SandClash 2024 Preview

Dates: February 29-March 2

Location: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Competition Overview

SandClash 2024 will be the fifth annual edition. Starting in 2019 the competition featured 75 athletes from 11 gyms from around the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It has seen an increase in the number of athletes participating, and the number of attendees every year; and they are expecting those numbers to increase again in Year 5. 

Last year there were 835 athletes competing from 45 countries and nearly 2,600 fans on site. Expect those numbers to be over 900 athletes, 60 countries, and 2,750 fans this year. New this year are the Masters 35+ teams of two for men and individual youth divisions for 15-17 males and females. 

Pro Divisions 

There are “RX” divisions for individual men, individual women, male teams of 3, and female teams of 3. 

• The men’s individual division has over 50 athletes registered
• The women’s individual division has over 30 athletes registered
• The male teams of 3 have nearly 70 teams registered
• The female teams of 3 have 15 teams registered

Notable Athletes

Using the B.Friendly Stats database there are 11 men and 9 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: 

Notable Teams

Most of the teams are ones that we will be learning about, but there are a couple recognizable ones: 

• Kolesnikov Teams has both a male and female team of 3 competing. They have recently announced their competition team for 2024 https://www.instagram.com/p/C3hlipqtlG0/?img_index=1 . All four members of the announced team are competing in their respective divisions. 
• The Progrm has a team in the competition led by Martin Fieferlik which includes John Schaffer and Marek Vacha. 

The Programming

This will be a three day competition with six scored events, two per day. Each scored event for this competition is labeled as a workout with a corresponding numeral: 

• Workout 24.1 is a triplet of chest to bar pull ups, overhead squats, and bar facing burpees with a 10:00 cap
• Workout 24.2 is a 5 k run
• Workout 24.3 has a buy in of double unders, toes to ring, and dual kb hang snatches culminating in max sandbag shuttle runs in the remaining time of a 7:00 cap
• Workout 24.4 is a lifting complex of a clean, hang clean, and front squat at four increasingly heavy weights with a 3:00 cap

There are still two unannounced workouts athletes are waiting on.

How to Watch

We will have a livestream for at least one heat of each RX division for each workout on the B.Friendly Fitness YouTube channel. Depending on the length of each event and the number of heats, we will stream most or all of each RX division. 

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 Riyadh 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.