Nobody in athletics has developed quite like Audrey Werro over the past 12 months.

On Thursday, the Swiss athlete headlines the women’s 800m race at the Zurich Diamond League, the very meet at which she announced herself to the world last year.

Werro, then 21, left the Letzigrund stadium in August 2025 as a Diamond League champion, only the second Swiss athlete to win the final meet of the season (after long jumper Simon Ehammer).

She had produced the performance of her young career, running 1:55.91s to finish ahead of Georgia Hunter-Bell, an Olympic 1500m medallist. In the process, she revised her own Swiss record for the third time in as many months, a progression that saw her jump from 101st to 29th on the all-time list in the same summer.

If that sounds impressive, then the Werro that will walk into Letzigrund on Thursday evening is on another level: European champion, unbeaten in four Diamond League races in 2026 (winning every one in a meet-record time), and, most notably, the third-fastest ever.

Her 1:53.80s run in Paris at the end of June is the best over 800m since Jarmila Kratochvilova set the world record in 1983. That is the longest-standing athletics world record and a mark that, in over four decades, has only been troubled by a handful of women — now Werro is a little more than half a second from it.

“It’s clear my status (has) changed from last year, some crazy things have happened this year,” she said in Zurich ahead of the race. “I’m really proud of my progression, running close to the world record this year, it’s really great.”

She has even usurped Keely Hodgkinson, the Briton who, in 2024, raced a perfect season to claim European and Olympic golds and looked unbeatable. Werro, having out-kicked her rival to win the Stockholm Diamond League at the start of June, spoiled the party for Keely on home soil in August, stealing her continental crown at the Alexander Stadium in Birmingham, England.

“I knew I would be European champion one day,” she beamed in the mixed zone, sporting a tiara, given to her by team-mates at Belfaux, her athletics club. “I’m a bit of an 18-year-old queen, so I allowed myself to bring it.”

That smile replaced the grimace from the day before, when Werro had fallen in the semi-final. Officials advanced her to the final because video review showed that her foot clipped another athlete as they ran around the final bend.

Audrey Werro reacts after falling during her semi-final fall at the European Championships (Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)

Unhurt and undeterred, Werro took the final to the rest of the field, running a gun-to-tape 1:54.81s for gold, smashing the European Athletics Championships record from 1982 in the process.

“I told myself that I had the best times and that I’d run many races at the front, even if there was a pacemaker,” Werro said in response to a question about the risk of her tactics, given that she effectively turned a championship race into a time trial. “I knew that I was capable of running the whole race from the front, so I decided that was my best card to play.”

Hodgkinson, processing mixed emotions, had run over a second and a half quicker than the time that brought her gold in 2024, but had to settle for silver. “There will always be competitors coming along. You don’t know when someone is going to have a breakthrough,” she said.

Based on the potential Werro showed in her youth, her rapid rise was a case of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’. This time last year, she was finishing her studies, ready to turn professional following immense promise at age-group championships.

At the under-20 level, she twice won European gold and took a world silver medal at age 18. In July 2025, just eight days after she competed against a senior field over 1,000m at the Monaco Diamond League, Werro demolished the 800m field at the European under-23 finals, taking gold with a championship-record run of 1:57.42s.

The catalyst for her progression this year, as she keeps repeating, is more to do with life off the track than on it. “The biggest change is that I’m no longer at school. It was tough to juggle both activities,” she said in Paris in late June, after breaking her own Diamond League 800m record from Stockholm. In the French capital, she finished nearly two seconds ahead of Femke Broeders-Bol, who ran a personal best for second place — a ridiculous winning margin at elite level.

“Now, there is no excuse, as I have all the time in the world to just focus on training, recovering, and the sport itself,” Werro continued. “My transition from being a junior to a senior was very challenging.”

Audrey Werro’s potential has been evident for years (Jurij Kodrun/Getty Images for European Athletics)

She referenced the European Championships in Munich in 2022, when she came sixth in her heat and was eliminated, a race that Hodgkinson won en route to taking gold in the final. “It was really hard to find my place in the field,” Werro said.

