We Noticed: HYROX Diarrhea Disaster, T100 French Riviera Preview and More

The global uproar over the HYROX athlete, Joanna Wietrzyk, hasn’t abated since the Australian won an event in Beijing last week while diarrhea was running down her legs. Initially Wietrzyk posted on Instagram “Go hard or go home … a win is a win,” after the event, but would later delete the post. Yesterday she apologized for continuing with the event, and has withdrawn her name from the results.

“I want to offer my sincere apology to the people of China, my fellow competitors, the spectators and the HYROX organizers for what happened during the race in Beijing,” Wietrzyk wrote. “Looking back, I regret the decision to not have stepped off the track I recognize that I should have made a different choice.”

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While triathletes and marathon runners might have seen similar situations in events before, the graphic images from last week’s HYROX competition in Beijing have gone viral. Wietrzyk continued to compete using equipment other competitors would compete on, including ropes, rowing machines and medicine balls, while also competing on a shared indoor track. Athletes have described having to use the same faces-covered equipment, while there’s also been reports of athletes slipping on faces on the track. HYROX China announced on Wednesday that it was offering refunds to at least 1,000 affected athletes. The intense backlash also prompted HYROX officials to update the global rule book, which had already listed penalties for spitting or clearing nostrils, to ensure that similar situations didn’t happen again.

Numerous outlets have reported that Wietrzyk’s sponsor, Puma, has removed any references to her apparel on its site, which appears to be the case today – the link to “Joanna Wietrzyk x PUMA | HYROX Performance Gear” goes to a general PUMA x HYROX landing page.

Wietrzyk was one of the biggest names in HYROX racing, having won all four Elite 15 Major titles this year and setting the HYROX Women’s Solo Pro world record (54:25) in Warsaw in April.

Wilde Leads the Way to T100 French Riviera

Fresh off his IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship last weekend, Hayden Wilde will arrive as the favourite for tomorrow’s EKOÏ French Riviera T100. Things will get started at Base Nature Place in Saint-Raphaël and Fréjus, roughly 30 minutes up the coast from Nice. The race tomorrow is men’s only, following the women’s race in Vancouver last month. Wilde currently leads the T100 tour and is the defending champion.

“I want to try and get some early points on the board and then I can go to the race in Saudi and try and switch that third place [from the T100 San Francisco Triathlon] into a first place as well,” Wilde said earlier this week. “So there’s many things that could reap the rewards after this race. I want to come back here and try and get that top step again. I think I just have to play my cards right and just be patient again.”

Last year just 22 seconds separated Wilde from runner-up Jelle Geens, who finished third in Nice. This will be Geens’ first T100 race after recovering from an injury for much of the year. Others to keep an eye on include Rico Bogen (the San Francisco winner), his countryman Lasse Nygaard Priester, American Morgan Pearson and Jake Birtwhistle, who currently sits second in the T100 standings.

Here’s the full list of competitors in tomorrow’s race:

The race coverage starts at 8 am local time (2 am EST). You can watch the show life on the PTO’s YouTube page for viewers outside Europe, or on TriathlonLive.io.

News We Missed While We Were Busy in Nice

• Dorian Coninx (FRA) and Georgia Taylor-Brown (GBR) won last weekend’s World Triathlon Championship Series race in Karlovy Vary. Coninx finished 10 seconds up on Alex Yee (GBR), while Taylor-Brown hit the finish line 36-seconds up on Taylor Spivey (USA), with reigning world champion Lisa Tertsch (GER) almost 90 seconds behind the Brit. You can see full results here.
• Sam Laidlow (FRA) won Challenge Samarkand despite walking for a bit on the run crossing the line in 3:34:57 ahead of Emil Holm (DEN) and Will Draper (GBR). Australia’s Natalie Van Coevorden took the women’s title in 3:58:41 ahead of Daisy Davies (GBR) and Sara Pérez Sala (ESP).
• Dutch athletes Milan Brons (7:37:00) and Kyra Meulenberg (8:42:07) won Challenge Almere last weekend. Results can be found here.
• Nikki Bartlett (GBR) won IRONMAN Wales for the second time last weekend, overcoming the challenging conditions (described as torrential rain – in other words, a normal Sunday in Tenby) to finish in 9:45:37 with Diede Diederiks taking second in 10:07:15 and Lea Riccoboni (FRA) rounding out the podium. Henrik Goesch (FIN) took the men’s race in 8:31:31, ahead of Germany’s Michiel Stockman (8:33:49) and Mitch Wiseman’s (NED), who rounded out the podium in 8:43:43.
• Hannah Berry (NZL) won IRONMAN 70.3 Sunshine Coast in 4:05:33 ahead of Aussies Emily Watts and Charlotte McShane. Trent Thorpe (3:42:33) added another Kiwi win to the day’s racing ahead of Aussies Caleb Noble and Mitchell Kibby.

Knokke-Heist to Host Full-Distance IRONMAN

After three years of hosting a 70.3 race, the first full-distance IRONMAN race in Belgium will take place in Knokke-Heist next year. According to IRONMAN, Belgium is the fourth-biggest nation by participation in Europe this year.

The new race will take place on September 5, 2027.

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