Your Coffee is ready.

Data Crunch: Probability of Finishing Top 25 Given Week 1 Performance

February 27, 2019 by Scott Henderson

Enjoying Morning Chalk Up? Access additional exclusive interviews, analyses, and stories with an Rx membership.

Week 1 of the 2019 Open is in the books, so it’s time to crunch the numbers, do a little analysis and make some predictions.

While only the top 20 in the Open are guaranteed a ticket to the CrossFit Games, with the top athlete from
each country also getting a Games ticket and their “top 20” ticket getting passed down, it’s likely the cutoff will extend to around the top 30.

To be conservative in our estimates we backed that number down to the top 25 and calculated the probability of an athlete finishing in the top 25 given their event 1 performance. This is shown in the graph below:

In the past 4 years, there have only been 10 athletes who were outside the top 250 after event 1 that ended up in the top 25. Oddly, 6 of those 10 occurrences were last year, with Scott Panchik making the largest jump from 631st to 13th. Open 19.1 has some obvious similarities to 18.1, so it will not be surprising if we see a similar shakeup this year.

The charts below contain the top 19.1 finishers and their odds of finishing in the top 25, as well as the Sanctional winners and their current rank. How these champions do will have major impacts on the other top finishers in their Sanciontals. If these champions can qualify for the Games through the Open, this can create a cascading effect as their Games invite from their Sanctional win is passed down one or more spots. However, some champions have a much better chance of making this happen than others.

[chart title=’Top Male Finishers on 19.1 + Sanctionals Winners’]

2	RANK	NAME	COUNTRY	SCORE	COUNTY RANK	PROBABILITY OF FINISHING TOP 25	COMP
3	1	Snorre Fjaagesund	Norway	411 Reps	1	49%
4	1	Lazar Dukic	Serbia	411 Reps	1	49%
5	3	Alex Wertheim	U.K.	409 Reps	1	47%
6	4	Niklas Hecht	U.S.	403 Reps	1	46%
7	5	Travis Mead	U.S.	400 Reps	2	44%
8	5	Jason Carroll	U.S.	400 Reps	3	44%
9	7	Travis Mayer	U.S.	399 Reps	4	39%
10	7	Zachery Buntin	U.S.	399 Reps	5	39%
11	7	Jean-Simon Roy-Lemaire	Canada	399 Reps	1	39%
12	7	BK Gudmundsson	Iceland	399 Reps	1	39%
13	7	Simon Mantyla	Sweden	399 Reps	1	39%
14	7	Lukas Hogberg	Sweden	399 Reps	2	39%
15	13	Kristof Horvath	Hungary	398 Reps	1	33%
16	13	Adam Klink	U.S.	398 Reps	6	33%
17	13	Matt Morton	U.S.	398 Reps	7	33%
18	60	Mathew Fraser	U.S.	387 Reps	28	12%	Dubai
19	194	Patrick Vellner	Canada	378 Reps	14	3%	WZA
20	221	Sean Sweeney	U.S.	376 Reps	85	2%	Cape Town
21	309	James Newbury	Australia	371 Reps	20	<1%	ACC
22	469	Bronislaw Olenkowicz	Poland	365 Reps	9	<1%	SiD

[/chart]
[chart title=’Top Female Finishers on 19.1 + Sanctionals Winners’]

2	RANK	NAME	COUNTRY	SCORE	COUNTY RANK	PROBABILITY OF FINISHING TOP 25	COMP
3	1	Olivia Leeper	U.S.	371 Reps	1	50%
4	2	Mikaela Norman	Sweden	366 Reps	1	49%
5	3	Danielle Sidell	U.S.	361 Reps	2	47%
6	4	Annie Thorisdottir	Iceland	358 Reps	1	45%
7	4	Karin Freyova	Slovakia	358 Reps	1	45%
8	6	Sam Briggs	U.K.	355 Reps	1	43%	Dubai
9	7	Sara Sigmundsdottir	Iceland	350 Reps	2	42%	SiD
10	8	Lotte Heemstra	Netherlands	349 Reps	1	41%
11	9	Amanda Barnhart	U.S.	348 Reps	3	39%
12	10	Alison Stall	U.S.	346 Reps	4	37%
13	10	Melissa Doll	U.S.	346 Reps	5	37%
14	12	Abigail Graham	U.S.	345 Reps	6	35%
15	12	Rachel Green	U.S.	345 Reps	7	35%
16	14	Jillian Smith	U.S.	344 Reps	8	31%
17	14	Dani Speegle	U.S.	344 Reps	9	31%
18	14	Lucy Campbell	U.K.	344 Reps	2	31%
19	55	Katrin Davidsdottir	Iceland	333 Reps	3	13%	Cape Town
20	89	Tia-Clair Toomey	Australia	327 Reps	3	8%	WZA
21	201	Madeline Sturt	Australia	321 Reps	13	3%	ACC

[/chart]

A caveat on these odds, one thing we know from simulating tournament outcomes is that the best athletes are consistent, and even if they have mediocre starts (by their standards) they usually find a way back to the top. So MatFraser and Tia-Claire Toomey have a much better chance of finishing in the top 25 than their 12% and 8% chances respectively…if they want to. And that’s the question we don’t yet know the answer to. How much does the Open really matter to the athletes who have already secured their tickets to the Games?

Finally, there were many questions about how height influenced athlete performance in 19.1, and it certainly did, but only weakly for the elite athletes. The impact of height was quite significant for athletes whose talent puts them around the 90th percentile or 50th percentile alike, but for athlete’s in or above the 99.99th percentile it’s not as significant. For this reason, it was hard to make sweeping adjustments to the scores for the top athletes, though logically we can assume that some of these top athletes with the best scores on 19.1 will regress back in upcoming workouts. Or maybe not, and they came into the 2019 Open just that prepared.