Werro Shocks Hodgkinson With Third Fastest Women's 800m in History at Stockholm Diamond League

Audrey Werro walked into Stockholm's Bauhaus-Galan Diamond League meet on Sunday June 7 as a promising 22-year-old Swiss runner with a personal best of 1:55.91, and she left it as the third fastest woman in the history of the 800 metres, having just beaten the reigning Olympic champion in a race that left everyone watching it struggling to find the right words immediately afterwards.

However Werro finished first in 1:53.98, a time so fast that the last woman to run quicker was Jarmila Kratochvilova who set the world record of 1:53.28 way back in 1983, meaning the 22-year-old Swiss runner had just become the first woman in 43 years to break through the 1:54 barrier, which is one of those athletic milestones that sounds impossible until someone actually goes and does it on a Sunday afternoon in front of a full crowd and also Hodgkinson ran 1:54.33 behind her, which was a new British record and the single fastest losing time any woman has ever run in the 800 metres in the history of the event, and those two numbers together put both athletes among the six quickest performances ever recorded over the distance going back to whenever women started racing seriously at this level.

The race had looked like Hodgkinson's to win after she moved past Werro with 300 metres left and stretched the gap, but Werro had kept something back and came storming through in the final straight to get to the line first while the Stockholm crowd reacted in the way crowds do when they understand they are watching history being made.

As America's Roisin Willis ran a personal best of 1:57.56 to finish third, a full three seconds back from the leading two, which tells its own story about how far ahead of the field Werro and Hodgkinson were operating that day.

After the race Hodgkinson said watching Werro push her to a time she had never run before was something she genuinely respected, though she made clear she had no intention of letting the same thing happen again, with her focus now on a world record attempt in London next month where she wants Werro in the race alongside her to help drive the pace.

Sportscape feels that the two athletes aged 22 and 24 running the third and sixth fastest times in the entire history of the women's 800 metres on the same afternoon in Sweden is the kind of thing that only happens when two genuinely exceptional athletes find each other at exactly the right moment in their careers, and the European Championships rematch coming in Birmingham in August is already the single most anticipated individual athletics contest remaining in 2026 and given what both women showed in Stockholm, it has every chance of being even better than Sunday was.