Did this Olympic race walker poop himself?

The idea of racewalking may seem like a throwaway joke, but the 50k endurance event is no laughing matter. These athletes have to grind through a 31-mile, three-hour exercise, keeping one foot on the ground at all times and averaging about 6:30 per mile. And sometimes, there are additional obstacles.

Like, well,

That’s race walker Yohann Diniz. The French athlete took an early lead in the long distance event despite an apparent case of drama pipes. He had about 40 kilometers left to go at the time of the photo, but if he had a problem he wasn’t showing it. At the 20k split, he led the rest of the pack by nearly 90 seconds.

One Twitter user pointed out Diniz may not have actually soiled himself. A few minutes before the screenshots above, the French racer removed a sponge from his shorts to cool himself off.

But if Diniz really did exert himself to the max, he would hardly be the first endurance athlete to have that problem. Mikael Ekvall, the current Swedish record holder in the half marathon, famously crossed the finish line of a 2008 race in Goteborg covered in his own excrement. Uta Pippig won the 1996 Boston Marathon despite battling an awful case of diarrhea on the course. Dealing with intestinal issues is just another piece of the distance athlete’s puzzle.

Diniz had to finish his race walk with a mystery substance dripping from his shorts, and that may make him the butt of a few jokes on an otherwise slow morning of Olympic action.