You cannot scenario-plan every crisis. The better goal is to build an organization capable of making a defensible decision when something happens that nobody thought to put in the plan.
Crises rarely arrive how you practiced.
You can build the plan, identify the team, establish escalation protocols, and rehearse the scenarios most likely to go wrong. All of that matters.
But the real test comes when something happens that doesn’t fit neatly into any of those boxes, and someone has to decide what to do anyway.
That is what makes the recent HYROX incident in Beijing so interesting. Not because it was bizarre, although it certainly was, but because it exposed the gap between having procedures and being ready to make a judgment when the procedures don’t provide an obvious answer.
At HYROX Beijing, Australian athlete Joanna Wietrzyk was competing in the Pro Women’s race when she experienced bowel incontinence mid-race.
She kept going!
Officials allowed her to continue as she moved through shared equipment and workout stations, finished the race, and won her division. Within hours, images and video were circulating online, and what should have been a story about elite athletic performance had become something very different: a debate about hygiene, athlete welfare, competitive fairness, event safety, and whether officials should have stepped in.
I’m reasonably confident nobody opened the HYROX crisis plan that morning and found a section titled, “What to do when a world champion soils herself and keeps racing.”
But that’s exactly why this matters. The incident didn’t fit neatly into one obvious category. It was simultaneously a medical issue, an operational issue, a sanitation issue, an athlete-welfare issue, and, very quickly, a reputation issue.
That is much closer to how real crises unfold
They rarely present themselves with a helpful label telling everyone which procedure to follow. They overlap, evolve, and force people to interpret what is happening while it is still happening.
HYROX’s challenge wasn’t simply that something unusual occurred. The more important question is what happens when an organization has procedures for the individual pieces of a situation, but reality combines those pieces in a way nobody anticipated.
It would be easy to look at what happened in Beijing and conclude that HYROX simply didn’t have a plan for something like this.
But that’s not quite what happened.
In its response, HYROX said it had clear bio-contaminant and medical procedures in place. The problem, according to the organization, was that the circumstances blurred protocols designed for elite competition and mass participation, creating ambiguity in how they were applied and understood.
That distinction matters. A lot.
HYROX wasn’t necessarily missing a rule. The organization ran into the much harder problem of deciding which rules applied, how they interacted, and who should act when the situation didn’t fit cleanly (pun not intended) into any one of them.
That is where a crisis plan stops being a document and crisis readiness becomes an operating model.
The manual can establish responsibilities, escalation paths, procedures, and thresholds. But eventually, someone has to interpret what is happening in front of them and make a call.
Sometimes that decision will be obvious, and sometimes, as Beijing demonstrated, it won’t be.
As much as you may want, you cannot scenario-plan your way out of every crisis. The real test of crisis readiness is whether your people have the authority, priorities, and judgment to make a good decision when reality produces something your plan never anticipated.
Because the most dangerous moment may not be when there is no procedure. It may be when there are several procedures, and nobody is entirely sure which one wins.
This is where crisis readiness gets uncomfortable.
A plan can tell you who is on the crisis team, when something should be escalated, who speaks publicly, which stakeholders need to hear from you, and what procedures exist for known risks.
What it cannot do is make every judgment call for you.
In Beijing, there are questions we simply cannot answer from the outside. Who had the authority to stop the race? Did that person know they had it? What threshold would have triggered intervention? How were athlete welfare, sanitation, and competitive integrity prioritized? And when multiple protocols applied, who was responsible for deciding which one took precedence?
Those are not accusations; they are the questions every organization should be asking about its own crisis system.
Let’s face it, this is going to be a great case study some day.
And they become even more important as an organization grows.
HYROX has grown from a relatively niche fitness competition into a global brand with more than 100 events and roughly 1.4 million participants in its most recent season.
That kind of growth brings enormous opportunity. It also brings more venues, more markets, more partners, more frontline employees, and a lot more moments when someone far from headquarters has to make a judgment call.
Operational systems have to scale as quickly as the brand does.
