Per ArmenHammerTV‘s exclusive, the 2020 Dubai CrossFit Championship (DCC) will have a significantly different format from not only years’ past championships, but also from almost any other CrossFit Games Sanctional.
Changes include the exclusion of team competition, single discipline events, and an increased prize payout, to name a few. The news was broken by Armen Hammer on his YouTube channel ArmenHammerTV which you can watch below:
When Is It?
The 2020 DCC will take place over four days on December 6th, 10th, 11th, and 12th. There will be a single day of competition on the Sunday the 6th and then several days break before the rest of the competition continues on Thursday the 10th.
Major Changes
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Individual Competition Only
The first big change of note is that the DCC will not have a team competition. The DCC will only have twenty male and twenty female athletes competing in individual competition.
When Hammer inquired why team competition was being cut, the DCC organizers told him that team competition is “a sign of 2019” and that team competition is not conducive to the new event structure.
Event Structure
The championship will consist of eleven scored events each consisting of a single discipline.
The disciplines that will serve those events are as follows:
- Bike
- Kettlebells
- Running
- Swimming
- Rowing
- Gymnastics
- Powerlifting
- Weightlifting
- Strongman
- CrossFit (high intensity functional fitness)
All athletes in attendance will compete in the first ten events before a cut is made. Hammer was not told specifically what the cutoff will be but assumed that it will be “one heat, maybe two heats.” Only the athletes who survive the cut will compete in the final event.
Hammer noted the discrepancy between what each event could consist of with the information he was given, citing in particular that gymnastics is a very broad category. It is difficult to know what movements will be demanded in that event, but Hammer assumed they will be entirely bodyweight focused.
Prize Payout
The total prize pool is $700,000. The winner of each event will take home $10,000. This will be the largest payout for a CrossFit event outside of the CrossFit Games themselves. Here is the prize structure:
Per First Ten Events:
- 1st – $10,000
- 2nd – $5,000
- 3rd – $2,500
Overall Finals:
- 1st – $100,000
- 2nd – $50,000
- 3rd – $25,000
“If [any athlete does] well at one single discipline, they are going to make more money than winning almost any other sanctioned event in the entire circuit. Wrap your brain around that.”
Every athlete, all twenty men and twenty women, that attend will have all their flights, hotel, and food costs covered from December 5th-13th. Hammer highlighted that Dubai is one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Wrapping Up
The 2019 DCC was won by Sara Sigmundsdottir and Brent Fitkowski. With these massive changes coming to the 2020 DCC including a gigantic prize pool increase, all focus will turn to which twenty athletes will qualify for the men’s and women’s divisions. The exclusion of team competition poses the potential for many big names to enter the fray for qualification, one of the most notable being 4-time CrossFit Games Champion Rich Froning.
This announcement makes the 2020 DCC much more compelling from our point of view and we are excited to see which athletes can to make their way to Dubai in December.
Feature Image via Dubai CrossFit Championship Instagram page: @dxbfitnesschamp
