The Sevan Podcast - #853 - CrossFit Quarterfinals Trolling the Leaderboard Final w/ Brian Friend & JR Howell

Episode Date: March 25, 2023

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Pretend like none of that conversation happened. Bam, we're live. Matt Burns, hi.

Chris, hi. Renata, hi. Matt Burns, hi. Jethro, hi. Jethro, hi. Elizabeth, hi. How's Jethro? Kate Lynn Farrell hello

Chris Love hi Chris Love Mason Mitchell all of you Sarah Cooper Jessica Valenzuela did Savon ever eat that chocolate dick if you tuned in this morning you'd know intact well not really circumcised but you know what I mean If you tuned in this morning, you'd know.

Intact. Well, not really circumcised, but you know what I mean. And we'll see if that thing melts this summer. Just sitting there. Quarterfinals are over. Byron Smith, hey. Very late again. Who, me or you?

Ryan, hi. Hey.ell hi hello suza hi yo we have a spreadsheet from b Spin. We have training think tank commentary and thoughts. We have mayhem thoughts. We have – holy shit, it's chaos. Let me ask you this before we just jump right into – Don't forget about Uncle Pat. It's chaos. Let me ask you this before we just jump right into. Don't forget about Uncle Pat. Uncle Pat. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Why Uncle Pat? I mean, I like it. I'm down. Why Uncle Pat? That's what Nico called him in the intro. So I was just making a reference. That's awesome. But that's been around for a while, right?

Uncle Pat? Yeah. Other people have used it too. Lydia. Hi. The chick that has a great profile pic but chopped out her ex-boyfriend good evening uh what do you think about that uh jr there's a picture you really like your ex is in it and you just crop them out what do you think i think it's okay all right buy a Google Pixel and you can take it out yourself. Oh, that's interesting. So get out of here.

You mean with a Google Pixel phone that those can do that? I believe so. Soccer mom. Hey, by the way, PC is getting an iPhone. No shit. We might be able to bring him back on the show. There he is. Patrick Clark. Patrick Clark. I have thoughts grandpa pat oh uh see hill oh my goodness see hill you changed your

what is that sitting in the chair is that a person you change your pick y'all uh got real jobs or something We got to move these shows up an hour. There. That's a novel idea. Seymour Butts. I can't do it. Justin Liang. Am I right, C. Hill? You changed your profile picture? Am I right?

Is this the most contentious? I'm open to a different word. I'm totally open to a different word. Online or in-person event that's been run by the mothership in your guys' memory? I'll be gentle. I wasn't going to say in the history of CrossFit, but in your guys's memory? I'll be gentle. I wasn't gonna say in the history of CrossFit, but in your guys's memory? I think that there's some context needed in that conversation. For me, what's relevant is that quarterfinals is a new part of the competitive season. And usually when I'm doing a, you know, a study,

we've talked about this with CrossFit before. Like for example, when they were outsourcing semifinals, I thought it was kind of ridiculous that they only gave one year contracts because you're going to make mistakes in year one. And it's like, if you're going to hold those people to their mistakes from year one and say, so we're not re-upping you for year two, it's like, I mean, come on. I thought they should give them three-year contracts. They may have known that they weren't going to be around for three years. And so they might've had their own reasons for not doing that. But in this case, this is year three of quarterfinals. Now the first year was, this is year three of quarterfinals. And so by year three, I think things should be running fairly smoothly.

And I feel that whether or not the answer to that question is yes, what, what I can, what I feel confident saying is that there haven't been enough improvements from year one to two and two to three to make me confident in the team that's administering this portion of the test. Wow. Wow. And when you say confident, um, wow wow and when you say confident um the fact that it's year three and you have to ask that question is really all that you should need to know oh right if i'm even wondering if it's in if it's if the third year should not be the worst year ever okay of a thing and we're and in this case i'm only talking about quarterfinals because uh you know the other parts of the season or some haven't happened yet. And that's what we're focusing on.

So I would say that, you know, the fact that this is the third iteration of it and that there are people that are wondering if this is the worst job they've ever done with any part of the season. It's not that's not a good sign, regardless of if that's the case or not. So you're saying, so the question the fact that i'm even asking the question uh gets us off on the wrong foot or says a lot it says a lot yeah it says a lot uh jr do you um does this seem like a particularly um bogged down year hey could it also be that just hey there just, this is the most media we've had in a while too. Yeah. I was going to say, I think along with the, uh, you got assholes like me and Hiller just chiming in. We got just tons of just shows and.

Yeah. I think we've got a lot more, um, people with opinions that aren't afraid to express them on public, uh, you know, platforms. But I also But I also think that the amount of talk can also be a good thing. And I just think there are a lot of people excited about the start of the season. So when you have this many people talking about it positively or negatively, some would say that's always a good thing. Or what about this? Maybe we're all getting puffy chested, pointing our nipples up in the air because there's no Dave Castro.

Training think tanks, lipping off. You got fucking me over here fired from the company lipping off got andrew hillard only gives a shit about views lipping off you got rich over there with dave gone lipping off you just got bad people maybe that's some of that yeah it could be that the fucking bullies that gone right right. And we're all fucking like, you know, the alpha is gone and we're all just kind of jockeying for position talking or talking or shit. Maybe we'd shut up if there was someone we thought was a little more in control. Maybe or, or maybe not.

I don't, I don't really know how Dave feels about the quarterfinals. I don't know really how Dave would, would quarterfinals. I don't know really how Dave would manage the quarterfinals over a period of years. We got to see him take the Open from its inception through a decade or more. We got to see him take the CrossFit Games through 15 years. We got to see him take every version of a stage of the season through a progression. And for the quarterfinals, he was around for only the first

version of it so we also saw joe alexander fuck up the damn bailey count love you joe and get fired and and then we saw the wrong and we saw the wrong weights used at uh in the opening uh workout of the open and a letter was sent out uh from hq saying how great their team did i mean no this is that's a that's mean, that's a pretty crazy fuck up. I give Joe his job back as a judge. By the way, Joe still works with the company, obviously. He just got slapped down as a judge. I mean, I have heard from people who worked at CrossFit in the late 2007, 8, 9, 10, 11.

This month, I've heard from them. They've reached out to me and said, this is insane. I would have been, I would have been, the punishment would have been extreme for something that was much more insignificant than the mistakes that are being made by certain people, you know, public mistakes that are being made by certain people now. But we shouldn't really limit that to CrossFit. I mean, the world in general is becoming a little bit more soft in that regard, a little bit more forgiving and lenient and not afraid to kind of hold people to certain standards or accountability because of this culture that's emerged in the last, you know,

few years of canceling people and rejecting people who are having honest conversations. So CrossFit may be just caught up in the wave of that. That's, you know, I would say affecting humanity right now. Susie, you tripping. Is that Brian friend? Is that is that an ai that's it we were just looking at ais today i showed the eighth wonder of the world on my morning show he said it might be an a i'm starting to think you're an ai well said brian wow you're getting uh squirrely uh the bully would have never let this happen okay um let's uh where where do you where do you want to start i'd just propose this idea. Let me, let me just propose this idea. If you guys don't like it, we can start somewhere else. Um, it was an idea I had the other day when you have 17, uh, regionals granted, it's a shitload. You have 17, um, different areas where people come up into the games who are first place winners, right? 17 and you have 17 second place guys and you have 17

third place guys and that that brings a certain excitement to the games and i was just thinking about this depth that's in the um semi-finals now the semi-finals might take all the air out of the room right because when they when when we go when we go to the games it's going to be we're only going to be thinking that the only person who has a chance of winning the games is the person who took first in Europe, first in Northeast, and maybe Northwest. No, not true. No? Okay. I do know what you're saying. The winner of the Oceanic region for the men will also probably have a chance. To win the games yes

okay most likely unless jay crouch i knew it beats him again he's a closet jay crouch fan i knew it i knew it all right all right um i do want to talk about that i had that's uh the the spreadsheets that i sent you guys earlier today are to that regard. You had mentioned that to me or the group of us a few days ago, and I'd been thinking about it. I wanted to wait. And just in case anyone's not aware, the quarterfinals leaderboards are not finalized yet. They are supposed to be finalized on Monday, March 27th. CrossFit does have the opportunity to extend that deadline if they see the need to. But I think that at this point, the leaderboards are fairly well-rounded where this morning for the first time, I actually looked at them following quarterfinals

with the, you know, from an analytical perspective to see, okay, what are these fields for semifinals actually going to look like? And that's what I put together today so that we can talking about that question. The you're sorry. The semifinals, the semifinals or the leaderboard for the quarterfinals you're saying isn't officially closed for another three days. And look at the calendar. Today's the 24th. They said it would be closed on the 27th,

but you're feeling pretty confident that we're locked in, not locked in, but pretty close, close enough that I thought, especially since we're doing this show, kind of the, um, wrapping up the online stage of the season for the elite individual

athletes that it would be, we would be able to paint a little bit of a picture about what's happened so far and what's going to happen, you know, two months from now. Um, uh, there's a question here about William Leahy.

I think we will be talking about William Leahy, uh, in specific. I got him in my notes. Good old Bill. But probably would rather put that on hold for a while. Sure. Come back to that towards the end of the show. Sure. Okay. Okay. So where did you want to start? Where do you want to talk about this? Who's going? Do you want to actually just pull up the leaderboard and look at who's going and why it's going to be exciting? Is that what you're saying? Oh, I mean,

fine. If you're desperate to do that, we can do that. Tell me, tell me, tell me. Where do you want to start? You want to look at this spreadsheet right here with the blue? Hey, this is really nice, these categories you gave. Games athlete, strong competitor, relevant competitor. Does relevant mean your ass? Brian has broken down the field into these three categories.

I think... This is not the full field, by the way. I mean, without seeing the spreadsheets i would think that relative might just mean someone who has the ability to flip the leaderboard um i did share them with you actually jr but i know you've had a crazy day yeah oh yeah jr everything good yeah we're good okay good uh jay uh so okay so should we pull up the spreadsheet to start with you want to do that you cool with that good as places any i guess okay yeah let's do it um are these people in the blue these people you know that are all of these people

already qualified these are the qualified people no no no oh okay all of okay so everyone on this list is currently everyone in this list that's not in red, which says did not qualify, have currently, or are currently occupying a qualifying position to their respective competitive region semifinal. The ones in blue, well, if we can see the top, you can see the actual semifinals. So you know which ones we're talking about. And then they'll have the number of guaranteed spots and then the number of allocated spots that they will end up having. We're pretty confident in those numbers. Some of the stuff we're going to talk about tonight, I've been vetting with Halpin. And basically what you're going to see here is several things. First of all, the worldwide ranking and strength of fields have done exactly what I said that they would do

the first time that we talked about them, which is nothing at all. They have had little to no impact at all on the distribution of game spots relative to the competitive field, which is what they're supposed to be doing, and we can see that right here. Last year, there were 21 spots for North American women because they took one of the last chance qualifiers. And this year, they're going to get 21 spots. They'll be distributed 12 and 9, almost definitely. And last year, European women had 11 spots. And this year, they're almost definitely going to get 11 spots.

I would say that the maximum plus or minus on any of those is one, you know, so there'll be within one of whatever number we have listed there. Second part of the hyphen or the slash Oceania, South America, Asia, and Africa will probably not get any extra spots. Um, and the blue, the women in blue are the ones that competed at the games last year. So the one, the woman who competed for Africa at the games last year is going on a team this year so there's no one uh sung young choice injured this year so there's only one for asia both south americans are coming back obviously tia and cara are out so there's some new going to be some new blood in oceania in europe all um there are i think 10 of the returning 11 in north america west there's nine of the returning, whatever there were,

and the nine again, so 18 out of 21 in North America. So all of the spots that were taken away were from North America and Europe. All the spots that will be redistributed are from North America and Europe. And what we can see right here is that it's going to be pretty competitive. Like if you count down the list of North America East, there's nine.

And then you just look at Emikeri. We'll just take three. Emikeri, Shelby, Neal, Fisagavi. There's your 12. So if you want to get in, you have to be able to beat one of those people. You know, it's interesting. Originally, I thought that the East was going to be the tougher region. But now that the West is down to nine, I'm thinking the West might be the tougher region.

Especially when you look at that group in green. Yes. The group in green were not at the CrossFit Games last year, and the group in blue were. And I think that there are a lot of people listening in, and if I said, hey, if you had a bet on one of these two people to have a better finish at the CrossFit Games, would you take Katrin David's daughter or Bailey Rail? That it would be a pretty even distribution. Would you take Lauren Fisher or Rebecca Fusile? Would you take Bethany Shadburn or Freya Moosbrugger? Would you take Chloe Wilson or Sydney McAlishan?

