Joanna Wietrzyk Has Retroactively Withdrawn From the Hyrox Race She Won in Beijing

Joanna Wietrzyk’s bowels failed partway through the Hyrox race in Beijing on Sept. 12. She finished the remaining stations and won by 45 seconds. Most of what followed has been covered here, including the clause Hyrox wrote into its rulebook within days and the refunds it sent to six hours of the Beijing field. Wietrzyk herself had said nothing about any of it. On Thursday she posted a three-slide statement to Instagram. She is giving the race back.

“On reflection, I have decided to retroactively withdraw from the race and forfeit the points I earned,” she wrote on the last slide. The apology ahead of it is addressed to “the people of China, my fellow competitors, the spectators and the HYROX organizers.” She wrote that she “felt completely fit and healthy at the start of the race, with no reason to expect any illness,” that she regrets not leaving the course and recognizes she “should have made a different choice.” She added: “I take responsibility for my decision to continue and am deeply sorry for the discomfort and disruption it caused.”

Her only public comment before Thursday was an Instagram story she has since deleted, in which, as The Tab rendered it, she wrote “Go hard or go home … a win is a win” and thanked people for their support.

A win at a standard pro race is worth 105 points toward Elite 15 qualification, where an athlete’s best five singles results across a rolling 365 days make her total. Forfeiting Beijing takes those points out and frees one of the five scoring lines for another race to fill. Wietrzyk raced Beijing in the pro women’s 16 to 24 category, and her fastest singles race, 54:25, came in Warsaw in April.

The result itself has not moved. On Thursday the independent database Hyresult still had Wietrzyk first in 1:01:23, ahead of reigning world champion Alyssa McElheny in 1:02:08, with no DNF or withdrawal against her name. Hyrox has not said whether it will amend the official result, and the clause added to section 12.3 of its singles rulebook after the race offers no route to one. It lets a race director end an athlete’s race on medical grounds where “blood, vomit, urine, or faeces poses a welfare or contamination risk,” and log a DNF. In Beijing no official made that call.

“HYROX made a mistake by not reacting immediately during the race,” co-founder Moritz Fürste wrote in a statement posted to Instagram and reported by ABC News. “In the end it is my job to foresee these potential incidents,” he added, “and I did not.” Hyrox World, in a statement on Monday, said “protocols designed for elite competition and mass participation became blurred” in Beijing, and said it would bar for life anyone it traced to the abuse aimed at athletes. Hyrox China told entrants this week that it “failed to promptly remove the involved athlete from the track.” No official has been named and none has stood down.

The page for Wietrzyk’s signature Puma collection now returns a 404, and the collaboration has gone from the company’s online store, a disappearance Newsweek also reported on Thursday. Puma has said nothing about the removal or about her contract, and nothing establishes it as a response to Beijing rather than a routine change to the site. The company supplies Hyrox’s official sportswear and is title partner of the Hyrox World Championships on a deal running to 2030.

No comparable result in road running has been taken back, and shared equipment is most of the reason: a Hyrox field runs eight 1K legs in and out of eight stations the next wave will use. Paula Radcliffe stopped at the roadside during the 2005 London Marathon and won in 2:17:42. George Kusche won Comrades in June with much the same trouble, and kept the win.

Her coach, Chris Bayens, told Newsweek on Tuesday that discussion of what happened was legitimate but that “the hatred and personal attacks that have followed are not.” Wietrzyk thanked the people who had stood by her and said she would be taking time “to recover, reflect and look after myself and my family away from the noise.”