Audrey Werro of Switzerland won the women's 800 metres at the Lausanne Diamond League on 21 August, clocking 1:55.33 to break Keely Hodgkinson's 2025 meeting record of 1:55.69. The 22-year-old has not lost an 800m final outdoors since March, and Saturday's win at the Stade Olympique de la Pontaise extended that streak to six months.
Femke Broeders-Bol pushed her the whole way, closing hard down the home straight to finish second in 1:55.41 — a Dutch national record that lowered Ellen van Langen's long-standing mark for the second time in eight days. Broeders-Bol, the reigning world champion over 400m hurdles who moved to the 800m this year after her March wedding to Belgian pole vaulter Ben Broeders, had already equalled that record a week earlier at the European Championships in Birmingham, where Werro beat Hodgkinson for the continental title in a championship-record 1:54.81, with Hodgkinson taking silver in 1:54.01.
Ethiopia's Saida Tsehaye took third in Lausanne with a personal best of 1:56.92. World champion Lilian Odira, who returned after a break from Diamond League competition to take Commonwealth Games silver in Glasgow, finished seventh — more than a second and a half behind Werro.
Four of the world's top five times
Werro now owns four of the five fastest 800m times run anywhere this year, including the only two sub-1:54 clockings since Jarmila Kratochvílová set the still-standing world record of 1:53.28 in the early 1980s. Werro ran 1:53.98 to win in Stockholm earlier in the season, then lowered her own Swiss national record to 1:53.80 in Paris. That places her second in the current world rankings, behind only the athletes she has spent the season beating.
Born in Courtepin, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland's canton of Fribourg, Werro competes for CA Belfaux under coach Christiane Berset Nuoffer. She is also the reigning World Indoor Championships silver medallist and was named European Athletics' Women's Rising Star for 2025 before this year's move into the senior ranks. Her results in 2026 — Stockholm, Paris, Birmingham and now Lausanne — have come against the same small group of rivals in successive races, without a single loss among them.
Zurich next
The Diamond League moves to Zurich next week, where Werro is scheduled to face Hodgkinson, Broeders-Bol, Odira and Britain's Georgia Hunter Bell in the same field for the first time since the European Championships. Broeders-Bol made her 800m debut in February in Metz, running a Dutch indoor record of 1:59.07 in her first serious race over the distance. Lausanne's two-day meeting, known as Athletissima, closed on 21 August with the women's 4x100m relay, won by the Swiss national team.