Would you take Kelly – you know, you just keep going down the list, down the list. Kelly Baker's been crushing it this season. So there could actually be a ton of turnover in the west like of those nine that are in blue if they only get nine spots it might be possible that only four or five of them make it back this year and it's also possible that some of these athletes that thought that going out to the west would be an easy road to the games are going to have a rude awakening when they come to the semifinals and realize that there's a lot of competitors there um let me let me just switch subjects real quick just to mess with jr here for a second

jr uh column b is the um uh northeast uh who wins that no uh column f is europe who wins that laura okay now we got a problem in column d go back to north america west who wins that laura okay now we got a problem in column d go back to north america west who wins that oh nelly that's why that's gonna be a show i still i still think it's errol lowen i don't you do that well i like that that is gonna be a show that i think she's by far the most well-rounded in that with that group of athletes okay she has the most impressive and complete uh you know performances over the past two seasons of anyone on this list okay now let me say something that's going to break my heart going back ariel if you're listening if your husband's listening to now's a good time to i don't know by the way go in the other room and water the plants or something there's no fucking way ariel lowen has a chance against mal o'brien or laura

horvat that's and that's what i'm saying like there's a these are the games they i just feel like these are these are gonna end up being the games yes no who's gonna win the games it's gonna be mal o'brien and laura horvat i mean don't get me wrong it'd be amazing if ariel lowen got up on that podium but but there it is those are your two right there and then the rest of those people don't even matter to the right well okay so this is the line don't do my aerial okay all right. This is the line of thinking that has been problematic for CrossFit historically. We got the winner, so we're good. No. If that's the line that you're taking, then I guess that's fine.

But that's not what most of the people that are watching and participating in the sport are interested in. They're interested in finding their ranking relative to the world and knowing how their person is going to fare relative to the field. Yes, there's obviously a ton of interest in the winner overall for the CrossFit Games, but to me, a sport is far more interesting if all of the other places also matter. Yeah, and I agree, but wouldn't it be great if from the Northeast, you took Emma Lawson from the Northwest, you took Danny Spiegel and from Europe, you took Gabriella Magawa, and then maybe went through there one more time and took those six and made another region. And now we have four regions with four people who, four first

place people. And maybe we just do that more and glorify the athletes a little more. I know, I know, I know it's cost prohibitive, but I just feel like they've narrowed this down so much that uh it seems to me like you're almost worried about it seems like a step backwards the athletes ability to monetize themselves too like you think that after the semi-finals the ones that finish 789 i mean look who's at seven eight nine on this list you know right those are big names that you're almost like oh no one's gonna even be thinking about them because they didn't finish one or two right and i want some hype like that was i mean look at even the atlas games no matter how much i shit on it i was still fucking excited about their one two

three over there who did they end up having they had emma lawson that was it page zemenza who was over there page powers page powers yeah page powers got to stand out there anyway oh i it's it's a moot point at this point but um i'm i mean no it's a it's a it's a worthwhile conversation but at the same time uh i'm not like that upset that i get to see justin madaris and pat velner compete head to head twice in a season instead of once fair enough good yeah great point great point yeah and I great point and I'm excited to see Emma Lawson and Mal go at it um uh more than once too great point yeah and in a big field uh you know with 60 athletes you know in those in those three semifinals, a lot can happen. If we, you know, as we look at some of the semifinals in particular, you're going to see that there's a really, really dense group of strong athletes there. And suddenly, if you're an athlete, like,

you know, a games athlete that maybe struggles a bit on the strength test, you might think a little bit bigger hit relative to the field than you would have in a different format. And that, you know, we've seen it happen before. before i mean we saw it last year with hayley adams which was in 21st or whatever it was and had a fighter way back in over the course of the weekend but you know you see what happens in online competitions when there's hundreds and thousands of people and suddenly you have you know people that get whatever score on the the strength test and they're getting like 500th place when all their other scores are like in the top 50. And that's extremely penalized. And so there's going to be twice as much penalty potentially for a bad performance,

which will have an opportunity, you know, and that will keep more people relevant potentially throughout the weekend. And with the deeper fields, you might get some people coming out of, you know, heats one, two, and three that have, you know, some pretty competitive scores on something that might be right up there, there out. How excited are we that all of these regions will be doing the same workout? It's great, right? Yeah, I think so. I mean, it gives us not as much to talk about, but I think we'll all be reminded of how cool that was week to week, getting to compare, seeing the athletes have another week to prepare, and then they go faster than the week prior. And all of us saying things that are not super rational, like, oh, well, she beat her time by a minute, so she's going to beat her at the games, stuff like that.

by a minute so she's she's she's gonna beat her at the games you know stuff like that but i mean i'm just looking at blue while you guys are talking and looking at blue all the way across and like in the east there's six i don't want to say locks but very high likelihood six top 10 at the games competitors you don't have that at all in the west maybe one or two the most i would say one so while the west may be exciting for the different reason, they probably will have less spots. It'll be maybe a lot more jockeying day to day. There may be more movement. It may come down to the last,

like to me, six or seven of the spots in the East are like, well, unless there's something programming wise that exposes someone, those are being taken. Yeah. And the cool thing is, you know,

you have an athlete like page Powers who's in that field. Just coming off a win at Guadalupalooza, crushing basically every workout in the opening quarterfinals except for one. And people are starting to speculate. I mean, you know, I think people have this. They often, like, jump to massive conclusions that are unwarranted. But she's doing great, and now she gets to go into a semifinal field with six proven top 10 games athletes. If she finishes third in that field, we've actually learned quite a bit about her,

and she becomes a lot more interesting in terms of podium contender, top 10 contender at the games as well. If she goes in there and there's a big drop-off after the top six and she's just beating everyone else, which I don't think is going to happen, by the way, I think she's going to be competitive with most of the women that are those top 10 women's in the semifinal stage. Yeah, that's an interesting point. But even if she is, then we might say, okay, well, we saw her do that with Emma Lawson last year. She went toe toto-toe with her in the semifinal, lost to her by less than 10 points, but she showed up at the games, and there was this massive disparity.

So even if she wins Guadalupalooza, how many workouts are there? How many days is that competition? It's only two. She wins the Open, three, four tests over three weeks. She does good in quarterfinals, five tests over three days. She does good at semifinals, seven tests over four days. She still hasn't proven to me that she can actually compete with the best in thefinal seven tests over four days she still hasn't proven to me that she can actually compete with the best in the world on 15 tests over four days semi-finals is seven tests i'm just guessing based on what history has has been uh and something else that

um we uh have discussed to keep uh mind of mindful of is that the northeast the north uh north america west and europe will all be taking four days to do the competition now we're not sure if that means they'll be have four days to do all those workouts or that's because of the teams but there could be a different stimulus at those compared to the people who have to do it in three days correct yeah potentially for sure. And there are several details of semifinals we don't know. That's just one of them. Yeah, I can't see them having a structure that would have one group of people

doing eight in four days, two a day, and then having another group of people do the same amount of tests in less days. No swimming for sure, right? Too many locations. Yeah, I don't think so. Anything else ruled out because of that? I actually asked Adrian about that in Omaha, and he said, like, I would consider programming swimming in the semifinals, but it's really, really difficult logistically. And what about your thoughts of maybe there being at

least one semi-final that ends up being different would you guys be bummed if you found out south america and africa had their own that was slightly different um how would you judge crossfit for that if like two of their workouts were different because of equipment issues oh uh well i mean we've had we've had that happen in the past like even this workout that was repeated um the regional rope climb rope legos rope climb workout the the original version of that the asian semi-final didn't have a field that could go the full distance so they had a slightly nuanced different version of that so i guess it's possible that it could happen again um it does kind of

muddy the waters in terms of cross cross semi-final comparison leaderboards and conversations but um again we you know in in most of those smaller regions that are getting less spots the games those athletes aren't really factoring in or competitive with the larger regions anyway. Yeah, see, he'll know because they are irrelevant. I wouldn't judge them either for that. Here's the thing. I don't think everyone should be punished because they have trouble getting yokes to

fucking Africa. So I'm totally fine with Africa as long as they're doing their best in that department to get everyone to do the same thing i think it's uh pretty let's look at the small i would like to look at the small um smaller continents for uh the women though because as i was going through this as you'll see the you know that you see the oceania gets three south american asia get two africa gets one and i was going through the leaderboards. I think that most of the people listening know that I have a fairly good knowledge of the athletes competing in these regions. And so I was pulling out athletes that I thought would be relevant, at least to this conversation. And in Asia, we have Sahar Kaya, who everyone knows from the

games last year. Coming back, you have Dewan Young, who's been around and competing. And she's actually, I think, the top seed going into the semifinal. And then there's this girl that I've never heard of before, Camilla Takeyeva, who had a pretty competitive quarterfinal relative to anyone else. And I hardly know anyone else on that entire list that's competing there. None of the Russian women are showing up again this year. Sung Young Choi is out. And there's just no depth of field there. And I'm pretty sure that when we run the studies, when Helpen runs all the studies after quarterfinals finish up,

that we're going to see very few of them filtering towards the top of the leaderboard. And it's just puzzling to me how they're, you know, warranted getting two guaranteed spots to the games. Do you think that they should get one spot guaranteed? Yeah. I think everyone should get one. Everyone should get one guaranteed.

You already know that. And I have a bigger picture. All the conversations I've been having during the quarterfinals and the fallout of it always end at the same point, which is that this is not working. And what's the solution? And that's something I'd also like to talk about tonight at some point. Sebon's $1.99 for the african uh yolk fund uh pull that pull sorry uh susan one more one more time let's take a peek over there and i'll make a note here um changes to uh uh i saw uh louise uh just fall into the weeds here a little bit i saw louise mark

marquez marquez uh over at mayhem in the mayhem video today when i was checking it out any chances of her making it past julia cato or victoria campos she's a brick shithouse yeah i've i got a chance to train with her while i was there. Her and Lucas DeRosa are living there for part of the season and training there. I think they were at least staying through quarterfinals. I think they will go back to South America and they'll lead up to the semifinal. But personally, for the women in South America, I think that the top four women on there are the only four that have a chance to make it. And two of those four will make it. I'm not sure which two.

And Victoria Campos, you know what's crazy is in the preview those four will make it. I'm not sure which two. And, and, uh, Victoria Campos, you know, what's crazy is when, in the preview, when they were running it,

I thought she was trying to show she's like, uh, uh, China show, uh, version two. And where is she from? Victoria Campos,

what country? Brazil. So Victoria, Julia, I think Louisa or Brazil and Sasha's Argentina. Crazy. All right. Uh,

and Oceana, uh, there's a comment down there. It came and went. What three there? You have issues with that? No, not this season. I think it's appropriate.

I think if you have Tia and Cara in the field, that it looks a little bit suspicious. And I think that their competitive performances and the two stages of the season so far would, would show that, especially if those two were in the field, but given the athletes that are there this year again, I mean, look, the girls in yellow are a lot of them are up and coming and could have made some big improvements this year and could certainly prove me wrong.

I would be very surprised if the three qualifiers to the games don't come out of the blue and green athletes right there. Out of all those athletes there in the green, two of the best ones are in Oceana, right? Oh, of course. Oh, just these four? Yeah. Yeah.

I would say that. At least two. Of all the women in green on this page here, Jamie, Maddie, and probably Caitlin are better than the rest of the girls in the green. Right. And are they better than the rest of the girls in the blue? Other than Ellie, yeah. Right, right. Okay. okay okay you have any concerns about Ellie she going to games no

I'm not concerned about her at all I think it's actually worked out in her favor that she's competing in Oceania I think that the West would have been a pretty difficult like we saw a very difficult field. Not necessarily because of the ones in the blue, but because of the ones in the green and yellow that are, you know, there's just a lot of parity there. There may not be a lot of top 10 games athletes, but you got like 15 women that are pretty, like, I could see that weekend going a lot of different ways for North America West women.

All right. Oh, look at money. Yeah, I just can't wait to see the test. You look at North America East, there's so many heavy hitters. There's so many really strong athletes there lifting-wise. And I'm really curious to see how the programming shakes out if what we're accustomed to seeing is what we see with some kind of external load max lift if that's in the equation if it's not in the equation at all if it's all kettlebell if it's no barbell if it's all barbell if it's all dumbbell if it's all that kind of

stuff you know what i mean can you scroll over and show us north america east uh suza it's quit staring at miss mendoza and trying to figure out if she's AI. She looks like one of those AI pictures you showed me earlier. Well, how do you say this name right here? Milsili? Milsili? Mendoza? Milsili?

