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

 

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	224
15	Central East	220
16	Latin America	219
17	Africa	166

 

Now this is getting interesting. Southeast and Southwest were at the top of the first list but drop to below the middle when we sort by the median score. This would indicate that those regions have more “average” CrossFitters participating in the open sectionals.  While the men (remember, this is only looking at the men’s division) competing from Canada are likely to score higher than the average CrossFitter from another region.

But that still doesn’t tell us anything about what it takes to qualify for the next round.

 

Qualifying scores

To remind you, the top 60 men from each region advance to the Regional competitions held in May or June. This is obviously preliminary since we’ve only done one workout, but it gives us enough data to see what score you would have needed to advance if the sectionals was only one (err two) week(s) long.

 

Rank	Regions	Qualifying score	Median Score
1	North Central	349	235
2	Southwest	345	237
3	Southern CA	345	240
4	Northeast	343	231
5	Southeast	340	225
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