2018 USAW Nationals

Unlike most prior events where we post the photos on facebook, we are instead posting a list of zip files with one for each session. This is because of a few reasons but the primary one is because of Facebook upload caps and the annoyance of taking 5-6 days to upload session albums just because of those limits. A secondary one is that Facebook reduces picture quality a lot and our photos look worse after being uploaded there.

At the 2018 USAW, we took photos of 15 sessions (5 per day). We covered a lot more with videos with 28 sessions. See down below for more info.

Here are the photos (right-click and then choose “save file as” or “save link as”). See the notes section below if you have any questions:

Day 1:

Day 2:

Day 3:

A couple of other things to note here:

  • We have reviewed most of these files. But given that there are tens of thousands of pictures that we will post, there could easily be a mistake in how something is cropped or something might be out of focus or poorly framed. However, if you don’t see a photo shown of a lift, then that means that we don’t have it (maybe it was out of focus, maybe we weren’t sitting there at that moment, etc). There also could be photos in the wrong album or similar — if you notice that, please let us know at [email protected].
  • Use a computer to download these, not a phone or tablet.
  • We can’t provide tech support for these files. We’ve tested the files and they’re working for us but we can’t guarantee everything will go smoothly with your computer. If you need support due to technical issues, you can buy your data here: https://store.hookgrip.com/shop/digital-media/. We will be able to provide tech support for purchases.
  • We do have videos (real time 4k 60fps and 3k 120fps for some sessions/lifters) for this meet but they are not free because there’s no good way that we know of to mass watermark and distribute videos in a cost and time effective manner. If you’d like your videos, you can purchase them at the digital media link above. We also post a lot of videos over the course of time on hookgrip and hookgripusa so videos could also show up there for some lifters. And we typically do video giveaways on the @hookgripstore instagram for people wearing a hookgrip item on the platform.
  • The full list of sessions covered by video is as follows:
    • Day 1: 58B, 53C, 56A, 53B, 69B male, 48A, 62A, 53A, 69A male, 58A
    • Day 2: 69C female, 63C, 69B female, 63B, 85B, 63A, 77B, 69A female, 77A
    • Day 3: 75B, 94A, 75A, 105A, 90B, +105B, 90A, +105A, +90A
  • If you’re wondering why we had less coverage for photos, there are four main reasons that all combined to cause this. One is a lack of employees to cover the event. Our competent photo-taking employees who usually help us to cover events were not available this weekend or had just finished with Pan Ams or just decided they didn’t want to go to the meet. A second is that each year, a higher and higher rate of people will post photos having zoomed in a bit to crop out the logo and it’s less and less likely that they’ll actually give credit to us for the photo. If there’s no logo being shown and no credit given in the caption then the photos are less and less beneficial to us. Of course there are many people who don’t zoom in and/or do give credit (thanks!) but we’re simply saying, as a percentage, less and less credit is being given as the years go by. This trend makes photos a less attractive activity for us unlike videos where it’s more difficult to zoom in without third party software. A third reason is that there’s already an official photographer so it isn’t like anyone we don’t cover doesn’t have access to photos. They’ll all be covered if they want to pay for their photos. So it isn’t as necessary in the “the sport needs photos for promotion” sense that was a more relevant argument when we started in the 2011-2012 timeframe. And lastly, the fourth reason was that the meet was a bit weaker than usual on the whole due to the people drawn away by Pan Ams, CrossFit Regionals and training through for Junior Worlds. Of course there were lots of very good lifters and several big records set but, on the average, there were not the same levels of totals in the gold/silver positions that we’re used to seeing across the board. While none of those four main reasons was enough for us to say “let’s do less photo coverage this year”, the four of them combined to be enough of a reason to scale back photo coverage. If one or two of those reasons didn’t exist, we’d probably have more photo sessions.
  • These are big files. Depending on your internet speed, they may take several minutes to download. Be patient. We list the file size next to each zip file.

If you have any other questions not answered above, please feel free to contact us at [email protected].