Are you an AI? We were looking at AI pictures earlier. Okay. I say we take a quick peek at the men, and then we'll come back here. Sure. And we'll come back here. Sure. And we'll talk about that. I do think the subject that JR was touching on and talking about the athletes in specific could be maybe its own show. We could definitely touch on it here.

But definitely, I'd love to tear into all the picks. I mean, yeah, we'll obviously come back to semifinals in the buildup to them and throughout that time period. But this is one of the main objectives, if not the main objective of quarterfinals, is to vet the remaining competitors for this stage of competition. And this is kind of what the snapshot looks like right now. So were the women 9 and 12 and the men are 10 and 12? The men get more? One more? Women are 9 and 12, and the men are 10 and 12. The men get more. One more.

Going left to right, the women were 12, 9, 11, and the men are 12, 10, 10. Oh, okay. Which, again, nothing has changed. We have not made any progress in terms of rewarding the current landscape of competitive athletes in the field. We've just taken athletes away, spots away from North American Europe and given them right back. Can you scoot back over Susa back over to the East so we can, we'll start over there.

And then, and do you see that same thing that you were saying about the ladies, JR, when you look at North America East? You're like, yep, those six are for sure going. And then you look at North America West, same thing. God, the men are more competitive in both regions, huh? So, I mean, just a big picture thing to keep in mind is while I feel very strongly that the European women have been slighted in terms of games representation going back at least as far as 2015 and are still being slighted in that regard. I've always also thought that despite having the most spots, the North American men are still the dominant region. And they're still going to have, I mean, no matter what happens here, like there are going to be guys that don't make the games this year

that you're like, wow, I thought for sure that was a games athlete in North America for the men. One of the guys in the green? Well, I mean, look, the guys in the green, I think there are men in the green that are just as good as men in the blue. For sure. It's just the men in the blue were at the games last year where did vigno finish mid-20s last year in the games no i mean this year in the uh in the quarterfinal right now he's like 50s maybe yeah like 50s he's just he's just barely sneaking in wow wow what happened to him do you know?

JR, do you remember? I mean, there's been so many crazy situations. I'm having a hard time keeping them all straight. Did he have a judging error? I'm not sure. I think at one point he got penalized for test one, and then it looked like maybe he won an appeal or he got some of the reps credited back. Because I know at one time it looked like he had a score that was just reps. And then when you went back to look, it looked like he had a time. What any issues coming out of the HWPO camp? Any issues with Mal or Hopper or anyone coming out of there? I'll just say this about Vigneault before we move to HWPO.

His performances in the quarterfinals are in his region. Ninth place, fifth place, 24th place, 30th place. You might be wondering, how the hell is he 56th? Because in the strict handstand push-up workout, he was 531st in that region. 531st. Everything else was 30th or better. Two places in the top 10.

He's still extremely fit. That's a weakness of his, and it was exposed in the most, in the deepest field of all of these competitive regions by far. By far, men and women? I believe that the 100th place man in North America East has the equivalent performances in quarterfinals to the 60th place man in North America West has the equivalent performances in quarterfinals to the 60th place

man in North America West. So while at the top, when you look at just the guys in blue and green, you say these are pretty well balanced. Once you get beyond that, there's about 80 guys in North America that are just as good as the other as 40 guys in North America East as in North America West. Twice as many guys that are just as good. JR, you agree? 100%. That's fact. You could go look at the leaderboards. It's pretty close to 100 is equal to 60 East to West.

We're going to get to that later on as well. I am not an AI. I was trying to understand how you thought Victoria Campos looked like China Cho. Well, that's something an AI would say for sure. I know. I'm trying to figure out how I thought that too. Is this Victoria Campos looked like China Cho. Well, that's something an AI would say for sure. I know. I'm trying to figure out how I thought that too. Is this Victoria Campos? Let me find a picture where it looks like China Cho. Nope, not that one. Maybe.

Kinda. Let me see that one with her on the runner. Let me see one of her from the back. I don't know. I was watching the mayhem video and i was just like oh shit china chose training there and then i looked up again and i'm like that's not what about down with the uh swim cap on and no hair because obviously she's got different hair yeah i mean she's she's thicker than china for sure but that's why i said china v2 she's the brazilian

you know it could be it could be Milcelli. Maybe she's got some Italian blood. Milcelli. This girl that looks like Halle Berry? Yeah. Macili Mendoza? Colombian. Colombian.

The last name probably indicates that, but the first name you never know. Maybe she's got Italian and Colombian parents. How good is Campos before we go back to the dudes? Is she still getting better? Her last name probably indicates that, but the first name you never know. Maybe she's got Italian and Colombian parents. How good is Campos before we go back to the dudes? Is she still getting better? Is she like a top 10 or she knows she's just going to make her mark and then fade off into the wind? Not sure.

I think that this year will go a long way in terms of us answering that question. She's got to get back there. I don't think it's going to be the easiest. I do think that those top four women are all going to be fairly competitive at semifinals. My gut is telling me she's the fittest woman in South America right now, and that she'll probably finish in the mid-20s at the Games. Oh, okay. Is that better than she did last year?

I think she was in the 30s last year. What did I guess she was? Jethro is saying she's Dominican. What did I say? That's what I said. You said Columbia. Yeah, exactly. Same thing.

Dominicans are Colombians stuck on an island. The exact same. Poppux was 33 last year. I could see her making a similar jump to what Sung Young Choi did. Low to mid-30s, moving up to mid to high 20s. Okay. If she gets back. All right. Back to

the boys. Enough of this Victoria Campos butting into the boys. How did Justin end up doing in the quarterfinals? He did okay. Did he win? He did do best in the world. He was last time I looked.

Oh, before we go to Justin, sorry. Any, any problems that HWPO or we don't hear any of that fucking nonsense, griping, complaining feet together via bitching from those guys. They're professionals.

I really haven't. I haven't heard any, anyone, no one has DM to me. No one has reached out to me and said, Hey, have you seen males this or hoppers that, or any of their athletes actually. So I don't think so. Yeah. You heard anything?

No. Jason takes me today. He said they're like full on semifinals training already. Good to go. Awesome. All right. Uh, yeah, because I didn't hear any, uh, I didn't hear any noise coming out of there, but, of there, but there does seem to be a lot of noise. Anyone worth noting who was supposed to go but because the penalties didn't go, either men or women? Into the next round? Yeah, into the semifinals? Anyone get there? We're waiting on James Newberry, right?

I think James is in right now. He is? Yeah. Even with a section of his video missing yeah i have awesome yeah you see him there on the list in green okay instead of being third he was like 23rd or 26 or something like that but he was inside the top 30 um are you guys happy with that call i watched his video with a wiki today. Oh, yeah. I haven't watched it yet. What happened? Basically, he got a notification saying you got to close your apps. And just like the rest of us, he thought it was saying something else. He thought it was put it in airplane mode, so he didn't read the whole thing, and he swiped it away. And then in the middle of his workout, his shit turned off for a couple minutes.

Yeah. I mean, a couple of athletes, Marissa Flowers and James Newberry both had these apparent problems with the WODproof app. I'm, I'm a. James took full responsibility. He didn't blame the app. He said it was his shit. I mean, and that's, but the first instinct of anyone is going to be, oh my God, the WODproof app didn't work. I mean, that's just human nature. You want, you know, you want to do that. Well, I'm a WODproof sponsored athlete. So obviously I know the people who work there. So I was like, I reached out to him and said, Hey, these things, this happened to a couple of people,

any ideas why it might've happened? And he instantly, he knew that there was probably one of two things or three things that either wasn't an airplane mode. They had too many apps open, or they were got a call from someone who was calling them using Wi-Fi during their workout. And any of those three things could potentially cause these kind of glitches. We were able to put the athletes in touch with WODproof. WODproof has a system where they can track the workouts using QR code that's specified to every single workout. And so they were able to go in on the back end and look and see what happened. And then they were able to communicate with CrossFit and CrossFit revisited the issue and distributed penalties

different than the original ones. I don't know when that wiki video came out but Newberry said he was still waiting to hear back from him like a final word. Do you know when that video came out, Sousa? It's a video with it's in that link. Someone sent it in that link, in that video,

in that link that we're all in, in that text thread. I don't know how old that is, if it's a day or two or if it's just hours uh tyler thompson $1.99 i'm 60s on the northeast leaderboard zero videos reviewed how would he know if his shit's been reviewed or not do you know this j JR? Sorry to interrupt. The video was posted 23 hours ago on the what happened to James Newberry on Wiki. Okay. I'm sure there's a way you can go into YouTube and find out all this information. Hiller would probably be a good person to ask. But I would assume the only way you would know is if he posted the videos private and that he has zero views

okay or or or he had two views because him and his mom watched it and that's and then no more what about what about these um these posts we're seeing on instagram where people are saying that they're getting ding points but they can tell no one's reviewed their video well there, there's two, as far as I can tell, there's two potential things. You, if you competed in quarterfinals and you submitted a score, then it can show accepted or pending, or, or there's like a few different options and they're like labeled with and color coded. So if you're looking at your, at your, um, your scores, your entries, you may be able to tell based on that. Additionally, if you have, uh, if you have videos on YouTube, you might be able to

see if anyone's watched them, which is, you know, a few people that we know, at least one person that we know of has said, uh, they're giving me penalties, but they haven't watched my videos because it shows I have no views on YouTube. And then lastly, I think there's also the possibility you didn't submit any videos and they haven't asked you for any. And then you would be pretty confident they haven't watched. Is there, I didn't hear the option that maybe they just fucked up. Well, I think that's implied in all of those options. Right.

Are there any – I want to hit on some specific ones. Whatever happened with the Danielle Brandon situation where she said she was docked points for holding on to the row at the 20-minute mark, And clearly in the video we can see she was actually completely irrelevant because it says on the scorecard that it's, that it's the number of meters, uh, showing on your monitor, you know, when it finishes counting.

So you can roll through the 20 and then, um, you know, if, if you're at 680 meters and it rolls to 700 meters, you get 700, not six, eight.

Oh, okay. So, so then how did they docker points for that was there ever was that i don't know i don't know if they did or did not um i'm not sure what the resolution was okay so we have no resolution we don't know what daniel brandon will ask her that when we talk to her uh james newberry we think that he's in what about um bill lahey what was the situation there when what ended up happening there um, uh, Bill Leahy, what was the situation there? When, what ended up happening there? Um, as far as I can tell the situation with Billy, he was kind of all surrounding workout number four, where he was getting off the rower early. Uh, there was some question about whether he was meeting the standard on the GHDs and, uh, some question of whether he was meeting the standard on the ghd's and oh some question of whether he was meeting his

standard on the v-ups i actually don't know for sure what his original score was and what his score shows now and if there's a possibility that that score will continue to change um but hiller made a you know a video about that workout in particular and i think that there was a he was writing the line between like pointing out the flaws with bill while also kind of um ah this is these are so i got the words wrong but there you can see there you can see if your workout's been validated or modified so maybe that guy who hasn't hasn't it doesn't have any of those next to his name it just they're just blank like they haven't looked at them at all yeah this is really cool apparently this is from the app and this is the way that you can access this so you can go in and look and see

you know which ones have a thumbs up which ones are still pending which ones have been modified due to a penalty or whatever that hey that's pretty cool that crossfit has that that's fucking way cool yeah i mean last year and i mean the before, some people thought they were going to have acceptance emails from all five tests. Some only got one and still made it to semifinals. Some got two. Some got three. I mean, it was like, who knows?

Tyler Thompson says, On my app, I can tell nothing's been viewed. It only says submitted. My two views are from my coach and Sevan's mom. Fair enough. So going back to the Leahy thing, we don't know what happened, but either way he got in. Well, we don't know that.

I mean, like I said, there's still three days left for the competition window, so there's certainly the chance that he could still receive a penalty, and that's obviously the case for lots of athletes. And that's obviously the case for lots of athletes. There was a post that someone made, and it said, hey, it was going off of Halpin's article that Mike Halpin wrote that you can find in Barbell Spin. That was saying there's 3,298 adjustments so far to maybe it was even a specific workout. In total. In total. I'm sure that's changed since since yeah that was like a day ago i think and a guy did the math for that and he's like hey dude that's a fucking impossible that would require you know whatever so many people to

watch videos 500 hours a day or something when you look at that do you think what do you think's going on do you think that they're really reviewing all the videos that they're, that they're, did you have any idea what that looks like behind the scenes, behind the curtain over there at CrossFit HQ, how many people they have doing it? And this guy went on to say that, Hey, they reviewed my video, but I can tell that it hasn't been viewed. Yeah. So this was actually his coach that, that posted this message. I just sent it back to the group for Susan to pull it up if he can. But you got them saying, you know, we've given out over 3,000 penalties.

