With the retirement of five-time “Fittest Man on Earth” Mat Fraser, there has been little attention given to the women’s competition as the 2021 CrossFit Open draws closer. Perhaps that’s because there is an equally dominant force in four-time defending champion Tia-Clair Toomey.
The Australian’s performance at the 2020 Games would likely have been the most dominating we had ever seen if not for Fraser outperforming her (he had one more event win, accumulated 125 more points, and had a margin of victory 185 points larger).
Despite the 27-year-old’s supremacy, there is a fierce and competitive group of women who will challenge her. Here are our top 10:
Katrin Davidsdottir was second last year to Toomey, has six consecutive top five finishes, is a two-time champ (2015 and 2016) and is always in contention. She’s still only 27 and has new training partners with her at CrossFit New England this season (Samuel Kwant and Amanda Barnhart). There is no reason not to expect her to be battling for the podium again this year.
The last woman who looked like she had a chance to beat Toomey was Kara Saunders in 2017. She is 31 now but her performances since returning from having a child have been as impressive as ever. She was 12th worldwide in the 2020 Open, third at the Rogue online competition last June, and eighth (but only seven points out of fifth) in stage one of the Games. She appears to have great balance in her life and has enough raw talent to once again compete with the best.
Despite poor performances at the last two Games, things are actually looking promising for Sara Sigmundsdottir. Like Davidsdottir and Toomey, she’s still in the prime of her career at 28. She’s recently hired Max El-Haag of Training Think Tank which seems like an excellent fit for her. Not making stage two of the Games last year was probably a good thing for her. When Sigmundsdottir is healthy, she does extremely well.
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Kari Pearce, third-place finisher and three-time reigning fittest woman in the United States, also finds herself in perhaps the best training environment she’s ever had to start this season. She has relocated from New York to Las Vegas to be with her coach, Justin Cotler, as well as a handful of other Games athletes, such as Danielle Brandon, Bethany Shadburne, and Nicolas Bidarte.
It’s hard to argue with results. Many questioned Haley Adams’ sixth-place finish in 2019 due to the Games’ different format. Well, she backed it up last year with a fourth-place finish in a completely different style of competition. She has amassed as much experience as any 20-year-old in the sport.
It’s hard to believe but Brooke Wells, six-time Games athlete and last year’s fifth-place finisher, is only 25. While her fifth-place finish in stage two last year wasn’t what she was hoping for, her stage one performance turned a lot of heads. She was only 25 points behind Toomey and a staggering 83 points ahead of Adams, who finished third in that weekend-long competition.
Kristin Holte, 2019’s second fittest woman, finished a devastating two points from qualifying from stage one of last year’s Games. Holte is an outlier in terms of ageat 34, but her performances in recent years show she is still a threat.
Like Holte, Jamie Simmonds secured her first career podium finish in 2019 after finishes of 11th and eighth in the two previous years. She didn’t do as well in stage one last year as some had expected with a 12th-place finish, but top five finishes at Dubai and Rogue suggest that, like Sigmundsdottir, the Games finish might be the exception, not the norm for her.
Amanda Barnhart was in that group of women (along with Holte and Saunders) who missed the top five at the Games last year by only a handful of points. She finished seventh, five points out of qualification.
Rounding out the list is Karin Frey, most likely the least recognisable name. Frey, 25, is not someone to be overlooked. She was 14th last year in stage one and 22nd at the 2019 Games, but she finished second to Sigmundsdottir in Dubai in December 2019.
