Hunter Woodhall broke the tape first in the T62 400m at the USATF Para Championships on Friday, clocking 46.43 seconds. He barely had time to celebrate before he knew what was coming next to his name on the scoreboard.

The issue traced back to a foam block Woodhall places under one hand at the start, an adaptive aid that helps him generate more force out of the blocks. Officials ruled it fell under World Para Athletics Rule 7.3(c), which bars mechanical aids on the starting line, and disqualified him from the race he’d just won.

What frustrated Woodhall most was the timing. He’d used the same block during Thursday’s preliminary round without issue, and earlier this season at the Prefontaine Classic’s Para 100m, also without penalty. This time, officials warned him less than an hour before Friday’s final that using it again would mean disqualification.

He raced anyway. Woodhall said he’d gone through the World Para Athletics rulebook himself beforehand and found nothing that explicitly prohibited the block. Officials told him that because the rulebook didn’t specifically allow it either, they were treating it as banned. Rather than change his start with no notice, he lined up as planned.

“I believe you gotta fight for what you think is right,” he said. “I think what they did here was wrong.”

He believes the rule exists because of him specifically.

“This rule was instituted for Hunter, and I’m not exaggerating,” he said. “There’s nothing in the rulebook that says you can’t.”

For Woodhall, the bigger issue is how the sport treats adaptive athletes trying to innovate. He argues it should be helping athletes find safer, more effective ways to compete rather than punishing solutions the rulebook hasn’t caught up to. “They deal with enough stuff day-to-day. They don’t need to deal with more stuff,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. This is ridiculous.”

He plans to formally protest the disqualification, not to have the win reinstated since USATF let him keep the medal regardless, but to force clarity on the rule itself. He has no plans to stop using the foam block until that happens, even if it risks another DQ.

The fallout didn’t stop with Woodhall himself. USATF put out its own account of what happened, and it showed just how far the ripple effects reached.

What did USATF say on Hunter Woodhall’s disqualification?

USATF’s statement, read aloud during Peacock’s broadcast, said the foam block wasn’t “approved for competition” and that World Para Athletics had warned the result couldn’t stand if Woodhall used it, leaving officials with no room to maneuver. “Of course, this is never the outcome we want for any athlete who has worked hard to get to this stage,” the statement read, adding that USATF recognized how disappointing it was for Woodhall’s fans and would work with athletes to clarify equipment rules going forward.

Woodhall called the whole episode “a bad look” and said it’s made him question whether coming back to USATF Para Championships is worth it. The fallout reached his wife too. Standing beside him in the mixed media zone, Olympic long jump champion Tara Davis-Woodhall mouthed, “I’m not competing,” a sign the controversy had shaken her own plans for the rest of the meet.

Woodhall is also entered in the Para 100m later this weekend at the same championships, where the same question is bound to come up again: whether he lines up with the foam block once more, and whether officials let the result stand this time.