Crash Crucible 2023: What You Need to Know

Photo Credit: Crash Crucible

What/When

The 2023 Crash Crucible “Re-Tour” is the fourth edition of Crash Crucible. It is an elite level off-season CrossFit competition spanning three days, Friday October 13 to Sunday October 15, this year. 

Where

The competition is hosted at CrossFit Crash in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The facility is massive and offers multiple options for floor layouts which creates beautiful opportunities for storytelling within the context of J.R. Howell’s well-crafted programming.

Live Broadcast

This year you will be able to watch nearly the entire weekend via a livestream on The Sevan Podcast’s Youtube channel. Sevan and Brian Friend will be on the call for the majority of the weekend, with Peter White of Coffee Pods and Wods, Tyler Watkins of Heat1 App, Taylor Self of Self Made Training Program, and several others commentators, athletes, and guests, making appearances over the course of the three days. 

The “Re-Tour”

This year’s Crash Crucible is called the “Re-Tour”. Competition organizer and programmer, J.R. Howell, sifted through the annals of old CrossFit Regional and Games workouts and then re-wrote them, upping the ante in most cases, to reflect where the general level of competitive fitness has come to since the original workouts were doled out. 

Masters are Doing The Same Events

There is a masters division for both male and female athletes 35+. They will be doing the exact same versions as the elite individuals, and I suspect that in some cases the scores from the Masters divisions will be impressive even against the individual field. We don’t often see entire competitions (other than the Open) where any Masters division is doing the same workouts across the board as the elite individual divisions, so this is both unique, and will be insightful, in that regard. 

Who’s Competing

If you are following Heat 1 App on Instagram you’ll have a very up to date roster of who’s competing in each division at Crash Crucible. They have posted the rosters for both Masters divisions, as well as the names of the 6 teams competing in the elite team division, the entire roster for men and women, as well as some data about who amongst the elite athletes had the best 2023 CrossFit Games season, and which of them have the heaviest recorded thruster (which is relevant for one of the events).

Performance Based Scoring

Last year Howell entrusted the scoring system (then known as Z-score) to Tyler Watkins. Watkins and his team have been refining their model (now calling it performance based scoring), and believe it is even a better representation of each athlete’s performance relative to their competition. Howell has said recently that performance based scoring is here to stay as far as Crucible is concerned; it will be curious to see if other competitions pick it up or not. In the meantime, we will keep you informed, especially on the broadcast, about what exactly this is and some of the potential reasons to consider using. 

From Crucible to the CrossFit Games

There is a pretty impressive trend that has developed since the inception of Crash Crucible in the fall of 2020- each year one of the champions here has gone on to qualify for the CrossFit Games for the first time following their championship at Crash. 

• Jayson Hopper: Crash champion 2020, Games rookie 2021
• Shelby Neal: Crash champion 2021, Games rookie 2023 (narrowly missed in 2022)
• Luke Parker: Crash champion 2022, Games rookie 2023

The 2023 Favorites

Will there be a champion this year who continues that trend? On the men’s side, that would require beating two Games athletes who are already in the field:

• Colten Mertens, three time consecutive Games athlete who’s coming off his best finish yet of 18th place.
• James Sprague, 2023 CrossFit Games rookie. He took 25th in his first year, and has been putting in the work since, as he continues to develop into a quite formidable young man. 

There are a handful of athletes who could potentially pull the upset, including Austin Hatfield, Jack Rozema, Max Krieg, and Bill Leahy; but it’s more likely for this trend to continue on the women’s side:

• Kloie Wilson is likely the biggest threat to do this as she has been closest to making it to the Games, missing by 5 total spots over the last three seasons. 
• Hannah Black finished four places and 32 points behind Wilson at the NA West Semifinal this past year. She’s newer to the scene, but is actually slightly older than Wilson, we’ll have to see what progress she’s made since May.
• Amanda Fischer had been attempting to make the Games on a team during the 2021 and 2022 season, but in 2023 she went individual and was within 40 points herself of making it in the NA East women’s field. 

Schedule

There is no published schedule YET about which divisions are competing when, but this is what we do know. Competition will run:

• Friday from 9:00 am until 7:20 pm (all times EST)
• Saturday from 8:00 am until 6:10 pm
• Sunday from 8:00 am until 5:00 pm