Competition

First Thoughts on the Dubai CrossFit Championship Qualifier Leaderboard: Who’s in and Who’s Out?

September 27, 2022 by
Photo credit: Patrick Clark (@athleteseyephotography)
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This year there are no invitations being sent for the 2022 Dubai CrossFit Championship; if you want the honor of competing at the live event in Dubai, you have to earn it through the online qualifier. And this is no easy task as only 20 men and 20 women will qualify. 

Yesterday, the initial leaderboard was made public on Competition Corner which gives us a first look at the potential qualifiers. 

  • There will still be scoring adjustments following video reviews which could take up to two weeks to finalize.

Who’s In?

At the moment six individual male Games athletes from 2022 are in a qualifying position:

  • Giorgos Karavis
  • Lazar Djukic
  • Jonne Koski
  • Ricky Garard
  • Guillaume Briant
  • Brent Fikowski

There are also a couple notable 2022 CrossFit Games team athletes in the top 20:

  • Samuel Cournoyer
  • Khan Porter

In addition to Koski, there are also three athletes from the 2022 LCQ in a qualifying position:

  • Fabian Beneito (overall leader currently)
  • Alex Kotoulas
  • Luka Djukic

On the women’s side there are five individual Games athletes from 2022:

  • Matilde Garnes
  • Seher Kaya
  • Emily Rolfe
  • Freya Moosbrugger
  • Karin Freyova

One notable team athlete from the 2022 Games:

  • Lena Richter

And three Last Chance Qualifier (LCQ) athletes:

  • Jamie Simmonds
  • Oihana Moya
  • Tayla Howe

None of those athletes are the overall female leader though, that is reserved for France’s Claudia Gluck. 

Notably, both Gluck and Beneito (men’s overall leader) competed at the Lowlands Throwdown where they both struggled on the legless rope climb workout. 

Gluck imploded in the 9th round of thatevent plummeting to a 20th place finish. Beneito took dead last (30th) for the men and made a great surge back to get into an LCQ spot. This will be a nice opportunity for them to have a little redemption in another high level live competition. 

Who’s Out?

As of this writing there are some very notable names in both divisions on the outside looking in; and quite frankly, for the sake of the live event, hopefully some of these end up in a position to accept an invite after scoring reviews and any potential invitations denials come through.

Men:

  • Simon Mantyla (21st)
  • Moritz Fiebig (22nd)
  • Nikita Yundov (24th) 
  • Uldis Upenieks (24th)
  • Enrico Zenoni (25th)
  • Benoit Boulanger (27th)
  • Connor Duddy (29th)
  • Chandler Smith (31st)

Women: 

  • Noortje Bleeker (21st)
  • Linda Keesman (22nd)
  • Emma Tall (24th)
  • Ashleigh Wosny (27th)
  • Andrea Nisler (29th)
  • Mia Hesketh (30th)
  • Kelsey Kiel (39th)
  • Julia Kato (42nd)

The big picture: It was definitely a risk for Dubai to remove all invitations this year. While they are missing many of the big names we’ve seen in the past (Roman Khrennikov, Jeff Adler, Willy Georges, Laura Horvath, Gabriela Migala, Jacqueline Dahlstrom, Sara Sigmundsdottir); they did still manage to get some big names to compete online. 

Time will tell how many of those Games-level athletes actually show up, but as it stands, the potential fields for both the men and the women do have several notable names, and several other up and coming athletes who we will have an opportunity to learn about (more on that in future articles).

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