Man Leaves Girlfriend Behind To Continue Competing At Fitness Event After She Passes Out
Is winning a competition really this serious?
djile | Shutterstock All for one and one for all? Not for the internet's latest villain, an Australian man who allegedly left his girlfriend in his dust at a recent fitness competition. But he didn't just best her in the match, he left her collapsed and in need of medical attention while he continued competing for his title. Suffice to say, the incident has the internet furious, but those claiming to be the ones involved are telling a different story.
A man continued competing in a fitness event after his girlfriend passed out.
It all went down at Sydney, Australia's recent competition for HYROX, the fitness craze that combines an 8 km run with 8 functional workout moves like sandbag lunges or burpees. Participants, who can compete solo, in pairs, or teams, run 1 km followed by one functional workout move, repeated eight times in a circuit, one right after the other.
So, you know, it's not for the faint of heart. It's a grueling competition, which is why a young woman collapsed in the middle of Sydney's recent bout. Her teammate and boyfriend, on the other hand, kept right on trucking, to the shock of onlookers, including one named Aaron Boundy who caught the whole thing on camera.
When she collapsed, the man allegedly asked if he could compete without her.
To say that Boundy was shocked by what he saw is an understatement. "That guy’s girl just fainted and like full hit the deck, she’s unresponsive," Boundy said in his video, which showed the man running off to the next station while his girlfriend hit the floor.
He continued doing wall balls, one of HYROX's eight functional exercises, while his girlfriend reportedly lay on the ground twitching, and paramedics had to be called. "He’s left her there … what a piece of [expletive]," Boundy said. "I think I’ve just witnessed one of the worst things in my life."
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He went on to say that when paramedics arrived, they placed barricades around the woman, indicating that her condition was serious. Nevertheless, her boyfriend was unfazed, and according to Boundy, he went so far as to ask a judge if he needed his girlfriend to join him in order to continue competing. When he was told he "technically" did not, off he went.
The video sparked outrage, but many have defended the man, including a woman claiming to be his girlfriend.
Boundy's video has understandably sparked outrage. "If we signed up as a couple, and he continued without me due to a medical emergency — especially being UNCONSCIOUS — he could continue the rest of his life without me too," one person wrote.
Others took the incident to be an indication of how the man really feels about his girlfriend. One commenter compared the situation to the well-known statistics showing that men tend to abandon their female partners when they're diagnosed with illnesses like cancer, for example.
Others who claimed to have been there have defended the man, however, and said the whole thing has been blown out of proportion. One competitor told Australia's news.com.au that "if it were me, I would have stayed with her, but I can also see why he finished it." Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the guy's actions, but fair enough?
But one woman online claiming to be the abandoned girlfriend in question said she is firmly on the man's side. "My first two questions to my partner when I came to was ‘Did you finish it for us, and what time did we get?’," the woman wrote in the comments of Boundy's video.
She went on to say that her boyfriend came right back to check on her, and that Boundy chose not to show that part in his video and instead chose to post his clip out of context.
Perhaps. But as another man who claimed to have been there put it, "I was a judge on Sunday, and let me tell you: Some people’s true colours come out under pressure." What is for certain is that with this incident, HYROX won't be shedding its reputation as a cultish approach to fitness any time soon.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
