The Duel III: 2023 Rogue Invitational Study

The 2023 Rogue Invitational saw the third iteration of “The Duel” and for the first time, we saw it with just two movements. “The Duel” is an elimination style event filtering down the entire field of athletes over four rounds down to two athletes who face off for the win in one final round.

The Duel III
Over, under, over log
3 sandbags to Teeter (200/150)

The past two iterations of “The Duel” have seen squatting, in the form of squat snatches and overhead squats, and a sandbag movement. The sandbag is the only thing that has stayed consistent over the three iterations of “The Duel”.

Listed below are the results of “The Duel III”. Where the results were not known, an estimate was clocked manually reviewing the live broadcast.

The Women

The Men

For both the women and the men, each round averaged faster as the athletes who advanced refined their execution on the seven rep event. Dani Speegle had the fastest time in each round and improved her time by roughly 2.75 seconds. Travis Mayer had the fastest time through the first two rounds until Jayson Hopper found his groove clocking the first time under 21 seconds in round three and the only time under 20 seconds in rounds four and five with a record time of 19.65 seconds.

Using The Past To Predict The Future

The worst “The Duel” finish of Rogue Invitational champion in 2021, 2022 and 2023 was third place:

• 2021 Men: Justin Medeiros (3rd in The Duel)
• 2021 Women: Tia-Clair Toomey (1st in The Duel)
• 2022 Men: Justin Medeiros (1st in The Duel II)
• 2022 Women: Laura Horváth (1st in The Duel II)
• 2023 Men: Pat Vellner (3rd in The Duel III)
• 2023 Women: Laura Horváth (2nd in the Duel III)

We could conclude that a Rogue Invitational champion is one of the best at sandbag movement or at sub-60 second time domain sprints, and there may be some correlation, but the more likely scenario is that they are one of the best at execution. In such a short event, it’s about efficiency of movement and staying perfect.

Twice the runner up at the Rogue Invitational placed 13th in “The Duel” when Annie Thorisdottir and Patrick Vellner did so in 2021. So if your favorite athlete did not do so well in “The Duel III”, don’t worry, history says there’s still a chance. 

In every instance but one where an athlete finished worse than 15th in “The Duel”, the athlete placed in the bottom ten overall. The one exception was Ricky Garard who took 18th place in “The Duel II” last year and went on to place 10th overall.