Audrey Werro breaks European Championship record to beat Keely Hodgkinson to 800m gold

Swiss athlete Audrey Werro claimed her first senior international title by beating home favourite Keely Hodgkinson over 800m at the European Championships in Birmingham, England.

Werro, 22, won in a championship-record time of 1:54.81s, taking more than half a second off Olga Mineyeva’s championship record of 1:55.41s that had stood since 1982.

Hodgkinson, the defending European champion from 2024 and Olympic gold medallist, relinquished her continental crown, taking silver as she finished two tenths back on Werro (1:55.01s), while also going under Mineyeva’s 1982 record. Femke Broeders-Bol of the Netherlands tied her national record for bronze (1:55.54s).

The win owed to perfectly-executed tactics by Werro, who beat Hodgkinson, 24, for only the second time in their ninth meeting. The Briton ran the opening bend hard from lane five, vying to be first at the break point to get onto the rail. Werro started in lane nine because she had been advanced to the final after tripping in the semi-final. By 200m, the Swiss woman had caught up to Hodgkinson and took a lead that she never gave up.

“I had a lot of emotion in me. I’m really happy with this medal,” Werro said in an interview on the track.

They hit 400m in 56.45s and a breakaway group of four emerged, with Jemma Reekie tagging onto the trio of Werro, Hodgkinson and Broeders-Bol, who were in a race together for the very first time. This is Broeders-Bol’s debut 800m season after a glittering 400m hurdles career.

Werro showed superior speed endurance on the second lap with near-perfect 100m splits of 14.6s, 14.6s, 14.3 and 14.8s.

“One mistake and you’re lucky to recover,” he said. Werro, having slowed midway through the second lap in her semi-final — which caused the field to bunch and led to her foot clipping another runner — clearly learned from that. Between 500 and 600m, she made sure that Hodgkinson did not close the gap.

The British athlete’s efforts to rally on the home straight and chase Werro down were met with roars by a sold-out crowd of 23,000 at Alexander Stadium. She ran more than three seconds quicker than she had in the same final two years ago, and while Hodgkinson did not get the medal she wanted, taking silver means she continues her streak of medalling at every international championships — this is her 12th career podium.

(Sona Maleterova/Getty Images)

“I’m sure we’ll have many battles ahead, I’ll settle for silver,” Hodgkinson said in an on-track interview. This is a first defeat in a senior European final for the Briton, who had won four golds from as many finals indoors and outdoors, and and was vying to become the first to defend the title at two consecutive championships.

Werro, meanwhile, caps the best two-lap season by a woman since the turn of the century. In her first full season at senior level she produced the third, fourth and ninth-quickest times ever this year. The standout of those was the win over Hodgkinson at the Stockholm Diamond League in June, when she ran 1:53.80s — the best performance since the world record was set in 1983.

Having first competed against one another four years ago, six of the 10 races between Hodgkinson and Werro have had them as the top two. Hodgkinson is up 8-2 on the head-to-head, and they may meet again on the Diamond League circuit this summer, before a likely showdown at the World Ultimate Championships in Budapest in mid-September.