Laura Horvath’s Handstand Pushups Fail Bites Into Her Rogue Lead on Final Day
Laura Horvath’s glaring struggles with handstand pushups continue as she finished second to last in the first event of the final day of the 2022 Rogue Invitational, allowing a number of athletes to take a serious bite out of her points lead.
Remind me: In May of 2019, the Rogue Invitational tested the athletes with “Snatch and Press,” featuring a three round couplet of 20 dumbbell snatches and 9 strict parallette handstand push-ups.
This was the seventh of eight total events that year, and new CrossFit superstar Laura Horvath had a major weakness exposed. Horvath completed her first 20 dumbbell snatches and was then unable to complete a single strict parallette handstand push-up.
Heading into that event Horvath was in sixth place overall, only 46 points behind Katrin Davidsdottir in fifth, but because she was unable to complete the minimum work requirement in that test, Horvath was disqualified from the competition.
For context: Laura Horvath has been a dominant athlete since bursting on the scene in 2018, finishing second in her rookie season. She seems to have all the tools to battle for the top of the podium, but inverted strength and skills have been a consistent weakness of her championship pursuit.
- In 2018, Horvath took 17th in the Fibonacci workout, where she was capped in an event featuring kipping parallette handstand push-ups.
- In 2019, Horvath took 27th in Mary, which is a 20-minute AMRAP featuring handstand push-ups, pistols and pull-ups.
- In 2020, Horvath took 30th in Damn Diane, which paired heavy deadlifts and strict deficit handstand push-ups.
- In 2021, three of Horvath’s worst finishes were during inverted workouts, with a 15th in a wall walk event, 12th in a handstand walking event, and 10th in freestanding handstand push-up event.
- In 2022, Horvath finished in 39th place during Echo Press, which introduced strict wall facing handstand push-ups to the CrossFit Games.
Three and a half years later, the Rogue Invitational repeated the “Snatch and Press” event to kick off the final day of competition. Horvath took 19th place and was only able to complete 3 total strict parallette handstand push-ups, dropping her overall lead from 75 to just 15 points over Annie Thorisdottir. Luckily for Horvath, there was no minimum work requirement for the 2022 iteration of the event.
The bottom line: Horvath has expressed her goal of standing atop the podium and becoming the Fittest Woman on Earth. Given the new era of CrossFit Games athletes, it seems unlikely that she’ll be able to hide such a glaring weakness when the rest of the field is already so well balanced. After three and a half years of training this weakness and only seeing marginal progress relative to her peers, can Laura’s dominance in her strengths be enough to carry her to overall competition victories?
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