20.1 Open Analysis and Tips, Fragkou's Drug Test

The Open 20.1 workout involves bar-facing burpees and ground-to-overhead barbells. Anna Fragkou fails a drug test. Annie Thorisdottir gets transparent.

Friday, October 11th, 2019

Open 20.1 Announcement

Multiple live streams simultaneously announced the first workout of the 2020 CrossFit Open.

10 rounds, for time, of:

8 Ground to Overhead10 Bar-Facing Burpees15-minute time cap

The best posted time on the leaderboard to date is Sam Bowles of the United States from CrossFit Iniquus. Bowles has posted a time of 10:11. It looks like, as with previous years, major athletes will be waiting until later in the week to post their most competitive times in the most uncomfortable game of chicken ever played. We do know that Scott Panchik has the best unreported time, finishing in 9:22 last night during the live stream. Rich Froning is in second place, finishing at exactly 10:00. On the women’s side, Sabrina Caron is in the lead with 10:01.

Now, about that live stream. WODDITY’s live commentary was the third most-watched, coming in with 2100 streamers, behind Rogue and Brazil CrossFit Championship. Second-best in english. Pretty good for a crazy person in his parents’ basement. Behind us were the Reebok Korea and the CrossFit French Throwdown streams, both bringing in less than 1000 views.

20.1 Strategy and Tips

I’ll be doing 20.1 after recording this podcast, so stay tuned to WODDITY.com for our workout guide. We’ve seen a number of athletes from Jacob Heppner to Cole Sager publish definitive strategy guides, but none of them have actually done the workout yet.

There are a couple of early takeaways, though:

The fifteen-minute time cap is aggressive. That’s one rep every five seconds for fifteen minutes. To keep up with Rich Froning’s time, you’d have to do a rep every three seconds.When it comes to warm-ups, you’re working a lot of lungs and lower back. The perfect warm-up would probably be some time on the rower to get the air moving through your lungs and some light engagement with your back.If you start to notice fatigue in your back from the bar-facing burpees and snatches, moving to a clean and jerk for the ground-to-overhead will decrease the impact on your back.The thing everyone is going to want to do is to start too hard and burn yourself out. Good ol’ redlining. Set a consistent pace you can maintain for ten-plus minutes and sprint at the end if you still have gas left in the tank.

Anna Fragkou Drug Test

We broke the news yesterday on WODDITY that seven athletes had received sanctions for failed drug tests. Most prominent among them were Anna Fragkou and Katie Trombetta. We had already learned and shared Trombetta’s news after she took to Instagram last week. Fragkou was new news. I looked at her as the most improved athlete of the 2019 CrossFit Games, jumping more than 700 places from the CrossFit Open to a 9th-place finish in Madison. For the full list of athletes, their punishments, and what they tested positive for, check out the article on WODDITY. I’ve put a link in my show notes.

Thorisdottir Open Performances

And the last story of the day is that Annie Thorisdottir has announced she will be posting full-length videos of every CrossFit Open workout. Her goal is to start a conversation about transparency within the top tiers of the sport. Videos will be up by 8:00 AM Pacific every Friday for the next five weeks. She did 10.1 with Sara Sigmundsdottir and put up an epic time somewhere around 8:44. Sigmundsdottir beat her, but the video cuts away so we don’t get to see Sara’s time.

And that’s it for news about CrossFit on Friday, October 11th. Thanks for listening. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe. It’s the best way to give back to the show, because it helps more people find us. I’m Ben Garves.