And the guy basically does the math and says, you know, that's 500 hours of time. Just saying that each video they watch for 10 minutes and for five days, I mean, that would be 20 plus days worth of video reviewing that supposedly that they'd done in five days. So are they just targeting specific movements? Are they targeting specific things in each workout? Like on the road, GHD V-up workout, are they just saying, Hey, the V-ups are a cause for concern in this workout. This is what we really want to make sure the standards being upheld on. Um, so make sure that they do their measurements. And when they start the workout,

we don't need to watch them row for three and a half minutes, go to the V-ups, look at the first set of V-ups. If you think you need to look further, watch the next set. If you see all you need to see on the first one and they don't do any of their reps correctly, give them a major penalty. We don't know that. But in Frank's case, this guy's athlete, he made this really long post saying,

it says I have no views on my video, but yet my video has been reviewed and I've got to assess the major penalty. And by major, he means his score has been adjusted by 14% or more. Yeah, I think he got a 15%, but he's fallen well out of qualifying now. And I think on his post, you could go to it.

Frank Mestriotti, I believe is his name. We can pull it up, but you can look through all the slides and how he kind of lays it out there with, Hey, this is what I did. I asked for what reps were in question. When I reviewed it myself, it looked like these reps were in question. Can you give me more information? And it looks like to no avail. Let me ask one more question. Did you want to say something about that, Brian, before I ask a follow-up question on that? There are two kinds of penalties being given, right?

There's this one kind of penalty. That's just, Hey, we're going to dock you 15%. Like the, the Danny Spiegel grip situation, right? It's just like a 15% penalty.

And then there's other penalties that like where they take the rep in question, take the average length. It took you to do that rep and then times it by two. So if you, it's a wall ball and it normally takes you one and a half seconds, they give you a three second penalty. Is that correct? Yeah. I mean, two different kinds of penalties. This year they have, and I don't know if I don't know for sure. Maybe someone does know if this was the case last

year or not, but they have specifically listed out things you can be penalized for and things that your video can potentially be invalidated for. It's not a, it's not an inclusive or all encompassing list. It feels like there's some things that aren't on those lists that people are also getting penalized for or can get penalized for. But you know, there's,

there's some things that are going on in terms of the review process that are quite confusing to me like you know uh if you're doing uh deadlifts with the grips on does that even count as a rep like should your workout just be over at that point if you're doing hand what's the definition if you're doing handstand push-ups 12 inches from the wall instead of 10 inches from the wall do those count as reps the wall, do those count as reps? Right. I don't know. And then in some cases, they're getting basically penalized 70 reps for 50 V-ups, of which maybe 30 of them were no reps.

And they're just assigning a major penalty to the workout instead of, I mean, it's like, okay, so even if every single one of my, so if all my V-ups were not a rep, I should either be given no credit for those 50 workout reps, or my workout should just be over by the time I got to the first workout and didn't do a single V-up to the standard. Because right now, what's basically what's happening with the assessment of the 15% penalty is you're encouraging bad behavior. You're encouraging people to just do it quickly, submit it, knowing that as long as I don't do anything to get invalidated, then I'll just get a 15% penalty. And the faster my time is, the less 15% is. And I'll probably still have a competitive score.

I mean, obviously, hopefully they won't give me anything, but if they do, they're not going to just say like, Oh, those weren't ring muscle-ups that, and stop my, and give me the score of everything up to ring muscle-ups. They just say, major penalty, add a minute to a score next. And now you're, you're encouraging athletes to, to ride the line even more, to cheat even more to knowing that they're going to get away with it. I mean, there are athletes that didn't, that didn't net zero handstand pushups at 10 inches. They were further away from that. And they're just given major penalty and move on. And they had pretty fast times doing that.

So it's not a big deal. They're still making it to semifinals. They're still towards top of leaderboards. Do you think any of them, this is off subject a little bit. I know it's speculation. Do you think any of them are doing it on purpose? I can't imagine.

Like I, like to use Dan Spiegel as example, I can't imagine in a million years that someone would like, she probably is like, fuck, why did I do that? I don't know. I mean people have already said it. It's like you're a seasoned veteran in the sport. You're training at one of the most prestigious affiliates in the history of the sport. You have great coaches there.

There's other competitive athletes there. There's media teams there. There's judges competitive athletes there. There's media teams there. There's judges that you've brought into judges thing. And all of those people just were like, yep, it's good. I mean, what gym was she at? What gym was she at? She did an Invictus. Oh, okay.

Okay. I mean, I have three people. I mean, that's about as OG as you get. I mean, that's the highest caliber in the. I got three people that are averaging 3 000th place worldwide in quarterfinals doing the gym over here and they're like hey can i use the grips on the deadlifts and i say no you got 50 competitors doing this competition like legitimate judges coaches that are paid to coach the top athletes in the sport the biggest media personalities in the space there and you can't you think like i i cannot even imagine like what how like how

could you do you can't do it on accident it can't possibly be an accident interesting wow that's very very interesting let me let me um throw in one more mention. But she does not have a coach, and she is one of the biggest names in the sport. And so maybe people – I mean, look, we're 100% – You know what I was thinking? Are you 100% certain that they didn't put the weights wrong at the 23.1? Yeah. Me too. They were wrong. The weights were wrong.

But there were some fucking really competent people there. Yeah. And we're 100% certain they didn't do it on purpose and so i'm thinking you have danny spiegel there she's super high profile people are in awe by how fucking small her shirt is and that it stays on her and instead of fucking talking to her about the grips they're like holy i think i think people haven't actually cued in on the real problem okay go ahead as good as she is, she's just not that strong. So she needed those grips to do the deadlifts. Ha ha ha! Right! Yes! Hey, those didn't help her, did they? Don't they just make the bar...

Those couldn't have helped her either. Don't those just make the bar thicker and more difficult to grab? No. They do help? Yeah, it just decreases the actual tension in the hands and it just puts it all on the wrist. Oh, so it almost feels like a strap. Yeah. Because she didn't wrap it, did she?

No, she just did probably like an over-under mixed grip. And similarly to on a pull-up bar. And you'll get that tension there. Yeah, similarly to on a pull-up bar, if you use the grip a certain way you can just put all the tension on your wrist and you can just hang on by a couple fingers uh jeff gassic ten dollars real name jeff gassic jeff gassic gassic these recaps are priceless for those of us who don't have the time to monitor social media and the internet who have real lives and aren't fucking losers like the rest of you,

seven, Matt, Brian and Jr. And family. Thank you. Looking forward to Daniel Brandon tomorrow too, but don't tell anyone. I'm forward to Daniel Brandon.

Always. Thank you. Jeff is a good dude. Yeah. I like money. Thank you. Trish is in the house. Jeff.

Don't hold your breath. Okay. Trish is in the house. Jeff, don't hold your breath. Okay, Trish. Calm down. Chill out, buddy. Chill out, Trish. Don't ruin it for the new people here. Julian Iford with the hamburger fries and condiment that is high fructose corn syrup, often mistaken as ketchup. Should Mal be given a penalty for what?

No. She's the queen. What, what's he talking about? I'm not sure. Okay. Um, it's,

Oh, well, this is interesting. I hope I didn't pick the wrong one. Uh, it's still my set. I sincerely apologize and own the dumpster fire created to clean house. Three,

make the changes required. Otherwise it's obviously subscribed to the bad publicity it's still publicity oh well i will say this um the publicity has been awesome for them i think this year is i think the last two years have been on fire obviously that's self serving as a mofo um but uh what about what about this thing that katie gannon posted on the barbell spin hey hey guys you guys complain that hq's not doing anything and now they're giving out penalties and you're still complaining like come on you can't have it both ways do you want them to be sticklers or not

that's what she's kind of saying right yeah and i think the conversation here is specifically about what movements are being so heavily scrutinized and And we can pull up the clip from Pat's interview where he kind of dives right in to the V-ups and how he kind of foresaw a lot of issues happening there. And for the people that I know personally and the people that I see on the leaderboard dropping off, it's most of them have been because of that movement. Obviously, we know it's a new movement. I think a lot of people would argue it's a movement that we never really thought would make its way into a competition because of things like standards. And I think something to think about when you look at the V-Up and you look at what the standards were, a lot of us agree that they could have been written differently,

maybe a little bit more clearly. But you can't argue this. This movement, to me, is like one of the biggest turning points in the sport, possibly. Because for the first time, you're being judged on how you get from point A to point B, not just if you got from point A to point B not just if you got from point a to point b so you're gonna have to explain okay go ahead go ahead go ahead so if you think about something

like a deadlift and we can just use the toaster bar probably because it's it's a little bit it's similar to a listen if you don't subscribe to this station this is premium content get the fuck out of here what you're about to hear is premium. This is only for subscribers and people who like the show. Your time is up. So when you do a toes-to-bar, you have to start from a hanging position with feet off the ground. Your feet have to pass behind you, basically, breaking an imaginary plane. And then both feet have to touch the bar in between your hands. That's when the rep is credited. There's nothing in the standards, and there never has been, about how your feet need to look on the way from your arch to your

hollow position to when your feet hit the bar. Your feet don't have to stay together. Your knees can bend. They cannot bend. You can run and jump from five feet away and get the biggest swing of your life, like a little kid on a monkey bar, just to get your feet high enough to hit. And it counts. On a deadlift, it doesn't matter if your back rounds and it looks like it's going to break. If the bar starts on the floor and it ends with hips and knees extended with shoulders behind the bar, the rep is counted. But now you are judged not only by do your feet and hands start on the floor and then do your hands touch your feet at the top. It's no, no, no. On the way up though, if your knees are ever higher than your toes, the rep doesn't count. Your knees can bend slightly as long as your feet remain together,

or in this case, touching in contact. No, not touching. It never says touching anywhere in the standards. Yeah, it doesn't, but that's, um, that's what, that's what the intent was. Right. So again, so again, it's, uh, if people thought that things like pushups, ring rows, anything strict muscle ups, which is one of the only times you can say that the way you got from point A to point B really mattered. If people don't think movements like that could come up, they're crazy. Because I think this is a new era. This is a new era of, no, no, no. I think the priority should be similarly to like it's in the affiliates, mechanics, consistency, and sensitivity. So not only do I want you to do this fast, but I want you to do

it fast correctly. We saw that in the wall facing handstand pushups. That's just another way to see that you're moving better and see that you're moving properly. So I think that this is, I think it's like, it sets a precedent that we've never seen before as far as what could possibly be tested. Good or bad? You like this or no? Yes or no? Do you have an opinion on it?

Have you formed an opinion on it? Yes, and JR? Go ahead, Brian. Yeah, either, either, either. It's contrary to what is being preached in the judge's course. And so I what is being preached in the judge's course. And so I find that problematic. In the judge's course, it specifically states and also highlights via some of the questions that they ask that it is not the judge's job to judge how the movement is done.

You're not there to be critiquing their form. It's just did they meet the objective? They're to be critiquing their form. It's just, did they meet the objective? And I think a lot of people would argue that if my feet weren't touching and they were separated by three inches, did I gain anything from that? Juxtaposed to a toes to bar. If my feet were together and I was nice and hollow and it was like I hinged at the hip and there was no bend at all on my knees.

Did that give me an advantage over having my feet go as wide as they possibly could and my knees bending and coming up to my chest? It's a similar – people will make that argument similarly. Like what did I gain from my legs not being together the whole time? What did I gain from blah, blah, blah? You did a really good job. Let me throw two movements in there and have you guys talk about them real quick uh the burpee it's just basically touch your chest to the ground and then you gotta jump right doesn't matter how the fuck you do it it's just the two points right doesn't matter if you jump up you bring one leg up say what's chest and thighs yeah

it didn't it didn't matter but at one time it did matter so when people started stepping up this is very similar dave one year just said hey you know that step up burpee that you do can't do that anymore got to jump your feet to your hands and then what did everyone do they went what do you mean what do you mean i can't do that anymore i've been doing them that way for a year and then everyone said okay well i guess i got to figure out how to do it this way again it's a similar similar comparison there that it's not just chest and thighs touch the ground and get up however you want. What if he makes a rule that the feet can never come outside the width of the hands? So people that jump their feet up wide when they do burpees can't do that anymore. And you have to jump basically up

with your knees into your chest. So would that be the same as what they're doing now with this V-up? Let me give you one more example. What about that year the same as what they're doing now with this V-up? Let me give you one more example. What about that year that when you had to jump over the box, you had to keep your body inside the dimensions of the box? Was that last year? In some heats. Correct.