Two years later, on her Olympic debut at the Paris Games, she went out in the heats again, fifth in a field of eight athletes. Learning to race rounds with championship tactics has taken her some time.

In March last year, at the European indoors, she cruised through the heats and semi-finals, but tripped in the final and finished sixth. Then, in the same month, she missed the podium at the world indoors by one hundredth of a second, beaten to bronze by Patricia Silva, who ran her down on the final straight.

“I’ve learned a lot over the past few years, and I’m now much better equipped tactically and mentally for competition. It’s paying off this year,” she said in the press conference before the Paris Diamond League.

She has surprised herself, too. “My time in Stockholm (1:53.98s, now fourth all-time) was incredible. I didn’t expect to achieve that this year — I thought it would happen further down the line.”

Werro’s success is a story of patience and trust. She still trains in the western Swiss canton of Fribourg, where she grew up, and opted to stay with coach Christiane Berset Nuoffer — who has trained her since age nine — instead of heading to the United States, where, based on the times she is running now, significant collegiate success would have awaited her.

On such an accelerated development curve, it can be hard to know when to let gratitude take over ambition. Werro and her coaching team structured their outdoor season with the aim of her medalling at the European Championships, and she won world indoor silver behind Hodgkinson in Poland this March — hardware that, in addition to her times, is undeniable proof of her ability.

The only thing that might get in Werro’s way is the very thing that makes her successful: long legs. She tends to be the tallest in the field, and it’s why front-running makes particular sense: to give her space to run and avoid any tangles.

With Hodgkinson a late withdrawal from Zurich — saying at the start of this week that her body is still recovering after the European Championships — there is even more expectation on Werro to deliver in front of a home crowd.

Also racing against her are Kenya’s Lilian Odira and Georgia Hunter-Bell of Great Britain, who won gold and silver at the World Championships last September. Werro was sixth in that race, another marker of her rapid improvement this year.

The biggest threat to Werro’s winning streak is Broeders-Bol, who pushed her all the way to the line last week. In Lausanne, Werro recorded her fourth Diamond League victory of 2026. The only women to win more 800m races on the circuit in one season are Eunice Jepkoech Sum (six in 2015) and Caster Semenya (five apiece in 2016, 2017 and 2018).

There’s a story behind how Werro celebrates, too. She bares her teeth and shows her nails in a playful roar. “When I was a child, my dad used to tell me (that) I have to be a lion, (that) I shouldn’t be shy and let other athletes go past me.”

Those words have proved prophetic. Nobody is going past her now, as Werro has Kratochvilova’s record in her sights. To break that on home soil and cap an already magical season would be frankly ridiculous. But this is Werro, for whom the ridiculous is now ordinary.

Greenlighting a fourth season of ‘The Robert Sanchez Experience’ always seemed a deeply questionable decision, and a universally panned premiere at Craven Cottage on Monday has pushed Chelsea to the brink of what would be a very popular cancellation.

Emiliano Martinez being eminently available at Aston Villa has changed the landscape in the final days of this transfer window. All summer the message coming out of Stamford Bridge was that Chelsea were happy with their goalkeeping options, and the hope was that Sanchez could at least be solid enough until Belgian youngster Mike Penders was ready to step up.

Instead, Sanchez produced the kind of performance against Fulham that underlined why he long ago lost the trust of most match-going Chelsea supporters, allowing Josh King’s shot to go through his hands before parrying Timothy Castagne’s shot straight to Gonzalo Garcia.

He almost conceded a third self-inflicted goal, opening himself up to an Antonee Robinson lob that mercifully drifted well wide after he had made a misguided charge into no-man’s land.

Robert Sanchez reacts to conceding Chelsea’s second goal against Fulham (Adrian Dennis / AFP via Getty Images)

All goalkeepers make mistakes, and those mistakes tend to be more memorable because they more often lead to opposition goals than gaffes made higher up the pitch. Opta data reveals that over three full Premier League seasons from the start of 2023-24 to the end of 2025-26, Sanchez made seven errors leading to goals to Martinez’s six (though the Argentina international played 20 more games and almost 1,700 more minutes over that time period).

