New year, new season. Just over a month before the 2018 Open begins, this season comes with many new features and is sure to have some surprises. Let's go step by step.
Open 2018
They will start on February 22 and will last 5 weeks. Nothing new at the moment, the dates of every year are met. But Dave Castro (Director of the CrossFit Games), who really likes to play, has already given the first clue on his Instagram account: There will be dumbbells in the Open. I think that after introducing them in last year's Open and there being no bar at Regionals, it is no surprise but it can mark the training of many co-competitors.
As every year there will be HSPU, double unders, rowing, pull-ups/c2b, muscle ups, cleans, snatch, thruster or burpees. Come on, if a WOD of burpess and thrusters falls again it shouldn't catch you by surprise. The same as a WOD with muscleups or chest to bar. Yes, there is an important novelty this year in the Open, and that is that the teams go from 6 people to 4 (as in the Invitational). This will make the good teams even better (if you eliminate the 2 weakest members the logical thing is to be a more competitive team), it will make us see new teams (more pits will be encouraged to compete as a team) and probably some athletes will jump from individual to teams to aspire to reach Madison. If we add to that that in Europe there are more places to go to the Games, we will probably see many surprises among the athletes.
Regionals
The most important novelty this year is the new distribution of Regions. On the one hand, the Latin American region is being created again, where a place will be distributed to each category to go to the Games. On the other hand, the California region joins the West region (Western USA and Canada) creating a larger region. And finally, Europe is divided into two regions. Meridian Region (4 places to Games), which will include Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland and Portugal, along with Africa and the Middle East; and Europe Region (5 places in the Games), with the rest of the European countries and Russia.
This, which a priori is good news for European athletes since there will be 4 more places for the same region as last year, may be a disappointment for the spectacle we saw in other years. For example, in Meridian we will see 6 athletes from the Top 10 men, but we will barely see 2 of the 10 best women from last year. And in Europe the opposite will happen. And another question arises: will two regional ones attract more brands from abroad or on the contrary will stands be lost? We will have to wait for the year and the Open to progress so that each of the regions can be better defined.