Correct. Is it really that unique, the V-up, what you were describing? I want to push back on it and prove you wrong. Is it really that unique, the V-up, what you were describing? I want to push back on it and prove you wrong. Is it really that unique? Well, I mean, I just think that it's the way that the standard was written and the way that the judges were supposed to enforce it was really, really like – it was really mind-blowing to me because it was like wait a minute there they have to judge the quality of this movement not just was the movement a rep or not like like

like uh like going back to the burpee your body has to touch the body has to be flat on the ground thighs and titties and then you got to be up and your feet have to be up yeah so if you change the standard so it said that your thighs and burpees much touch the ground at the same time and come off the ground at the same time, now you have a totally different thing that you're judging. Right. Because all those people that worm their way down and worm their way off of the burpee, suddenly that's no longer good. Yeah, and I mean, people will argue things like a push-up. People will argue things like a push-up. We've seen the push-up like one of the first years of the games when they did the hand-release push-ups and they had to get up and over the wall. They did that. And they did push-ups in Murph. But when have they ever really done push-ups? And people just say, oh, yeah, they never do push-ups because they're so hard to judge. Ring dips are hard to judge, blah, blah, blah. Well, if he can say that your body has to stay in a certain shape when you're doing a V up, who's to say that the judges aren't going to

be prepared to judge a rigid body line? Like, Hey, if your body line deviates from being rigid, you get no rep. Like, I mean, this is, it's not any different. Go ahead. Are you going gonna say something brian yeah no i think this is a this is very relevant to the conversation and it's something that i i first remember specifically talking about uh after the 2000 are those good are those good i don't know oh okay you tell me if his feet are together or not oh i couldn't tell from that angle how could i tell you mean they're coming off the ground together that one didn't those ones are they're touching the top the feet are touching the hands together are they together i can't tell from this angle well what does it mean if they're together okay good point savan and his kids walked

into the store together were they touching yeah this angle would be impossible to judge well this is the angle that they wanted they wanted this angle or a three-quarter but in in the picture they show this angle they show a profile view like i made my athletes face this way well how would you be able to tell if their heels are touching if their feet are together it doesn't matter if they're touching never says anything about touching in the standards they have to be together what does it mean to be together i assume that means your heels have to be touching okay so answer my question seven and avi walked into the store together were they touching uh no well how do you know they weren't

touching they were together. Just from experience. Just from experience. I'm yelling at him because he's outside looking for pennies. You just told me together means touching. Right. Right. So they walked into the store together. They were obviously touching.

Right. Yeah, I guess it's context. And I think I was one of the people there. It's a terrible decision of how to write the standard, especially when you're administering this test to an international population of 20 000 people hey is that true that five that uh five percent wait how many that five percent of the people got penalties but they couldn't have possibly have reviewed i'm guessing they didn't even review five percent of the fucking uh scores it's hard to know that would be hard to know what they were doing. 5% of 5% of 20,000 is a thousand,

right? Um, it's hard to know what's going on with the review, but I do want to say this to, to JR's point after the second cut workout of the 2019 CrossFit games is the first time that I had this thought in my mind, they introduced the double kettlebell shoulder to overhead for 66 reps in a, in a workout that had rowing and handstand walking, where you had to get across a certain line.

Did you not very much that you have to judge on the rowing? The handstand walk is extremely obvious whether you made it or not. And yet now you have these 66 reps in the middle of the workout with a brand new movement for the games and a brand new standard. That standard was new for the athletes and the judges. And you can just go watch one heat of any heat you want, pick any three lanes next to each other. And you'll see the standard being administered differently by the judges because they also just learned it. If you're going to, if you're going to

do something like this, you must at least educate one of the two populations. If not the athletes, then educate the judges. I know for a fact that the review team that's reviewing these videos worldwide are not seeing the same thing and correcting the same thing when it comes to the VIA. That there are some cases where certain people are watching it and flagging it, and some cases where there's certain people watching the same thing and not flagging it. And I don't blame the review people for that. I blame the administrators and organizers of this test for not preparing their team for what was about to come. I think that it was also irresponsible not to prepare the athletes for what was about to come. If you're telling us that you're going to

release an equipment list and jump ropes is supposed to be your clue that you need a beaded jump rope to have the most efficient execution of one of the tests, then you should be fired from your job. If you're telling me that you're going to provide an equipment list and then you're going to have a workout that pops up several months later that has a standard we've never seen, a movement we've never seen, an advantage for a certain equipment that you may or may not have and may or may not be able to get and you have 24 hours to do it and you're expecting your judging team to judge 15,000 videos that have that movement in it. You're setting yourself up for failure, which is the exact thing that I've been begging you to not do for over a year now. Make

decisions that are easy on yourself. You want to do a V-up in competition? Put it in the semifinals where you have control of the judging, where you have head judges that can say, hey, you're doing that wrong. You're doing that wrong, where you can take all the judges and show them beforehand. We're going to accept this and not this. You want to have a crossover there? Put in the semifinals. Give all the athletes in the semifinals a beaded rope to use and say, hey, now you don't even have to say it. Now everyone knows, oh, those are in the semifinals.

They're trickling their way down. Probably if I want to be competitive in the sport, I should get a beaded rope. Because five men and five women had to do double under crossovers at the games is not an indication that everyone in the world should go that has a chance of competing quarterfinal should go buy a beat a jump rope uh i i don't uh i don't agree with you there but i do agree with the first part that i that uh i think is more relevant that if you're going to have equipment lists you better have the fucking beat a jump rope on there and i apologize to the people in africa Asia for my presupposition and to you, Colton Mertens. But I'm going to assume that if you live in Africa or where Colton lives or in Asia in some places, that it is fucking more difficult to get this equipment than in the United States. And when it is supposed to be truly an international event, it is truly a fuck up not to tell people ahead of time. You're basically saying fuck you to them.

You don't matter. Because there are places in the United States where you can go on amazon and you can have a beaded rope delivered to your house in three hours and there's other people who take you two weeks to get it if you can get it at all so i agree with brian it's fucking ass nine i want to say this uh on top of what brian was saying um i watched the training think tank video with max el haj and the um the darren guy who looks like Ken from the Barbie set. They hired – they had judges come in. He didn't say they hired them.

He was careful with his wording. But they had judges come in who were Wadapalooza and games-level judges with a minimum of three years of high-level judging experience. They brought in six of them. They had extensive meetings with the judges and the athletes, and they still had a lot of significant issues. And at some point, it'd be cool to get Max on here and Ken and talk to them and pick their brains and find out. are going on now. You have a population of athletes who's realizing, man, I can't let anything come down to chance. I got to take this super seriously. There's some new stuff here. There's some standards we've never seen, some movements we've never been tested on.

I'm going to go above and beyond to make sure that I do this right. And if you do that and you still get penalties, that can be extremely frustrating, especially when you're leveraging that against the other group of people who are maybe taking advantage of this 15% penalty thing and saying, well, I'm going to ride the line. And if I get a major penalty, at least I've gone really fast. It'll only be 15%. I'll probably still be good enough to get it. Julian Efford, Mal stepped out of the camera view and wasn't given a penalty. Pull up Hiller's IG post. Thanks, Julian Iford. We'll do that right now.

CrossFit Corey, actually, when you step out of frame, your video is supposed to be invalidated. But they will just give a penalty because it's Mal. I don't know if you can say that. We have these examples of these waterproof situations where they didn't step out of frame, but all of a sudden the video freezes and you can't see what's happening for a period of time. And so, you know, is that grounds for an invalidated video? I don't know. In the case of Marissa flowers, for example, she'd already done 10 and a half minutes of the workout. When that pause, it's only a 12 minute am rep so the newberry newberry too same thing

right yeah so they gave me so they gave her credit of what they could see so i mean i i guess in like it's possible you know but that's but that's the point let me let me ask you this though once again brian how the fuck right you convinced me now that the thing with danny spiegel is weird as shit how the fuck does mal o'brien no one's gonna argue the heir to the fucking throne the next fucking matt fraser rich froning and tia how does she step out what we'll see how does she step out of the camera how how does that happen uh cozy ghost in Mal's video she left the picture frame potentially a penalty yes but Mal's a legit beast

okay the argument begins let's use common sense I don't know what the fuck that means in this day and age Brian set that up in the beginning put the pieces together when you watch it no penalty the ghost has would we I mean would we really be happy if they had validated her video and she didn't compete in the season i'd be fucking pissed but who cares what i

think i was pissed when sam briggs didn't get to compete i'm pissed that fucking rich froning didn't compete i'm pissed that matt frazier fucking tucked his legs tail between his legs and hit the road i'm happy that tia fucking got smashed with the baby batter, but at least she got a real reason. Okay, look, yeah. I don't know how that happens, dude. I don't know how you let that happen. Hey, to me, that's more significant than the grip.

Moving out of frame. The athlete must remain in the frame for the duration of additionally the clock uh submissions will be invalidated wow that's wow well i mean this is i mean this is actually you know to me what's surprising the most surprising thing about this is that these two videos that they've posted here used but you obviously have mel o'brien violating one of the written rules of competition and you're proclaiming this is a world record. And then you have Victor Hoffer's video, whose time on that workout is absolutely insane. I have seen dozens and dozens of videos of athletes doing front squats who've been penalized that look very similar to his front squats on the first set. And so it's just like this gray area of what counts as an extension of the hip at the top of the front squat or not.

at this gray area of what counts as an extension of the hip at the top of the front squat or not. And you're celebrating someone whose front squats look really similar to a lot of other athletes who you're penalizing for a very, very similar, if not exactly the same quality of movement. And that inconsistency more than anything is what I think is frustrating to people. Let me ask you big picture real quick. Why do we care about any of this? Besides the fact that it's fun getting clicks and views and because it's relevant and because we're watching it and we put time and energy into it. And it's like. And then pay money to participate in it with the expectation that they're going to get, hold, which is just crazy. Don't think like that, but bear with me here for this narrative. Let me erase that. Take two. There's thousands of 22 year old men and women out there who are putting every last bit of effort into this.

Every cent, every part of their life, they've – this is what they want to do, uh they did they deserve the best in terms of the event from the event they're participating in yeah equal equal equal commitment at minimum equal commitment at minimum right it would be like a daytona 500 not having adequate medical staff when every year someone dies in the race. And I think that it is foolish of them to have that expectation based on what we've seen historically. You're signing what? I was going to say you didn't like that metaphor, JR. I saw you look up like I saw your eyes look up into space.

I was processing it. Okay, thank you. Go ahead, Brian. Sorry to interrupt. that metaphor uh uh jr i saw you look up like i saw your eyes look up into space i was uh i was i was processing it okay thank you go ahead brian sorry no i'm just i mean look we know we have known this about the open forever and we know it and now we know it about the quarterfinals it's impossible for them to review everything that they need to do it's impossible for them to have uh a consistent and fair application of these things across the board. And so if you're signing up for this competition, regardless of what you've invested, you have to know that there's a chance that you're going to get what you perceive to be and what very well might be an unfair application of the rules, an inconsistent

application of the rules. It happens every year and it has been for a long time. And it's not saying that that's a good thing. I'm saying that is a thing. And if you're blind or negligent or you're refusing to accept that as a thing, that's on you or on your coaches or on your team and you haven't been paying attention. Obviously, we would hope that that would not be the case and we would hope that we would be moving in the right direction. But what we see is that a lot of the same problems pop up year after year. And this year there's been, in my opinion,

and I think JR would agree, there's been some new problems added to the equation. Meaning the V-ups. Meaning the choice of movements, the choice of how to introduce them and the standards which the standards with which they're expected to be upheld. Miss Pugface, $9.99 for premium content. And with that $9.99, you will also get an evaluation of your profile picture, which is very dark.

And I think that you can, if you're committed to that profile picture. Dude, I think she's on a stripper pole. And I tried to talk a little quieter. Sorry, last time I came on, I guess I came in hot. People were saying my volume was too up. Hi, Caleb. Is she? Does that look like she's on a stripper pole?

I don't know. I thought maybe she's doing a backbend or something, but whatever. But if you're committed to that picture, I would say that you import it into Photoshop and then just work with the shadows. If not, she use a different picture that's free that you get that premium content uh and a free um work on your uh uh zach we we call him zach we just call him zach because he says his

last name wrong and i don't want to offend him. I literally just posted a video of me training and staunchly defending CS less than a week ago. Offending what? I think there are some conversations going on in the comments that would give that more context. All right. Let me get through these. I think, you know, to add to Brian's point, one of the other topics is what is the test for primarily?

