Should Road Races Copy Hyrox’s New Rule on Athletes Who Soil the Course?

Joanna Wietrzyk, the 24-year-old Australian who holds the Hyrox women’s world record, lost control of her bowels partway through the race in Beijing last weekend and finished it anyway, through the burpee broad jumps and the lunges and the wall balls, on equipment the next wave of athletes would use after her. She won in 1:01:23, and nobody on the floor stopped her.

Within days Hyrox had rewritten its rulebook. Section 12.3 of the singles rulebook now says that “if a racer’s blood, vomit, urine, or faeces poses a welfare or contamination risk to the racer or to other racers, a Race Director may withdraw the racer from the race on medical grounds.” Anyone removed that way is marked DNF. Moritz Fuerste, who co-founded the sport, told ABC News that Hyrox “made a mistake by not reacting immediately during the race.”

That got us wondering why nothing like that clause exists in road racing, but the reason is on the course map. A Hyrox race is eight 1K runs threaded between eight stations that every wave of athletes shares. A marathon is a public road with toilets along it. London puts them at the start, at every mile from Mile 1 to Mile 24, and at the finish, which gives a runner in trouble two dozen chances to deal with it and leaves nothing behind for anybody else to touch.

The power to stop a runner is there regardless. Clause 5.1 of the London Marathon’s conditions of entry lets the organizer ask somebody to stop if it believes they are “unfit to participate in the Event due to: the consumption or use of alcohol or drugs; an injury or illness,” or if carrying on “may cause injury to You or another participant.” That is broader than what Hyrox has just written, and it already covers this. What no road race has done is name one bodily failure as the reason.

None of them has gone looking for a reason to use it either. Uta Pippig took the 1996 Boston Marathon in 2:27:12 while suffering what was later identified as ischemic colitis, roughly 200 meters down on Tegla Loroupe with three miles to run and past her by Kenmore Square. “I felt not nice. I was thinking several times to drop out because it hurt so much,” she told the Associated Press that afternoon. Nine years later Paula Radcliffe pulled up at the side of the road four miles from the end of the London Marathon, lost only about 15 seconds, and ran 2:17:42. She wanted, she said afterward, “to apologise to the nation.” Both results stood without a question being asked.

The numbers are the reason nobody wants to open that door. Estimates of gastrointestinal symptoms among distance runners range from 30 to 90 percent depending on which study you read, and it gets worse the longer the race goes: one review in Sports Medicine puts severe distress at around 4 percent in marathon running and 32 percent in Ironman, with figures between 37 and 89 percent in ultras of 67 to 161K. An official who removed every runner whose gut failed would be removing a serious share of the field, and most of them would have finished perfectly well. In ultras, where the numbers run highest, he would barely have a race left.

The verb in section 12.3 is only “may,” which leaves the next call where the last one sat, with whoever is standing in the arena while the clock runs and a world record holder is on the floor in front of him. Wietrzyk has not commented. Hyrox has said it will ban users who abuse her online.