Dutch Court Rules Worker Was Wrongly Fired for Running a Marathon on Sick Leave

A 3:27:58 marathon is a time most amateur runners would be happy to post on Strava. For one Dutch travel company employee it turned into evidence, and then into a legal fight with his employer that has now gone his way twice.

The Court of Appeal in The Hague ruled on Sept. 22 that online travel company Prijsvrij had no valid reason to fire the man on the spot after he ran the 2025 Rotterdam Marathon while on sick leave. Upholding a Rotterdam district court decision from last September, the judges left Prijsvrij to pay €50,000 ($56,000) in fair compensation plus statutory payments that take the total past €60,000, according to the published ruling. The case drew wide attention this week after Dutch broadcaster RTL Nieuws reported on it.

The employee, who is not named in the ruling, joined Prijsvrij on a one-year contract in July 2024. In December he developed sudden, serious problems with his vision and reported sick. Doctors suspected myasthenia gravis in January and confirmed it in February. The autoimmune disease weakens the voluntary muscles and often appears first in the eyes, as drooping eyelids or blurred and double vision, according to the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

At his first appointment with the company’s occupational physician on Jan. 3, 2025, he mentioned that he was running four times a week and training for a marathon, and the doctor noted it in his file. Three days later Prijsvrij’s general counsel emailed him to say his wages would be suspended, a step the company eventually dropped. In March it hired the investigation firm Hoffmann Bedrijfsrecherche, whose staff photographed him on several days driving a child about 3.5 kilometers (2.2 miles) to school and doing the shopping. The court called the surveillance “een buitenproportionele maatregel,” a disproportionate measure, and found it intruded on his private and family life.

Despite some accounts this week, the ruling does not say the investigators watched him race. Their observations were the car journeys; the marathon only comes up later, in the letter that fired him.

He finished Rotterdam on April 13, 2025, in 3:27:58, placing 3,112th of 17,843 runners and inside the top 18% of the field. That is more than an hour quicker than the global average marathon time and well inside what most coaches would call a good marathon time for an amateur. Two days later Prijsvrij dismissed him with immediate effect, arguing that the race and the driving showed he had misled the company about how sick he was.

The appeals court threw out every ground. The judges accepted that a run like that would make any employer wonder, but found no proof that he had deceived anyone, since he had told the company doctor about his training at the very first consultation. When Prijsvrij later moved his case to a different occupational physician without passing that on, the court put the gap on the company. “Prijsvrij, die hier kennelijk zwaar aan tilde, had de bedrijfsarts hierover zelf kunnen informeren,” the judges wrote, meaning that a company so bothered by the running could have told the doctor itself.

His contract was due to end on June 30, 2025, and the court put the income he actually lost over those last months at just €4,550 ($5,100). The €50,000 reflects something else: the court’s finding that Prijsvrij acted seriously culpably, the stress it caused a man in the early months of a chronic illness, the harm to his job prospects, and the need for a figure with some deterrent weight. On top of it come €8,250 ($9,300) for the improper termination, a €1,820.42 ($2,000) transition payment, his wages for the first half of April, and €4,421 ($5,000) toward his costs on appeal. He had cross-appealed for €70,000 ($78,600) and did not get it.

A district judge in Tilburg reached the opposite verdict on Sept. 2, in a case that turned on what the employee had said beforehand. A part-time sales assistant off work with glandular fever had told her manager by WhatsApp that small efforts tired her and that she slept for much of the day. Two weeks later she raced a Hyrox. When confronted, she offered little more than the view that exercise is good for you, and the judge upheld her summary dismissal, finding the contradiction had broken her employer’s trust. She left with a €877.50 ($985) transition payment and no fair compensation.