What is it for secondary? Who should it be administered to primarily? And who should it be administered to secondarily. So the way I view quarterfinals is maybe a little bit more harshly, but I think that every stage is just a screening process for the next stage. And I think it should be that way through the whole season, especially from quarterfinals to semifinals and semifinals to the game. So if you take the games events, you know what they're going to be. And you want to make sure that the people that get there are going to be able to handle what's asked of them at the games. Then you make sure that you

conduct a semifinal in a way that, and I mean, Adrian's a super smart guy. If you know you're going to do legless pegboards at the games, you need to make sure that you have a dense legless rope climb workout at semis. And last year they did that. If you know that you're going to last year they did that. You know, if you know that you're going to have them do a 405 deadlifts for reps, make sure that there's a heavy hinge in the semifinal to make sure that people aren't going to get there and not be able to do something like a 455 deadlift or, you know, something like that. So I think that using it as a screening process is the most important thing. You need to make sure you get the right people to sem you finals. There's always going to be plus or minus five people who, yeah, maybe it came down to the test, maybe it came down to the online reviewer that they had or whatever. Maybe they got a penalty, maybe they didn't. Just say, you know, I'm the fittest in my gym and I made quarterfinals, but I couldn't do any of the workouts because it started out with a 225 front squat and I only thrustered 220 pounds in the open. Or I only got two strict handstand pushups in the snatch workout in the open and I couldn't even get to the 21 handstand pushups because I couldn't even do any ring muscle ups in that workout. But I mean, I still kind of think it's a, Hey, you, you know, you made it,

but just because you made the top 10% doesn't mean that you should just be given a buy to just do all five tests. A lot of people would disagree with me, but I think what's more important is, well, who is it really supposed to be for is it supposed to be for the people that are in contention to qualify for the next stage or is it supposed to be another level of showcasing the athletes all the athletes somebody somebody got cold feet hey so how how many would you say uh go so you basically what you're saying is don't take the don't take the full 20 000 a caller stand by one second caller go ahead jerry you don't you're saying is don't take the full 20,000. Caller, stand by one second, caller. Go ahead, Jerry.

You're saying that just too many people go? Is that what you're saying? Well, I would say that if like this year's tests, to me, were the most difficult by far of the three years that we've had. And it's always been 10%. So I would say with these tests, it should be 5% or even less. I mean, I like that just because it makes the open more important. Brian, can you hold on while we hear from the caller? One second. Caller, hi.

Hello? Hi. Hey. So I'm one of the 20-year-olds getting one of these massive penalties that you were talking about earlier who, you know, puts their life on hold for them. And, uh, so today I, I submitted my penalty yesterday or my appeal and I, uh, got my,

my email back today and just like the robot, like copy paste denied. But what was the movement? What was the denied but what was the movement what was the movement what was the movement and what and you do you vehemently uh disagree with them that you were penalized unfairly i mean yeah like there was during the workout that there was no intent i had no intent of seeing the reps at all I thought I did them correctly I still think I did why is she using that word intent who cares what your intention is I'm not trying to be a dick to you

I'm trying to figure out what you mean by that like I didn't intend to get my wife pregnant with the twins but ovulation was I can't help her out there this is one of the problems that CrossFit has brought upon themselves during this quarter final review process, because there was a high profile athlete who was assessed a penalty and then

was communicated with after the fact that, uh, intent was relevant in the decision, decision-making process while they were evaluating his, um, appeal or the decision. I'm not exactly sure how it worked, but they use that word intent and that opens up the door for people like her to

say, I think the intent was pretty clear for me too. How come I'm not getting the same treatment as this well-known athlete? And who was that athlete? Sam Quant. Oh, wow. Okay. Is it color? Is that why you're using that word? Cause it was on the, cause it's the word they used. Um, I mean, yes. And I also mean it like I,

I genuinely saw the time and now that I did it right. What do you know what you did that they didn't like? Um, I know what they're saying that I, I didn't do right. And what was that? Um, so they said my feet weren't together and then they also said that my feet were below my knees off the ground which is tricky because anyone who bend their knees at all your feet would your heels would be below your your leg yeah so the tricky part about that is that they have something in the standard that allows for slightly bent legs but they at the finish of the rep but what they're up what they're

um penalizing people for is for having slightly bent knees at the beginning of the rep so you have to so when your hand touches you can be bent a little bit because of your like your what's it called? Anthra something? Hamstring flexibility, maybe, or whatever. Yeah. But, so basically, if you, if I, like, what I've learned now that I didn't understand then is you need to have your feet, your legs straight coming off the ground. But if you bend them on the way up, that's okay. That's like.

But it never says that. Would you have made it to, how would you have made it to semifinals oh yeah i would have been 33rd now i'm 100 and something in what region uh north america east i'm sorry oh just out of curiosity what will you do will you will you will you pull your shit together and and take another stab at it next year? Are you dissuaded? Oh no, I'm coming back next year. All right. Good job, girl.

I missed that last year after making it. I'm ready. I'm ready to come back and make a statement. All right. Thank you for calling. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for having me. Bye. Anthony, a TPA, $2. Let's FG, LFG, the two best looking guys in CrossFit and JR. Thank you. Time.

Best recognized. I saw $19 in here. Let me dig through here real quick. Hold on. Hey, so you give Mal a pass. Is that what you're saying, Brian? For what? For stepping out of the camera.

It says they'll be invalidated. It's not. You give her a pass. Let's say you work at HQ. No. I would say no. If you wrote that, then you have to say to her, hey, this video is not. We're not accepting this video.

Do you have another one? Because you step out of the frame. It says that will be invalidated. not doesn't say could be invalidated i mean i'm not yeah i guess but either way you've written that in there you're reviewing the video she stepped out of the frame you have to communicate to her i don't care who she is and you're not supposed to care who she is either do you have a video where you didn't step out of the frame otherwise we have to invalidate this one uh get rid of online qualifiers problem solved okay now this is maybe a good a good time for this uh last thing that i've had

help and prepare for us tonight okay can i do i have to you start i'll be back in 30 seconds sure it comes on i mean barry Barry's question about online qualifiers is relevant or suggesting to get rid of them, I suppose. And what JR was talking about earlier is, is the open really screening athletes for the quarterfinals? And is the quarterfinals really screening for the semifinals and the semifinals screening for the games, which makes sense to pretty much anyone I would assume, but especially, you know, people like JR and myself, we spend a lot of time thinking about programming. When we look at the open workouts, we make some assumptions about quarterfinals workouts. When we look at quarterfinals workout,

we make some assumptions about what's potentially going to be coming at semifinals because it only makes sense that you would do that. And so what I asked Mike to do was to look back at the, at the open from this year. And I asked him to identify how many men and how many women would have qualified for semifinals. If the threshold was that you had to be in the top 15% worldwide of athletes who actually submitted scores for the workouts on each of the four tests. Quarterfinals. Yeah. Quarterfinals. Yeah.

Did I misspeak? Yeah. You just said semis. It's okay. Yeah. So, okay. To advance from the open to quarterfinals, what if the barrier to entry was that you must be in the top 15%, not overall, not in the top 10% overall, but the top 15% on each

of the workouts. And so he ran a really, really impressive data study, and this is what it yielded. So for the men, those are the prerequisites that you would have had to have had to make it in the top 15%. And as you can see there, you would have needed to do eight ring muscle-ups, five rounds plus 18 burpee pull-ups, thruster at least 228 pounds, and you would have had to gotten to the snatches at 185, but done any of the reps so those would have been the prerequisites meaning if you didn't achieve any one of those you couldn't advance regardless of how good you did on any of the others that would have yielded 6,931 potential or potential participants in

quarterfinals for men which is um i I think, a reasonable number. And then you can see the breakdown by continent. I have an idea of extrapolating this study into the quarterfinals that also can help do away with the completely useless worldwide ranking and strength of field method that we're currently using to allocate game spots. And it will be based on something like this, where you can actually see the percentage of athletes that are meeting the thresholds that the test maker should be expecting of athletes who are going to take the next stage of the test to have in their arsenal and if you scroll over to the right we can see wait wait i gotta stop you one second just to be super clear you're saying uh in the open you

have to be in the top 15 for every workout yeah this is just so so so let's but let's just say joe let's just say i don't mean to call me you were three percent three percent three percent twenty seven percent you're out you're out because you don't have the requisite skill sets to take the next test yeah i ain't hating okay now the reason why i don't i don't think for now that um barry's suggestion of taking online qualifiers out altogether is that I do think there are some important aspects of them. I do think that it's important and valuable to have the community participatory event that the Open is. And I do think that it's important for CrossFit to collect revenue from that event. What they do with that revenue is a different conversation

that we can potentially have, but it's pretty obvious that the open plus quarterfinals are making them a significant amount of money, which they can use hopefully to administer the season well and pay out athletes and whatever else. But, um, yeah, I think that in this, and then, so additionally, what I would do is I would only score those 600, 6,931 men against each other. And then everyone else in the open that didn't make it would be scored against each other. So 6,932 and beyond would be just labeled. They would just be a red line. They're not eligible for quarterfinals, but they did participate in the open.

They finished below everyone who is eligible for quarterfinals because they are good enough at the things that are going to be tested coming up in the season and everyone still gets a place on the leaderboard everyone still gets to do all the tests you can definitely still the time design tests like we had this year that have building elements of them and have things like ring muscle-ups and strict handstand push-ups and heavy snatches that will be barriers for people and they need to be because we're taking 300,000 and condensing it down to a field that then we want to advance down to only 300 or 600 total people. Um, so I think, you know why this translates great for the community too. Maybe you said this already, but because then you can know I'm the 53rd percent fittest, like everyone will get a percentage, right? The other thing is that

you're not going to see, um, I mean, this is for the men, but for example, 143 reps. So Laura Horvath only got 145. I don't think she's going to be taking that workout so lightly if she knows why better be in the top 15% of everyone taking this because otherwise my season's over. Yeah. You know, you're not going to see people having, you know, it's kind of weird or oddly low scores.

You're probably going to see, even though, you know know it doesn't really matter for the rest of the season you're probably not going to see just madera's coming in in 78th place in the open he's not going to want to take any chances he's just going to be like i better i better make sure i don't want to leave anything a chance it shouldn't be a problem but you never know and for those of you who are worried about outliers or some shit like that you can always throw away the top 1% and the bottom 1% of the scores. So there's some way to work around that. I love that idea. So I'd asked earlier, hey, why do we care?

And this person says because of the double standards, because it makes or breaks sponsorship earning potential. It's a huge deal. To some of these guys, this is all they want. They have a love for the sport. So to see this happen is ridiculous. Also, standards are standards. If they aren't going to be upheld, this is a strong thing that Brian says, and I believe too, why even have them?

It's a slippery slope if you start letting this few slide here and there. I would just add on to the end of that because there was this uh well dave kessler reposted on his own instagram someone had said this is a picture of dave reminding people that the standard is the standard but you know if if you're gonna write the standard you better make sure it's a good one especially if it's something that no one's ever seen or done before in a competition like this. Where are we here? The problem with Mal and Victor's video is HQ is posted,

has posted them as world records. The standard to meet with Victor, not doing front squats to standard of Mal walking off camera. Is that true? Yeah. Oh shit. But if we're being super honest here, we should not be surprised that CrossFit is putting out things that are not to standard themselves because that's become a pattern that they've demonstrated regularly over the last year. That's fucking nuts. That's fucking nuts.

Zach, let me come to chat. 499. Come. Come chat. Come chat where is he uh well there's the call call my brother call uh um uh sarah cox sarah um uh i watched a few of zach's uh videos and I do think that he would be an excellent candidate for coming down to Newport and checking out California hormones. How are you on time, JR? I'm good.

How are you, Mr. Friend, on time? I'm 20 minutes at most. I'd like to be done. Okay. i'm 20 minutes at most i'd like to be done okay um uh i'm scrolling through the comments here to make sure i didn't miss anyone's uh holy shit here we go spencer davis a man falling from the sky has there been an explanation why the sport doesn't have instant replay and review for the best athletes in the world at the games and semis that's a question for someone like a production

person like brian would it benefit athletes and empower judges thanks for premium content a closing porn hub account oh good job yeahorn's totally overrated. You should have never had a Pornhub account. There are many instances at the games and semifinals where they use replay and review and check cameras to make sure they get things right. yeah do you want your 23 back since brian said they do that's kind of a shitty answer you know what i mean okay uh if you guys have a few more minutes, Mr. Sousa, do you have Zach's phone number?

