A Win Is a Win

Imagine yourself as an athlete on the starting line. Perhaps you’re envisioning a track star or a gymnast mid-competition. Put yourself in that athlete’s shoes. You stand in an arena of coaches, family, and competitors. There’s a buzz in the air and … human feces on the track? This may sound implausible for any athlete to face, but the HYROX competition in Beijing proved otherwise.

HYROX is a standardized hybrid indoor athletic competition that combines running with intermittent workout stations. Participants run 1 kilometer, complete one workout station, and repeat this sequence eight times. On Sept. 12, 2026, Joanna Wietrzyk won the HYROX competition in Beijing, but not before suffering a bout of bowel incontinence. Although the crappy incident happened around station four of the HYROX sequence, she pressed on, completing four more stations … on shared equipment. Thousands of athletes followed closely behind, using the same contaminated sleds, rowers, sandbags, and track. Some runners were reportedly slipping on the contaminated course. Wietrzyk later posted a selfie of herself receiving an IV drip post-race, captioned “Go hard or go home” and “A win is a win.”

After her victory, the incident sparked mixed reactions. Some called Wietrzyk “brave” and “inspirational” for pushing through and finishing the race, while others think HYROX made a grave mistake in letting her continue, saying it posed a biohazard risk to other competitors. Within a week, after facing intense backlash, Wietrzyk apologized and forfeited her win. HYROX co-founder Moritz Fuerste also admitted that organizers should have stopped her.

The incident is an extreme and almost comical version of a mistake many of us make daily: treating a choice that offloads costs onto others as a virtue because it looks like resilience. Showing up sick. Pulling an all-nighter in a shared room. Driving tired. Doing it anyway.

The truth is, we have laid the groundwork for mistakes like this to be taken as inspirational feats of discipline and drive—a highlight reel of athletes pushing through pain and triumphing. We celebrate them for this “grit.”

In the 1996 Olympics, Kerri Strug vaulted on an injured ankle and became an instant American icon. In the 1997 NBA Finals, Michael Jordan scored 38 points while visibly ill from the flu. In 2013, Kobe Bryant tore his Achilles tendon mid-game against the Warriors, then stayed on the floor to shoot and sink both free throws before walking off. Today, fitness influencers like David Goggins sell the “no days off” mentality, where personal suffering is, to an extent, the point. HYROX is built on this “aesthetic” of pain and endurance, so “go hard or go home” was not a random caption; it embodied the mentality that the sport and its culture foster.

But look closely at that highlight reel: the price every hero pays is their own body. While this is certainly subject to separate critique, it represents a stark difference between the HYROX incident and the rest of these events. The best example is almost too perfect: Paula Radcliffe at the 2005 London Marathon stopped at the roadside to relieve herself mid-race, kept going, and won. People joked about it for years, but few critiqued it as selfish, because on an open road, the cost was hers alone. Although several outlets have compared the two incidents, they differ in one key way: Wietrzyk’s race happened in an enclosed arena with shared equipment. Both involved the same emergency and the same refusal to quit, but they reflected completely different ethics.

Some would argue that sports are solely about winning. Competition has one goal: reaching the finish line and taking home the trophy. It may not have been Wietrzyk’s job to stop herself; maybe someone else should have intervened. Athletes are simply playing by the rules; officials’ role is to enforce safety. Wietrzyk technically did not break a rule, and HYROX let her continue. Is it right to say she is in the wrong?

Elite sports often require obsession. From Kobe Bryant to Eileen Gu, athletes have affirmed and promoted the idea that obsession is the only way to be a champion. You cannot ask someone at their physical limit, mid-race, to run a cost-benefit analysis of how their actions might affect everyone else.

Several objections undermine this logic. HYROX likely had no rule against mid-race defecation because no one could have imagined needing one. “It wasn’t technically banned” is not a great defense for reframing biohazards as heroism. Wietrzyk’s own forfeit suggests she agreed.

A laser-focused approach to winning alone may undermine itself. A win can mean a lot under the right conditions. It can be argued that this was not the case in the HYROX incident. But while other athletes slipped on a contaminated course and used contaminated equipment, Wietrzyk’s choice likely contributed to hesitation or prevented other athletes from performing at their best, undermining the value of her win.

Grit is admirable when you are the only person absorbing its cost. Wietrzyk’s demonstration of the idealized trait came at the cost of the entire arena’s sanitation and safety. Most of us will never soil a rowing machine in front of a crowd, but Harvard runs on its own vision of “a win is a win.”

You show up sick to section because missing it feels weak, and your classmates catch your cold before midterms. You rewrite the group project at 3 a.m. because you “care about the grade,” and the group loses its input. You brag about four hours of sleep, and your “discipline” pressures everyone around you to make the same sacrifice. None of this makes you a great competitor. It makes you selfish.

Many students believe education is meant to prove they can shine above everyone else. With this mindset, they miss out on the advantages collaboration provides. Considering those around you does not make you a failure or a worse competitor. No one will judge you if you are absent due to illness. No one will judge you for needing to take a break. They will judge you when your “grit” becomes their burden.

Salma Gheith ’30 (salmagheith@college.harvard.edu) is comping the “Harvard Independent.”