Opinion | CrossFit: 20-year-old Haley Adams ready to leave mark on 2021 CrossFit Games under the guidance of Rich Froning
- The quiet, soft-spoken American is already a perennial powerhouse, and has only been competing as an adult for two years
- Adams, who trains under the watchful eye of legend Rich Froning, appears to have all the ingredients to become a CrossFit champion
She’s currently 33rd place in North America heading into the semi-finals, and no one is talking much about her. But don’t let her overall placement fool you, she had a world class quarter-final performance.
Her results for the first three tests of quarter-finals were an impressive first, third and fifth in North America (there were over 3,400 women who competed in that competition). Then she was 27th on the final sprint-style workout where she was only 10 seconds away from a 15th-place finish. Through those four workouts she had 36 points. Amanda Barnhart finished first overall in North America, scoring 104 points across five tests. If you drop Barnhart’s worst performance she’d have 62 points, 26 more than Adams on her best four.
When we see that Adams took a 517th place finish in the four-rep max front squat, it’s easy to think that looks bad on paper, but it really shouldn’t. It’s very unlikely given the change in both the number of participants (there will only be 30 athletes competing at each semi-final in the next round) and scoring system. Points are expected to be awarded using the CrossFit Games scoring style for the semis, with 100 for first, 96 for second, and so on, instead of the linear point-scoring system that was used for both the Open and quarter-finals. For semi-finals, even if a similar test shows up, it would be very unlikely to keep her out of a qualifying position.
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Once she’s at the games, we know what she can do. In 2018, her final year as a teenage competitor, she had one of the most dominating performances any athlete in any division has ever had. There were 11 workouts, she won nine of them, including the first six and took second in the other two.