Maybe send him a link. Zach, you better have fucking good audio. You better not fuck this shit up. Okay. Can we look at the women's standards? Just don't want to leave them out just so you can see what would have happened there. I think this actually is a good representation of something else. Don't feel bad. You're not leaving them out just so you can see what would have happened there. I think this actually is a good representation of something else. Don't feel bad.

You're not leaving them out. Everyone just goes cross-eyed when you put this up. They understand what you're saying, but when they see the numbers, they just… So these would have been the minimum thresholds for the women. And I think that there's another – there would need to be another element of plan here where you would actually need to say one or the other. So based on the women that participated here, you wouldn't have actually had to be able to do a ring muscle-up still to advance. And obviously, that's a problem. The way that the quarterfinals test was designed, no one who can't do ring muscle-ups should be taking that test.

And so I would say that in this case, I would have, uh, you know, said it's, it's a 15% threshold or five ring muscle ups. And if you don't have at least five ring muscle ups, you're not good enough to take the next phase of the test. Now I'm not saying these tests are perfect. I'm saying based on the tests that we have anyway, based on what it is. And the test would change Brian based on that, right? If you had some strict guidelines like that, like a 15% threshold, you'd have to be cognizant of that when you made the test. Yeah, I mean, obviously, you don't know where the 15% is going to fall. But I would assume that if you're programming ring muscle-ups in the open, and you're also programming ring and bar muscle-ups in the quarterfinals, that you're expecting the people who are advancing from the open to be able to do muscle-ups. people who are advancing from semifinal from,

from the open to be able to do muscle ups. And, and, you know, in this example that I have, that's not the case. And in the example that we have from this season, it's way more dramatically, not the case at all.

Uh, David Johnson, uh, seven on tell Brian, the 23.1 is off for men and women off. What does that mean? That means the legs aren't together. Raw performance,

uh, four 99 thoughts on penalties being reversed. So easily seems like a lot of penalties were given out. off what does that mean that means the legs aren't together raw performance uh 499 thoughts on penalties being reversed so easily seems like a lot of penalties were given out wednesday then reverse takes away the credibility of the judge gene yeah i mean there's uh there are a lot of people who have uh the kind of have the feeling that um it's weird that there's just like these rolling and constant changes on the leaderboard. And that they might say, like, do your job, review the videos. And when the when you have all of the videos reviewed, publicize the penalties and show us the updated leaderboard. So we get just one change and we don't have to check back every day and every hour to wonder, is this going to change is that one going to change or whatever and i empathize with that and if often some at times i should say thought that myself um but this thing that is being brought up here is uh

is a legitimate thing like you know the athletes are being notified of these penalties then they're appealing and then the penalties are changing and it it does seem to be happening with what I would call an alarming amount of frequency. And it's once again, just calling in, you know, overall calling into question what that review process is actually like. What we've heard Dave Eubanks say is there's a team of people that look at videos. If they see something, they flag it and it gets passed up the chain. If the next person up the chain sees it and they flag it, then it gets passed up the chain again. And the final set of eyes on it, one of these superiors or executives that are overseeing whatever competitive region that they're overseeing, it will be the one that decides, yep, that person's getting this penalty

and then we'll communicate with them. But when the appeal comes back, is it the same person that's looking at that again, or is it actually going to a different set of eyes? And if it's going to a different set of eyes and that different set of eyes is then communicating with the athlete, Oh, actually, we're going to monitor, we're going to modify that back to this instead of that, or we're going to erase it altogether. All you're doing now is just leaving a mass amount of confusion. Who's in charge? How do I know that the person that's reviewing my video is actually qualified to do it? Or am I just getting either lucky or unlucky that I have someone who's seeing something one way or seeing something the other way as either person A, that's finally making the decision to penalize me, or B, that's the one that's reviewing my video after the appeal?

Or both, ideally both. Cozy Ghost. Super sticker. $9.99. There was another one here. Stand by. No. I missed it.

Danny T. You barely talked about the leaderboard for leaderboard episode. Yep. That's true. And there will be another episode for that. So that should be fun. Right? We definitely need to talked about the leaderboard for a leaderboard episode. Yep, that's true. And there'll be another episode for that. So that should be fun, right? We definitely need to talk about the leaderboard. I think we'll talk about that.

When do semifinals start? Well, that's why I want, that's what, I mean, that's what this portion of the show where we looked at all the people that are currently, you know. With the men didn't get any love. The men got screwed. We didn't even make it over to Africa. It's okay though. Don't get me wrong. Don't get me wrong.

There's every show. Every show can't be perfect. The show's only a nine and a half out of 10. And the leaderboard is a direct reflection of all of these things that are happening. It's cool, too, when the leaderboard is locked because you have those last few spots that people get in. And you know, some of us know those people personally. Some of us know that they have some cool stories. Like they've been trying to make it for three or four years, or they're coming back from an injury or, Hey, they barely got in, but this is someone who's amazing at this movement or is amazing at this lift. And if this kind of thing comes out at a

semifinal, watch out for them because they could win an event, you know, things like that. I think when the leaderboard is finalized, it makes people like us a lot more confident to speak about it. It will be. When do the semifinals start? What's the date? The first week of semifinals begins on May 18th if you're in North America East and May 19th if you're in Africa. Right. Okay. So we're a month away. Did you by any chance see the video that Andrew Hiller made today regarding the problems also that they're having over at the Adaptive Division? I have not. You did watch it, JR? No, I didn't. Okay. That could be something that we should probably address at some point too. If you think that there's problems over here basically they're

having trouble categorizing these people and uh and it sounds like tensions are running high in terms of uh who goes where right so there's athletes it's and it sounds like that there's um it sounds like there's some tension between uh wheel wad i think that's the the big dogs in the space and crossfit hq and how people are determined and put placed into which categories and uh it it sounds like it's turned into a screaming match which is kind of a shame um andrew does say something interesting there that he would actually not even have an adaptive class because they because they've taken on more than they can handle it's. It's not even doable in his mind.

Yeah. I mean, that last part of that comment, once again, just goes to this overarching theme, which is we have heard abundantly the directors of the CrossFit Games say, hey, we got a small team. And yet we've seen consistently that they make decisions that compromise their team's ability to execute the season that they've created mr zach welcome to the show oh hey i want to personally i want to personally thank you for the four dollars 99 cents hey man it's you know all in a day's work thank you yeah good to have

you are you what do you think what do you think what do you think but that thumbnail also brian what's up dude hey zach hold on zach before you take over the show that thumbnail you made with the skinny dude and the giant nose oh that okay so there was a comment there that was like hey why do you have to do seven like savannah yeah that was not you okay okay all right all right well then the person who said that why do you gotta to do seven like savannah yeah that was not you okay okay all right all right well then the person who said that why do you gotta do seven like that fuck you because then that's actually me it's that person being mean to me yeah exactly zach jr howell uh he is the nostradamus of the crossfit space he knows all the workouts even before they uh they enter adrian's mind really um yes no it's true he's in denial zach uh uh michael sarah called he wants his mustache

back oh god why you gotta do me like that you know i've actually gotten more compliments than people have shit on my mustache so that's why i keep it when the ratio flips then i then i'll get rid of it yep that's wow wow is this just going to be the roast of zach i'm down for it let's do it no we want to hear what what you what's interesting you made that video basically nerds it's the nerds versus nerds it's uh right do you think and you do you think what do you think you think we're just um what do you think you have an opinion you have a strong opinion on what we're talking about so the the basis of that video was like i went i was in key west with my family and i was like i want to go take a class just see what happens you know um

there was a pretty cool gym so i got a lift in there and then i was like i just want to do it and i looked at the workout and it was like max front squat and max back squat that's mainly why i went i just definitely cherry picked it but i went and the dude I was paired with back squatted four or five, the dude next to me back squatted three 65, the dude on the other side of me back squatted three 65. Like here I am on an, on an Island in Key West. And I just hopped in the 9am class in some random box. And there's four guys back squatting over 350 pounds. Like that sort of thing, I believe doesn't exist unless there's crossfit so that's where i was like i just got all fired up man because like anytime i even mention crossfit or like tell my channel like that i like it or that it has that that it's kind of like something that

we need to recognize as being here they always give me shit back and it's like like where else are we going to find that we got to talk about that but at the same time you know there's the people that any time that someone likes to criticize crossfit or sometimes there's typical typical problems in crossfit um the the crossfitters the kool-aid drinking crossfitters that i talked about in that video as well you know they get on my case too it's like the nuanced people like i said savann first time i was on here you and hiller and brian and you know de souza and and everyone else like de souza de souza that's what i said de souza that's fine go ahead is that his name de souza

but yes it is now that you said it because there's a there's a jujitsu player who's de souza but anyways um uh you know you guys are like my people in that you have oh souza yeah sorry my bad dude um you guys are my people in that you have nuance and that's like where that's all that video is about that's it you know and it went pretty well on instagram as well um do you but what do you think about the the heavy there i mean i think that i think crossfit's I mean, there is a lot of us. Well, there's two things going on.

One, we don't like other people from the outside talking shit about us. You know, it's like, it's like our mom, you know, like I'll complain to you about my mom, but if you say something about my mom,

it's fucking go sideways. Blood's thicker than water. So kind of those of us inside the fence, we're kind of okay. Talking shit. But as soon as someone outside the fence starts throwing rocks, we're like, fuck you get them. There's this guy, uh, uh alex bromley he's got a great channel you

definitely got to check it out he's a totally he's a good dude and i was on his podcast and he we were talking about how crossfitters would would do really well in like the the weight class variation of strongman competition because there is a lot of that element of strongman in crossfit and there's a lot of muscular endurance in crossfit obviously and there's a lot of muscular endurance in in uh strongman like some of the events are max rep squats okay like that a crossfitter can do that all day you know i don't know brian signed off it's okay shit no don't don't worry about brian he's he's good he probably had to take a deuce or something uh but you know what i mean i was going next don't worry jr will vanish next before you know

it'd be just me look at look at yeah these guys hey they're east coast guys they're east coast guys and uh and you know thank you jr don't feel bad jr i'm here with zach word and and so i was you know thinking about that it's like here are two dudes that are kind of like outside the sport that are putting respect on it. And I think more people need to do stuff like that for sure. But also criticism is always welcome to like it's how the sport grows. It's how it gets better. What do you think about the judging? Did you watch any of the show today? Did you hear us talking about the judging and the problems and the via basically there's two things going on right introduction of new movements it may be appropriate or inappropriate times and then the capacity for the mothership to do adequate uh judging wouldn't you say those are the two main things jr yeah yeah sums it up good yeah like the

crossfit's between a rock and a hard place right because i was just thinking about it like okay if we get rid of quarterfinals and we just go back to the old system, all you really care about are the top scores, right? Because that's who we're sending, that's who we're taking to regionals, but it's now semifinals. But I was thinking about it like if we just did that, let's say someone does poorly on something and gets 200th place 300th place, and they're trying to make it to, to regionals. Uh, if we went back to the regional system, you know, how many of those people above them were cheating and doing shitty reps. So it puts so much extraneous pressure on the open to be this very official thing. And so there needs to be this midway mark. Well, I think you guys brought this up. There's, I don't know how many athletes 10 000 athletes or something like that sending in you know 3 000 30 is it 30 jr

that yeah like 30 000 go from the open to quarterfinals and and how many hours of footage per person you know so so how much like it's impossible to to view all that footage in five days and i think you guys went over that so now they're they have an even bigger problem so i have no idea what the answer is but it's a it's a very interesting thing i can't think of another sport where this exists this is wild it is wild what what's kind of interesting though is is like you could not make it into the nfl or into the nba or into major league baseball and you're not going to get any explanation like fuck you you're not in team didn't pick you like you don't get shit right right but here you say that again jr it's a meat factory right and but here we expect a transparent um empirically driven road uh data set to to push

people on and uh and we have these weird things like Mal O'Brien, who, who I'm believe is the fucking, you know, the, the fourth coming, uh, or the fifth coming, whatever it is now where we're at with these greats. And yet she stepped out of the,

she did something that it says in the rule book and validates the score. Like what somebody said, somebody said the word is may in there. So like you may not step out or is it must not. I, it says, I think it just says straight up. If you step out,

your score will be invalidated. Whoa. I saw that Hiller pointed that out earlier. I mean, and then, and then of course there's the other thing too. There's these other people like James Newberry, his camera turned off or this Marissa flowers for camera turned off.

