. Great women's race, too. Big takeaways in terms of athletes, your changes on perspective of the athletes,

either of you, men or women? Well, when a friend of mine was giving me a hard time because I've been a huge, huge, huge fan of Karen Frey for years, and I've often picked her to do just a little bit better than she ends up doing. I did pick her to finish on the podium this year, this competition, but I didn't pick her to win.

And I'm okay with that because I don't care where I picked her. I'd much rather have her, you know, have a competition weekend like this and get other and have other people have a chance to see what I have believed that she was capable of for a few years now. I've been a staunch supporter of Brian's assessment of car and fray for quite some time. Although we've had the pleasure of watching her compete in Dubai for several years. Yeah. I mean, I, I mentioned it a couple of times. The last time that I was here with Jason 2019, you know, she was, she was in the fight for a long time amongst some of the great women in the sport and in Dubai's history. And she comes back this year and now she's a champion here and it's,

it's well-earned and it's, I am really happy that people got to see this from her this time around. I would like to thank the people over at the Dubai fitness championships for not reporting us for whatever clips we've used. It's kind of amazing what kind of assholes are out there in the world who you're trying to promote their shit. And for some reason they can't accept that. And,

and they do report you. Dickheads. I, I, I, I, unfortunately I didn't get to watch the events live, but I did get to go back and watch them right after they were done live.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. Day two's camera work was absolutely not one complaint. I was able to see everything. The audio was good. The commentating was great. I have no issues. I don't set my expectations above that. Having people talking to know what they're doing, me being able to see the lanes and distinguish between the athletes, you know, it was great. It was fantastic. Congratulations, Brian, for your contribution to it. It's good having one of the guys in our posse go out there and do good work. Thanks. I mean, it's, as we've talked about, you know, there are a lot of challenges about putting on a competition here, but there's one thing that's definitely true, which is everyone that was involved in it was very passionate about having a good product. And, you know, it's for you guys to be able to hear someone to say something like that, that you were able to see what these athletes are capable of doing and have some information about why maybe they're doing this or struggling to do that makes me happy to hear. And I'll extend that thank you also to Hardwork Pays Off. And basically, I'm trying to think, I don't want to use the word transparency. The perspective that we were

able to be given on the feed both days by the guy who actually programs it really does a lot. It adds a shit ton of value, especially whenrian's just throwing questions at him i mean it was it was good and the and this team hwpo they were so um helpful here on site as well you know harry pally was this was running the scoring for portions of the competition jake marconi and josh godinez were out there taping the floor at times. Matt O'Keefe was involved in everything. And then, of course, Matt Fraser being generous enough to come on the podcast and share some of the thinking behind the creation.

No, he's not generous enough to come on the podcast. He's scared to come on the podcast. Oh, on the broadcast. On the broadcast. I thought I tried to catch you there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will say this, too. I don't know if this is true but i heard that when lazar jukic went down on the 160th floor of the tallest building in the world and was flopping around like a fish uh matt fraser ran down two floors

and grabbed him uh goodies to try to revitalize them and And I do know Matt is that kind of person, um, you know, to do that. So that shit's kind of cool. I always love it when, when the, you know, the guys who are in charge recognize that it's also their job to take care of everyone. And, you know, less, less, uh, maybe well-known, but these guys in the front here, the, the, the middle, uh, or the, the guy on the far left, I was looking at Diego, I'll have in there in the Brown. That's one of the Royal shakes here. And then the guy on the far left, I was looking at Diego, Mohamed there in the brown, that's one of the royal shakes here. And then the guy on the right, Saud, who's the competition director. These guys invest so much of their time, resources, knowledge, experience.

And even though everything doesn't run smoothly, all of them are always doing what they can and contributing what they are. It's a big team that put this on this year. And I think that the fact that the athletes were able to do so well, you know, people were talking about this maybe not being the competitive field Dubai has ever seen. I was blown away with athletes' behavior off the floor, the way that they received information late and just rolled with it. And then, of course, their performances on the floor. We saw exceptional things from all of the men, all the women at

different points in the weekend. We had one of the most iconic events in the history of the sport celebrating the 10th year of the Dubai Fitness Championship. And I mean, honestly, I just feel blessed to have been a part of it. I was nervous coming back over here. It'd been three years. I got really sick on the plane ride home last year, but it was well worth it. And even if I get sick going back, I won't care. This was a good weekend. Trying to look up to see how much Hamdan bin Mohammed is worth. What his net worth is. I'm going to break the computer. Oh, shit.

They said they're spending special forces to my house to put me down right now. You just got yourself put on a list. Yeah. Thank you. house to put me down right now for you just got yourself put on a list yeah uh thank you i extend my thank you to uh the shake and all those guys over there for uh letting us we're basically seagulls that feed off of your droppings uh at the restaurant and uh we're happy to do so uh thank you everyone uh uh mike uh helping i could listen to matt and and Brian talk over any CrossFit event the best. Thanks, Mike. Chase, thanks for coming on.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Glad I could make it. Adam Blakeski, love the broadcast. Brian kicked ass. Matt has still had his hint of combativeness while answering Brian's law. Oh, I didn't get that. I thought that Matt was actually more vulnerable than normal.

But okay, fair enough hw uh po was doing all the adjustments to the leaderboards while the heats were going on please take notice uh crossfit uh no 30 minute wait to find out where the athletes stood uh cat sheer great show oh cat i can't wait to have you on soon and uh jeffrey birchfield uh thank you bruce you can't compare the two i don't know what you're talking about but okay um love you guys and see you tomorrow bye-bye affiliate show tomorrow