QUARTERFINALS, SEMIFINALS, AND LAST-CHANCE QUALIFIER Individual Athletes The 2022 CrossFit Open took place from Feb. The Affiliate Cup competition allowed teams of athletes from each gym to compete with one another and potentially advance to the Quarterfinals, Semifinals, and Games. ( Please note: Countries are assigned to athletes based on citizenship and assigned to teams based on location.) For example, athletes could search for the fittest in South America or Switzerland.
The leaderboard was also searchable by continent, country, or user-generated hashtags.
Separate hashtag-based leaderboards were available for teachers, military service members, healthcare workers, firefighters, college students, law enforcement officers, and hundreds of other professions, interests, and groups. The Open allows hundreds of thousands of individual athletes to quantify their performance and rank themselves with peers. Anyone who was at least 14 years old could sign up and join in the first stage of the CrossFit Games season with special divisions for teenagers, age groups, and adaptive athletes. During the three-week competition, one event was released online each Thursday, and athletes had four days to record and submit scores. The road to the CrossFit Games started with the worldwide Open, the largest participatory sporting event on Earth. This year, a worldwide Open competition involving hundreds of thousands of competitors allowed the best athletes to advance through Quarterfinal and Semifinal rounds, culminating in the 16th edition of the CrossFit Games from Aug. As top athletes began to train year-round for strength, speed, endurance, and skill, they were met with new tests each year that took them outside their comfort zone. Competitors are required to train for the unknown, and the scores of events have included distance swims, obstacle courses, 1-rep-max lifts, handstand walking, sled pushes, rope climbs, and odd-object carries. Instead, athletes from around the world are tested against a variety of unannounced events, each with different movements, equipment, and time domains. From their inception, they have been unlike traditional sports such as track and field, gymnastics, weightlifting, or even decathlon - all specialist sports in which the events are known long in advance. The Games began in 2007 in Aromas, California, as the first competition to objectively measure fitness.
The international field of play has included athletes from over 120 countries. For the past 15 years, fans from around the world have attended the multi-day sporting event, streamed the competition online, or watched on ESPN, CBS, or a wide range of international broadcasts. The CrossFit Games are the ultimate proving grounds for the Fittest Man and Fittest Woman on Earth™ and are world-renowned as the definitive test of fitness.