And it's like, holy shit. It's like, these are, these are great people who've given a shitload of time i personally don't want to uh submissions maybe oh maybe okay nope i'm wrong maybe invalidated okay so it's up to them yeah do you do you have you guys heard of high rocks yeah that's the thing uh um hunter mcinty whoops, asset. So I think each one of those competitions has like thousands of people in it

per one. Okay. Yeah. Like what if there was a stage like that? You know, I don't, I don't know. It's,

it's right. It is really weird to be competing in your own gym and then going on to, to the semis. But I do, I, I do think it was getting a little ridiculous with the regional thing they were taking the top 20 of each gender and it was like you know sex you mean you mean sex sex yeah sure sure savon yeah sex male and female genitalia yeah yeah i'm looking forward

what do you think about would you personally enter uh, would you ever enter as a, as the women's comp to get the money? Um, I, I would probably get my ass whooped anyways. Right. Right. Uh, the only thing I know CrossFit's too hard, dude. I, well, I did the, uh, I did the clean and jerk workout, which is cool. Hey, Hey, Chris. What's up?

How are you? Yeah. What's going on? What's up, Chris? It's been a long time, Chris, what's up? How are you? Yeah. What's going on? What's up, Chris? Long time. You're Chris Williamson, everyone. Right.

When he, right. When he came in, the mic just automatically turned off. Who is this? Did it? Chris, how are you?

Welcome back, buddy. What's happening? Good. Your, your mic keeps going out. I think when he turns it to you, it automatically, it has a filter

for english accents are we good yeah now we're good okay bullshit filter it filters out english can i can you keep your hands above the uh in camera's view chris it's weird with you sitting at him like that and me not being able to see your hands his head has got to go down i promise uh how is it how is it living with zach chris it's good man it's good we train a lot he's a excitable little fucking cheap dog so he he offsets my british dourness quite nicely and oh you're a dourist also dour oh oh dour like yes you know just a little we could be a little bit more upbeat we talked about this the tall cut cutting down the tall poppy thing and and chris and i you know lifting each other up and shit i'm i'm the opposite of that people wouldn't like me in the uk i don't think

you lift him up he cuts you down yeah yeah yeah sometimes yeah well it's good for men when men cut each other down it's kind of nice though Cause in a way it's like a compliment. Yeah. And also like, I know at any point of the day, like he lives in this house back here. Yeah. I just like can bust open the door and go, what's up pussy. And then close the door and walk away. Oh, thank you. Dour, uh, relentlessly serve stern or gloomy in a matter of uh or manner or appearance who used that word my god chris you used that uh the guy whose country invented the language that you're speaking right now right thank you on that done respect uh respect given um chris what do you think about zach's uh um re rebirth uh as a crossfitter him him revisiting his CrossFit days?

I love CrossFit, man. I think it's a great training modality. Both of us have said CrossFit is one of the few training modalities that if you even begin to mention it on the internet, almost everybody has a problem with it except for CrossFit. And yet, I've never had as quick results with the way that I look and the way that my fitness feels than doing it. So it doesn't surprise me that he's, he's got back into it. I went and trained with him yesterday, went to the box that he's training at yesterday, and we just did relatively easy little chuggy thing. And it was great. I enjoyed it. It's really fun. I just, it's just so effective, man. It's just so effective man it's just so effective it's strength and conditioning

at at a high high pace you know uh uh dick butter uh the mustache is making uh so much sense now uh eric weiss uh who is the big spoon we rotate we rotate yeah they have they have equity they have equity amongst my night they have equity amongst their they have equity amongst their genders is Brian coming back not till we do our frisbee show I'll leave you to it gentlemen Chris hey great seeing you

brother thanks for the cameo God Chris Williamson that's what I deal with I appreciate that yeah you guys got to check out his shit anyone who's watching right now that's big time yeah that's big time chris williamson yeah damn man um yeah dude does he ever go live no no no no do you ever go live no i don't you guys have you and hillar are like doing this live thing. It's crazy.

Like, it's just a different world. It's pretty cool, actually. And if you build up the right culture to where people will do donations and like chat donations and stuff, it's cool. But I think Twitch has more of that culture. Like they have subscriptions and then they have like a lot of people donate as you go but you you seem to have this going and it's working really well how many people are watching right now 790 god damn um we we tried to go live on twitch but for some reason

it just well it says we are live on twitch it says it says we are live on twitch right now up here in the right hand corner you see there you are yeah sorry for the mic thing yeah we're live on all of them except for rumble we've just had an issue with oh i can put click view on twitch what does that change oh shit oh there's a whole new world? Did we just enter a wormhole? Really? Could I click it, too? Watch this. I'll share it.

Hey, but I don't think we have any viewers on Twitch. Hey, but I don't think we have any viewers on Twitch. Whoa, we're getting a... Get out of here now. What the fuck was that? Holy shit. Like I said, it's a weird paradigm uh sarah cox 499 uh would you ever consider doing um uh uh testosterone placement therapy oh for sure for sure yeah yeah okay i know a person if you if you get interested if you need your blood work okay well well i actually i

got my blood work done and i've actually um been put with the doctor but we're not doing any hormone replacement we're just like working on some things and it's been pretty nice it's pretty nice and what happened with uh nicki rod you went and got nicki rods yeah oh yeah great i'm i'm actually doing his podcast tomorrow which is gonna be fun he has a podcast yeah he just started it so wow yeah no wonder he's not fucking responding to any of my texts anymore i had a good run with him and now he's gone fucking he's ghosting me i won't let him though i'll keep bugging him yeah i keep bugging him that'll be fine i'll tell him to respond to you i appreciate it hey so he he he came back your homeboy um uh mr dates yep fat uh exonerated him yeah he exonerated him but he said he was pre-diabetic which is very kind of scary uh

there's a bunch of blood levels i didn't even watch i haven't even really watched the full thing yet um but it's cool i mean look with these natty or not things, like people are just going to push the goalposts every single time. You know, like they'll be like, this blood test doesn't mean anything. It's not USADA. It's not this. And then and then say he passed the USADA test. They'd be like, well, he probably cycled off. And, you know, there's there's no way you can prove anything in this world anymore, which is kind of frustrating.

But it's also kind of the way it works people are people are frustrated in general one i mean i i just made this video with kalipa i just had kalipa on my podcast and um we talked about one of the things that we talked about here was that uh crossfitters are getting younger and younger it's something that i noticed uh and the only com like 90 of the comments i said that the the video was titled why are crossfitters getting why are elite crossfitters getting younger and younger and like 90 of the comments were like ped use like it just had it had nothing really to do with that i was explaining how the people that can take the hardest and heaviest training are usually

going to be around 18 year old girls. And they're usually going to be around 22 to 23 year old males. And now the sport is so advanced that that is the wheelhouse. That is where we're going to see the best. And we are with Emma Carey, Emma Lawson. I don't think those people are PEDs though. I don't think Lawson and Carey are PEDs. I think that happened with gymnastics,

right? Just younger and younger. Yeah. It's the same thing. That's a sports getting dialed and dialed down. And like these girls, like I believe can, can be natural and can take on this. But when you get to the age of Tia, it's like, okay, you know, 30 years old, like that's, you're pushing it a little bit. Maybe that's where PEDs could end. I'm not assuming anything. I'm not saying anything. What I could say is this, okay? If you were to say that Emma Lawson is on steroids,

you would have to also say that her parents, who I've heard are really great people, her family, she's got a good family unit, you would have to say that they're complicit in something incredibly illegal, right? I always think of it that way too. When anyone would say malice i'm like dude she's fucking 16 yeah and and don't get me wrong in the systems of the past and weightlifting

i actually covered this uh on one of my videos if if you could pull it up it's like um i don't know i think i did it like a couple months ago i forget the name of it but i talked about uh children getting getting steroids and getting caught with like with you know their piss had you know exogenous hormones in them and and it's happening in weightlifting like endlessly and endlessly and i talked about the east germans uh so giving and and max ada actually said this on the power project he's a he's a big weightlifting coach he said in some of the soviet coaches that he talked to you go through puberty and that's when you get steroids that's it that's when it happens and he was like dead yeah it's a horrific use of peds and children hey why do you

jr why do you think they're getting younger or do you think that that's even true no it's definitely true i just think it's like any other professional sport it's a young man's game a young woman's game i mean look at the nfl look at look at look at any professional sport that requires you could just say in quotation marks intense hard really hard training, hard on your body type training, I mean, 30 is old. That's NFL. That's CrossFit. It's becoming that. There's some of the old guards still left that's still hanging around in their early 30s, but that number will keep getting younger and younger. For sure. And then we have the other issue also right now even though the men's division is more uh developed uh women are making the jump at a younger age uh than men sorry brian i didn't

read your post brian thank you for the money buddy a donation for jr getting trapped in a surprise live call-in show love you zach tons of people just started commenting from twitch which is funny i think that's people from our show who went over and downloaded Twitch. Zach, I really appreciate you coming on. I would keep you on longer. We're two hours and seven minutes. I really do appreciate you coming on. Thanks for jumping on.

It's great for my show. It's great to always see you. And you bring such great energy, man. Thank you for having me. And also to everyone in the chat, thank you guys for putting up with my shit and and allowing you know a cretin is a cretin or cretin to come in at like a cretin cretin yeah just to come in and just blow through um i appreciate everyone no it's awesome uh thank you and the reason why i waited so long to bring you on is i suspected uh brian would uh split if um if we did because he likes to stay keep the show very focused and i and i don't blame him at all and i thought okay if i bring zach in we're gonna lose a little

bit of focus oh man you by the way do you know i know brian i've known brian for a long time we like you have yeah we came up in the same gym started crossfit together i think yeah oh shit yep back in like 2014 or some shit were you guys friends oh yeah yeah um tomorrow morning at uh 6 a.m zach will be on and we will discuss the george floyd uh incident in detail uh zach uh personally went to the morgue and pulled blood from george floyd's dead body and then took them to nick plates dates and they looked at his blood and although george was on a variety of supplements, they are most concerned that he also is pre-diabetic. We will be talking about that. Natty or not.

Coming up. Yeah. Jesus fucking Christ, Simon. I can't. Dude. It's a dangerous place you've stepped into. A dangerous place. Okay. All right. All right. I'll see you into. A dangerous place. Okay.

All right. All right. I'll see you guys. Bye-bye. Ciao. Bye-bye. His laugh cracks me up. JR, what the fuck's wrong with you?

Yeah, no. 1106. I said I was leaving. That stayed on too long. I can't even believe it. You stayed. Okay. it you stayed okay so i do think jr we need to um i do think we need to uh do a semi-final show or a couple of them right we need to at least go through and in love on some of the people who made

it right go through and just look at all the people and in love on them and be like yeah this person's cool this person's good at this and and kind of and then maybe then once again revisit um right before the semi-finals and then give kind of pick the winners again, revisit right before the semifinals and then pick the winners? Yeah, because before the programming comes out, we can go through. We can do a show on the men and a show on the women and go through and say, hey, what's this person's goat? In the top 20, who's got something that they hope doesn't come out? And if it does, is it going to knock them out of contention? And then when the workouts do come out, then we can get on and say,

hey, based on the workouts, who does the programming line up really well for? And who is it going to be tough for? Do they give clues? The equipment list thing is over, right? We're done with that. Yeah, that's over. And I would say that you may be able to make some inferences based on what comes out for the teams and maybe the age group quarterfinals because sometimes you'll see some

overlapping but if the way that he's done it so far is any indication like he may wait till a day or two before to release the workouts like he he released them a lot later than Dave always did. Okay. Getting up to the games. So, I mean, hopefully we get them, you know,

I would say a week out probably is what you would think. Maybe like Tuesday or Wednesday of the week prior to that's usually about when they start trickling out. Okay. And then, and then another thing we will be visiting Masters. We will be having, what I'm really hoping for

is that Rich does the Masters events and then we can have Rich on. And then even if Rich doesn't do the Masters events, we'll try to drag his ass in here. Still have Rich on. Yeah. We'll still have Rich on. And then we'll have Rich on again.

And then we'll ask him to come on again. Okay. Thank you guys. Everyone have a great night uh tomorrow i will be here i'm not sure if i will be here at 6 a.m pacific standard time or 7 a.m pacific standard time but i will be here and i will be i will be extremely fired up if you didn't miss this morning show i think it was one of uh the best shows um that i've ever uh done okay talk to you guys soon oh is that noah um oh i thought that was uh you could call my little emojis like that i thought that was uh the guy from who took over john stewart's job all right guys uh buh-bye