Monday, March 28, 2011

CrossFit Games: Which region is the most competitive?

Now that the results for the first week are in, we can start to get an idea of the quality and distribution of athletes around the world competing in the games. So what else would we do to kill the time until the next workout is announced besides analyze the numbers.  I scraped the data from the games site for the Men’s Division. This could be done for the other divisions but I just started with one because it takes a bit of time to get all the data together.

So we all think our region is the most competitive, but let’s look at the numbers and see if that is really the case.  The first and easiest way to answer this question is to rank regions by number of total participants.

Number of Athletes

Rank

Regions

Athletes (men)

1

Southeast

1313

2

Northeast

1241

3

Mid Atlantic

1144

4

Southern CA

1084

5

Southwest

1048

6

Australia

954

7

Northern CA

943

8

Northwest

938

9

North Central

934

10

South Central

909

11

Europe

851

12

Central East

775

13

Canada East

480

14

Canada West

452

15

Latin America

112

16

Asia

83

17

Africa

75

 

Grand Total

13336

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This shows that the East Coast (US) is the best represented. This is a bit surprising to me given that the first affiliates were in California and I generally thought of CrossFit as growing out from the West Coast.  I didn’t look at the total populations of each region but it’s possible that HQ made the same assumption as me and made the East Coast regions each cover a bigger population area than the regions in the West. In any case, the US divisions seem to be somewhat evenly sized, between 775 and 1313 athletes in each one.

But that doesn’t tell us anything about how good the athletes from each region are. To get an idea of how strong a region is as a whole, we can look at the median score from the first WOD.

Median Score

This shows the score of the person with half the scores above his and half the scores below his in each region.

Rank

Regions

Median Score

1

Canada East

253

2

Canada West

249

3

Southern CA

240

4

Mid Atlantic

238

5

Southwest

237

6

Asia

235

7

North Central

235

8

Northwest

234

9

South Central

233

10

Northern CA

233

11

Northeast

231

12

Southeast

225

13

Europe

225

14

Australia

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