The 2024 Eurasia Throwdown Finals Preview

Dates: March 9-10

Location: Turkish Gymnastics Federation. Istanbul, Turkey

Competition Overview

Another busy week for the “2024-25 B.Friendly Fitness World Tour“, it’s week two of the CrossFit Games Open and also the second stop of the tour. Brian Friend finds himself in Istanbul, Turkey for the Eurasia Throwdown Finals after spending a week in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for the SFA SandClash Fitness competition.

The two-day competition takes place this coming Saturday through Sunday, March 9-10. The international competition will feature over 500 athletes from 50 different countries.

Istanbul is one of the most historical and cultural cities in the world and plays the perfect host for such an event.

Brian will be onsite to provide live coverage of the final heats for six of the events, three each for each day of competition in the Elite division. Leaderboards will be posted on Competition Corner.

Elite Divisions

There are “RX” divisions for individual men, individual women. 

• The men’s individual division has over 28 athletes registered
• The women’s individual division has over 7 athletes registered

Notable Athletes

Using the B.Friendly Stats database there are 15 men and 5 women who we have prior competition data for. These tables shows their name and country, and also their rating relative to the field on a scale of 0 to 99: 

Athlete	Country	Field Rating
Augustin Viličnik	Croatia	99
Beka Kvernadze	Georgia	75
Nikolas Saraliotis	Greece	51
Charalampos Pavlidis	Greece	38
Anilcan Aydogdu	Turkey	31
Isaak Petridis	Greece	30
Dmitry Gurin	Russia	23
Aleksandar Ilin	Russia	22
Azat Axanov	Kazakhstan	17
Yurii Bulat	Moldova	13
Mustafa Talha Kolbasar	Turkey	11
Nika Maisuradze	Georgia	11
Bariş Sayin	Turkey	8
Eren Yayla	Turkey	6
Timofey Orlov	Kazakhstan	4
Vasileios Soukoulani	Greece	3
Marios Belousis	Greece	2
Nikos Tiliakos	Greece	1

This field features two European Semifinalists from the 2023 CrossFit Games season, Augustin Viličnik. The Croatian is his country’s national champion the last three seasons. At the German Throwdown Semifinal, Viličnik finished 27th highlighted by his fifth place finish in the opening workout.

Beka Kvernadze is another athlete to watch in the men’s field as the four-time fittest man in Georgia is also coming off an appearance at the German Throwdown. He would finish 38th among the European field and like Viličnik recorded his best finish in the opening workout, placing ninth.

But those two athletes aren’t the most accomplished athletes in the field because Russian athlete Aleksandar Ilin is registered to compete. Ilin is a two-time Games qualifier, competing at the 2019 Games as Russia’s national champion and finishing 55th. He received an invitation to the 2021 Games after placing second at the online CrossFit Asia Invitational Semifinal but ended up withdrawing.

Athlete	Country	Field Rating
Kamila Takeyeva	Kazakhstan	99
Nicole Crouch	United Kingdom	87
Merve Gokcil	Turkey	73
Eva Ioanna Arampatzi	Greece	53
Diana Yaburova	Russia	0
Natalia Biberica	Croatia	0
Russu Mariya	Russia	0

On the women’s side Kamila Takeyeva headlines this small but very talented field. From Kazakhstan, Takeyeva is fresh off her victory at SandKlash captaining the Kolesnikov Team Oreo to a championship. She’s three-time national champion for Kazakhstan and was sixth at the Far East Throwdown Semifinal this past Games season.

The home crowd favorite will no doubt be Merve Gokcil. Gokcil has been one of the top athlete’s in Turkey since starting CrossFit four years ago. Last season she finished second to Seher Kaya for the national champion accolades. She has made two-straight appearances at the Asia Semifinal, placing 17th at the Far East Throwdown last year.

Another podium contender is Nicole Crouch, who competed at the Madrid Championship this past September where she placed 25th.

The Programming

This will be a two day competition with six scored events, three per day. 

• Event 1 is a triplet of 30 front squats, 20 shoulder-to-overheads and 10 thrusters with a 7:00 time cap.
• Event 2 is a 5K row for time with a 25:00 time cap.
• Event 3 starts with 50 burpee box jump overs and then ring muscle-ups (30 for the men and 20 for the women) with seven shuttle run penalty every time an athlete breaks from the muscle-ups with a 15:00 time cap.
• Event 4 features two rounds of 1,000 meter bike erg, handstand walk with a ramp, 10 pull-overs with another set of handstand walk with a ramp with a 12:00 time cap.
• Event 5 is five rounds of calories on a bike (18 for men, 15 for women), six sandbag cleans, one seated legless rope climb with a 12:00 time cap followed by a cash out of 50 meter sandbag carry.

How to Watch

We will have a livestream all the Elite division heats for each workout on the B.Friendly Fitness YouTube channel. 

Each livestream will be scheduled ahead of time and we will post them on the B.Friendly Instagram the day of. Keep in mind the time zone, in Instanbul it is ‘AST’ time zone abbreviation which is UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) +3. 

• That means most of Europe is 2 or 3 hours earlier.
• The East Coast of North America is 8 hours earlier.
• The West Coast of North America is 11 hours earlier.