Running Had the Hyrox Problem in June and the Winner Explained Why He Kept Going

Hyrox has spent the week apologizing. Joanna Wietrzyk won the Beijing race last weekend after losing control of her bowels and carrying on, and within days the organization had written a contamination clause into section 12.3 of its rulebook, letting a race director withdraw an athlete on medical grounds. Since then she has posted a selfie from what appears to be a hospital bed, captioned “Go hard or go home … a win is a win,” and deleted it. Her win is still on the leaderboard.

Almost all of the argument since has been about whether an official should have stopped her. A runner answered that question on television in June, about his own race, and nobody this week has quoted him.

George Kusche won the 99th Comrades Marathon on June 14, the 50th running of the up course, 86K from Durban to Pietermaritzburg with around 1,750 meters of climbing in it. He ran 5:15:56 and took nearly nine minutes off a record Leonid Shvetsov had held since 2008. TimesLIVE mentioned a stomach upset and left it there. IOL was blunter, reporting that he had lost control of his bowels in the closing stages and that it showed, and photographs from the finish went around South African social media afterwards.

Kusche did not use the word either when SABC News asked him about it the next day, but he did not dodge it. “It’s not something you do out of your own free will,” he said. Stopping “wasn’t an option in my opinion.” He turned it back on the interviewer: “Would it have helped to stop, and what would I have done when I stopped?”

His reason had nothing to do with hygiene or rules. “Stopping would have been disrespectful to my family and to myself for all the work I’ve put in,” he said. “I guess I made the best of a very bad situation. At least I walk away with a win.”

The win was worth R2,322,000 (about $143,000). The race publishes the breakdown: R925,000 (about $57,000) for first place, R242,000 (about $15,000) for the first South African home, R605,000 (about $37,000) for the up-run record and R550,000 (about $34,000) for the fastest average pace. Piet Wiersma, who came in 3:40 behind, took R464,000 (about $28,500). Asked about the money later in the same interview, Kusche talked about the race rather than himself, saying it showed how far Comrades had come from the days when it had no prize money and not even hydration stations.

That is what any rule like section 12.3 runs into. A man 80K into the best race of his life, with a record in front of him and about R1,858,000 (some $114,000) between first and second, is not going to take himself out, and Kusche said so plainly. The clause only does anything if somebody else applies it, over the objection of the person it is being applied to. Hyrox discovered that in Beijing when nobody did.

Running has never had to make that call. There is no sled on the N3 that the next runner has to touch, no wall-ball target waiting for another wave, no arena floor to pull up. Kusche finished, collected and went home, and the only person who had to live with his race was him.