Because the bigger and more complex an organization becomes, the less realistic it is to believe every important decision will make its way neatly up the chain.
A crisis plan tells people what should happen. Crisis readiness determines whether they can make the right call when the plan stops giving them an obvious answer.
By the time HYROX responded publicly, the communications problem was already well underway.
Video was circulating, competitors were talking, questions about sanitation and athlete welfare were spreading, officials were being criticized, and Wietrzyk herself was becoming the target of abuse.
And let’s not get started on how the media coverage followed quickly.
None of that started with a press release. It started with decisions made on the competition floor.
That is important because organizations still have a bad habit of treating communications as the function responsible for explaining what happened after the important decisions have already been made.
But some of the most consequential communications decisions are made by people who do not work in communications. The race official deciding whether to intervene. The medical professional assessing risk. The event manager determining whether equipment remains in use. The person deciding whether something gets escalated or handled locally.
Each decision shapes the story stakeholders will eventually see. That is why crisis communications cannot begin when someone says, “We need a statement.”
It has to begin much earlier, by helping the organization define what matters most under pressure: which issues require escalation, who has decision-making authority, what information needs to move quickly, and where reputational risk intersects with operational risk.
This is also where trust comes back into the equation.
You cannot communicate your way around a bad operational decision after the fact. You can explain it, acknowledge it, and correct it.
But the strongest crisis communication usually starts with making a decision you can credibly defend before anyone asks you to defend it.
Let’s give credit where credit is due. HYROX did a really good job with some of this. In fact, its response after the incident did several things organizations often struggle to do in a crisis.
HYROX acknowledged that the situation exposed ambiguity in how its existing protocols were applied. It didn’t pretend the criticism was simply an overreaction. HYROX China also said affected areas were isolated and disinfected, equipment was removed, waste was disposed of, and flooring would be replaced.
That matters because effective crisis communication has to do more than say, “We take this seriously.” It has to show what changed, and show it in as many ways as possible.
There is another important distinction here, too. HYROX could accept responsibility for how the event was managed without making Wietrzyk the villain.
That is harder than it sounds.
When a crisis becomes public, organizations are often tempted to protect themselves by creating distance from the person at the center of it. We’ve all seen it happen where someone else becomes the explanation.
But accountability and protection are not mutually exclusive.
An organization can say, “We should have handled this differently,” while also saying, “The individual involved does not deserve harassment or abuse.”
The lesson is not that a strong statement erases what happened before it. It is that when the initial response falls short, the next move should create clarity, demonstrate action, and take responsibility without unnecessarily sacrificing the person standing in the middle of the story.
Don’t think the lesson is to add “unexpected bodily-fluid incident” to your crisis plan. Please don’t…or if you do, send me a copy!
The lesson is to build a crisis system that can still function when the situation in front of you looks nothing like the one you rehearsed.
That starts with a few very practical questions:
Who can make the call?
When something does not fit neatly into the plan, people need to know who has the authority to act without waiting for six layers of approval.
What takes priority?
Safety? People? Business continuity? Reputation? Competitive integrity? Those priorities need to be clear before the pressure starts.
How quickly can something unusual escalate?
Frontline teams should know what requires immediate escalation and what can be handled locally. In a world where video can travel globally in minutes, hesitation creates its own risk.
Can your people exercise judgment without a script?
Scenario exercises should not always have a clean answer. Sometimes the best training puts teams in a situation where two imperfect choices exist and forces them to decide.
That is much closer to the real thing. You will never write a crisis plan thick enough to anticipate everything that can happen to your organization.
And you shouldn’t try.
The goal is not to predict every crisis. It is to build an organization capable of recognizing what matters, escalating quickly, and making a defensible decision when there is no page telling people exactly what to do.
I’ve argued that you cannot manufacture trust after a crisis begins.
The same is true of judgment. You either build the conditions for good decisions before the pressure arrives, or you hope people figure it out while everyone is watching.
Because eventually, something will happen that is not in the plan.
