Hyrox Had a Rule for Everything. Except Poop

Every sport eventually gets a national scandal. For cycling there was doping. For football there was Deflategate. And for Hyrox, a fitness race that asks you to use equipment thousands of strangers have already come into contact with, it was a literal shitshow. Australian pro Joanna Wietrzyk lost control of her bowels halfway through a Hyrox race in Beijing this past weekend, in front of an arena filled with spectators, judges, and cameras. She kept racing. And won.Within hours the controversial clips were everywhere, and reactions split into two camps: enraged people who called her a walking biohazard, and a smaller group who thought she was a warrior. “Selfish” came up a lot; one X user shared an image purportedly showing diarrhea smeared on the seat of the rowing machine she’d used. It got ugly enough that Hyrox announced it would permanently ban anyone sending threats to athletes, and Wietrzyk turned off her Instagram comments and deleted a Story celebrating her win (from a hospital bed, where she was presumably being treated for dehydration). Thousands of competitors and armchair athletes weighed in on the debacle with furious threads, hot takes and memes.Australian pro Joanna Wietrzyk lost control of her bowels halfway through a Hyrox race in Beijing this weekend. Fred Lee/Getty ImagesFollowing the blowback, the company behind the rapidly growing, international sports competition released an official statement on Sunday, written in the jargony tone of an airline delivering news of a delay to irate passengers. “As our sport continues to evolve,” it began, “we are encountering new and increasingly complex situations that challenge us and where additional clarity is needed.” To review: The complex situation was poop. The clarity needed was whether you should be allowed to compete while covered in it. Hyrox conceded that its “clear biocontaminant and medical procedures” had “become blurred”—an obtuse way to say that, following the incident, turf was ripped off the floor in a nuclear-level disinfecting effort, and race participants wondered if they’d inadvertently caught norovirus.For the uninitiated, Hyrox is a hybrid fitness race that alternates eight 1-kilometer runs with eight grueling functional-fitness stations—things like pushing a heavy sled, rowing, lunging with a sandbag, and repeatedly hurling a medicine ball at a target. Last season, 1.4 million people participated worldwide.Twenty-two-year-old Wietrzyk is very, very good at Hyrox. She holds the Women’s Pro world record, swept all four Elite 15 Majors last season and is one of the sport’s biggest stars with almost 100,000 followers on Instagram. Favored to win the Hyrox World Championships in Stockholm in June, Wietrzyk was strikingly composed during the race, exhibiting zero theatrics, signs of physical stress, or bravado—not even when American Alyssa McElheny overtook her in a stunning upset. This weekend in Beijing, she won the Women’s Pro race in 1:01:23 while covered in her own excrement. This is a woman who knows how to lock in.As demonstrated by the weekend’s events, pooping during endurance sports is gross, unfortunate, and yet hardly unprecedented. Marathoners and triathletes know this. An athlete might be jet-lagged from traveling halfway around the world, eat something unfamiliar, get slammed with race-day nerves or, you know, actually be sick. Add the physical stress of racing at an elite level and you can understand why the digestive system might stage a revolt. Shit happens. But the issue is that Hyrox has grown into a massive business without growing up. The judges hovering over every rep? Volunteers with no playbook when something goes sideways.Whatever happened with her stomach in Beijing (some reports claim she had food poisoning), photos and videos circulating online show brown liquid covering the back of her black racing shorts and running down Wietrzyk’s legs as the judges looked on. In fact, they were tucked up in her business making sure every rep was clean. What’s striking, analyzing the footage, is how unbothered everyone is. Judges hover at her elbow counting reps. Other athletes lunge past. The race photographers, by some accounts, simply found new angles. The whole time, the entire Hyrox staff watching, not one person stopped her.The irony of their inaction is that Hyrox is a sport with a Bible-big rule book. Judges are notoriously aggressive about enforcing all of them. Every competitor has to execute each movement to a precise standard. During the burpee broad jump, for example, both feet must be parallel at takeoff and landing. Get it wrong once and you get a warning; do it again and you’re docked with a red card and a 15-second penalty.And the rules extend well beyond reps. Spit or clear your nose onto the floor? It’ll cost you a two-minute penalty. Toss your paper cup anywhere but a designated bin? Two-minute penalty. Pour aid-station water over your head to cool yourself down? Also two minutes, because Hyrox considers the resulting puddle a slip hazard. And yet there was no protocol for what happened with Wietrzyk. An athlete can have fecal matter running down her legs while engaging with competition equipment that hundreds of other people will use and was simply an “increasingly complex situation.”To be fair, this is less the fault of Wietrzyk and more that of the environment she was placed in. She was in the middle of a professional race. Hyrox is her job; race results, prize money, and sponsorships matter. (Though it’s unclear how clothing and sneaker sponsor Puma feels about now being the name of a…tainted victory.) And unlike a road race, where portable toilets dot the way, there is no such thing on a Hyrox course. A participant who suddenly needs a bathroom is shit out of luck. When an athlete is wired to keep going, the onus falls on race officials, and one should’ve stepped in to say: My friend, that’s enough Hyrox for today. (From a safe distance.)That nobody did says less about the judges in Beijing than about the company that put them there. Hyrox has spent the past decade signing up everyone it can; it has not used the profits to figure out how to protect those same participants on the course. Hyrox is simultaneously trying to become a legitimate professional sport and an enormous mass-participation fitness event. The elites race for money, sponsors, and livelihoods. Then thousands of regular people stream through the same venues, grabbing SkiErg and rowing handles, pushing and pulling sleds, carrying kettlebells and throwing wall balls. When I raced a Hyrox in New York in May, I had to hold back my disgust when I picked up a sandbag that felt moist with sweat. Friends who competed in the event later that day told me how lucky I was to race early, before the equipment became, in their words, soupy.As of now, however, the organization is only drawing the line at fecal matter. Per the aforementioned Hyrox statement, the company is now reviewing its procedures to prevent another literal shit show.Hyrox has spent the past few years insisting it’s not CrossFit. Poopgate reveals the two have more in common than Hyrox would like to admit: a cultlike masochism that celebrates pushing through pain, and a feisty, social-media-savvy congregation with strong opinions. The sport has Olympic dreams, a splashy new Amazon partnership and, last week, announced an investment that values the company at roughly $690 million. This is a very big, very serious business. If the organization can do all of that, and dictate exactly how you carry a sandbag on your shoulders, surely it can find a way to ensure participants don’t get cholera from using the course equipment.