I confess that I had never heard of Hyrox — a hybrid fitness race that combines running with workout stations — until a couple of days ago. Neither had lots of other people, perhaps including you.
But I’ve definitely heard of Hyrox now, and I bet you have as well, because a Hyrox athlete named Joanna Wietrzyk — a 24-year-old Australian who’s the Hyrox women’s world record holder — has gone viral after she suffered an apparent bout of gastric distress and had literal excrement running down her legs while competing at an event in Beijing over the weekend. Or to put it another way, she suffered the ultimate uniform mishap.
Despite the obvious risks of cross-contamination, especially in a sport that has multiple athletes using communal equipment at shared workout stations, Wietrzyk was allowed to remain in the race (and ultimately won!). Hyrox officials initially praised her perseverance through adversity but then backtracked and said she should have been removed from the event once she became a walking biohazard. They’ve amended their rules accordingly.
As you might expect, this storyline has generated a lot of media coverage, which leads to a tricky question: What’s the best way to describe what happened to Wietrzyk? If you’re a magazine that’s allowed to publish profanity, like Rolling Stone, you can give your story a snarky headline like “This Hyrox Race Became a Literal Shitshow.” But what if you’re an ostensibly respectable news outlet that wants to describe a dirty situation without using dirty words?
Here’s how more than a dozen media operations answered that question while covering the Wietrzyk story, in roughly ascending order of explicitness: