Stats analysis is an important and fun part of any sport and CrossFit has had way too little for my taste. With that in mind, I've put together (as in found someone smarter than me to put together) a relatively simple statistical analysis of the 2015 Regionals.

The question seems simple: what were the standout performances from the 2015 Regionals? Given that the Games and Regionals scoring now favors winners, this can be an important tool to trying to figure out which competitor can step up, hit a homerun when it counts, and get those extra points by winning an event at the Games.

Further, this analysis will give us an idea of which athletes have absolutely mutant capabilities when compared to the field and it's always fun to know who the mutants are.

We're calling this metric "Standout Factor". Standout Factor (SF from here on out) is a measurement against the average competitor. The higher the SF, the more that performance stood out compared to the rest of the field. An easy example of how this works is Matt Rattay's performance in Event 4. Matt finished the handstand walk in 1:11.9 and the average finishing time for that event was 2:19.73. This gives him a SF of 2.83, which is overall the single most dominant performance at Regionals in the Men's division. 

How dominant is a 2.83 SF? Check out this graph:



On the X axis we have the ranking of each individual who participated in this event. On the Y axis is the time. At the top right corner, waaaaay above everyone else, is Matt Rattay and his absolute destruction of the field in this event.

Handstand walking is impressive, but certainly favors a specialist more than many of the other Regional events. So what's the second most dominant performance from the men's side of Regionals? Matt Fraser's dismantling of Event 3, which scored him a 2.82 SF:



One of the beauties of SF is that we can use it to compare performances across different events as well. So just how insane was Mat Fraser's Event 3 finish? If we were to remove the two "specialist" events (events 4 and 5), the next highest SF among Games qualifed men is Jonne Koski's 2.18 SF in Event 1. Here's a visual comparison of how a 2.18 SF compares to the field:



That's Jonne Koski and Dan Bailey bunched together at the top, way faster than everyone else on Event 1. Comparitively, Mat Fraser's Event 3 finish is miles ahead. He's not only way faster than the average Regionals athlete in that event, but he's also significantly ahead of the rest of the leaders in the event too.

But what about the women's side?

Again, a specialist has the single highest SF. Oxana Silvenko is an Olympic silver medalist in weightlifting and she proved it by snatching 210 in Event 5, for a SF of 3.41.



You can see there are a lot of competitors crowded around the 180 mark, and this only makes Silvenko's 210 even more impressive since the majority of high level females snatchd 180+. 

By the way, the dot in the bottom left corner is Julie Foucher's snatch post Achilles injury.

The highest women's SF outside of the specialist events was Kristin Holte's finish on Event 3, with a 3.17. This looks a little different compared to Mat Fraser's finish though:



Given the cap issues on Event 3, we had to massage some of the data to find ways to make this work out for our analysis. Because so many people capped out on this event, just finishing it (especially as a female) is a dominant performance. Kristin Holte finished it incredibly quickly, especially when compared to the average female's capped out score which is why she has such a huge SF in this event, but unlike Mat Fraser's performance, she had some close competition in terms of actual finishing time which is why she's not so far above everyone else here.

So Oxana Silvenko can snatch way more than the average female Regional athlete and Matt Rannay can handstand way way faster than the average male Regional athlete, but CrossFit isn't about specialists at all. It's about having broad capacity, being able to excel at seemingly divergent events.

To that end, we created a cross comparison of results in Events 3 and 5. Event 3 was the long, grinding chipper and Event 5 was a 1RM snatch. It doesn't get more disparate than that when it comes to physical capabilities. Here's the women's table:



A couple things to notice here: first off, as the times in Event 3 (X axis) get faster, then average weight snatched (Y axis) increased. Simply put, the fitter you are, the fitter you are. 

The best combination of these two capabilities is rookie Sara Sigmundsdottir. To give you an idea of how that compares, Camille Leblanc-Bazinet is the dot just under where it says "(180". 

Here's the men's side comparison:



Again, we have a general upward trend that shows the fitter you are, the fitter you are. And again, we have an insane performance by Mat Fraser. He definitely separated himself from the pack when it came to both of these events, and the result is his scores sitting pretty way far away from everyone else.

Standout Factor is a cool metric that can be used to compare among and between divisions. We now know that the performance which stood out the most compared to the rest of the field was Oxana Silvenko's snatch. We also know that finishing Event 3 under the time cap makes you a superhuman. 

The CrossFit Games will be testing a whole lot of mixed modal events and the competitors capabilities to adapt and learn on the fly. There isn't any statistic modelling that can help predict that sort of thing, but we can use Regionals to see who to look out for in terms of possible massive performances: Mat Fraser, Sara Sigmundsdottir, and Kritin Holte all stand out from the crowd on separate events and in a couple weeks, we'll have a whole lot more data from the CrossFit Games.