But numbers can only ever provide part of the picture. They cannot account for the audible frustration that ripples around Stamford Bridge when Sanchez misplaces a pass, misjudges a cross or dallies just long enough over a rolling ball to get himself into trouble. They cannot account for the encouragement that his sloppy or indecisive moments give to opposing players or fans, or the anxiety that they spread to the Chelsea defenders in front of him, cascading to create the overwhelming sense that something bad is going to happen.

Goalkeeping is football’s ultimate confidence game. Not just the confidence that a goalkeeper feels in themselves, but the confidence they inspire in their team-mates, in their coach and in their supporters. Once a goalkeeper becomes widely viewed as “having a mistake in them”, fair or not, it is almost impossible to recover. In that sense, even in his better stretches of form, Sanchez’s position at Chelsea has felt untenable for most of his three years as the club’s No 1.

It is a lot to ask of Penders to step into the Premier League pressure cooker at 21 and command that confidence. Martinez, a 33-year-old veteran of the last two World Cup finals and a highly regarded Premier League goalkeeper at Villa for the last six years, is not the type of character to be fazed by walking into a position that has been a problem for Chelsea pretty much ever since Thibaut Courtois pushed his way to Real Madrid in the summer of 2018.

Emi Martinez won’t be fazed by the pressure at Stamford Bridge (Buda Mendes/Getty Images)

Any online search for Martinez howlers at Villa yields results in a matter of seconds. His aggressive style can work against him, and his lowlight compilations did not take long to circulate among more sceptical Chelsea fans when The Athletic reported on Wednesday that the club has been offered his services. They are unflattering, but nowhere near numerous enough to be disqualifying and, unlike with Sanchez, they do not end up defining him.

He is also much more of what you might call a traditional goalkeeper, more likely to focus on commanding his penalty area than sweeping up far from it. His passing, both short and long, is solid rather than spectacular. He is not the goalkeeper you sign if you want an 11th outfielder to relentlessly bait the opposition press and take risks in order to generate rewards in possession.

Chelsea under Xabi Alonso do not need that. They need a goalkeeper who can radiate calm confidence even in the most hostile environments, who can shake off setbacks and save his team as well as the ball in the most high-stakes moments. Martinez has more often than not done just that throughout his career at Villa, helping to power their steady rise from Premier League mid-table underachievers to consistent challengers for European qualification.

Decisiveness is a good quality for a goalkeeper to have. Martinez is proactive in dealing with crosses and knows when to hold and when to attack the ball. Many of his finest career moments have come in one-vs-one situations — chiefly his sensational star jump save to deny Randal Kolo Muani a late winner for France in extra time of the 2022 World Cup final.

That was a long time ago, but Martinez conjured some of his old magic when Sunderland midfielder Habib Diarra ran clean through on his goal in the 93rd minute with the score 3-3 at Villa Park in April.

He closed the distance and sank down towards the ball, while still retaining the body control to flick up his right arm and claw the Senegal international’s attempted dink out of the air. Villa went down the other end, and Tammy Abraham headed in a late winner.

Martinez also made a vital reaction stop to keep a close-range Igor Jesus effort from crossing the line as Nottingham Forest applied pressure in the first leg of a Europa League semi-final tie that Villa went on to win 4-1 on aggregate.

Those two Martinez saves were two of the more consequential moments of Villa’s run-in at the end of a season which saw them finish fourth and win the Europa League. Sanchez has also demonstrated himself to be very capable of impressive shot-stopping but, as he enters the fourth season of his Chelsea career, it is hard to recall a single intervention which had such a positive impact on his team’s chances of success.

His volatility has an unfortunate tendency to surface when Chelsea most need security from their goalkeeper. Martinez, in contrast, has a proven track record of rising to big occasions and a personality which, while often provocative, wins him the belief of his team-mates.

That is half of the battle for any goalkeeper at this level, and marks ‘Dibu’ out as a clear upgrade.

Caroline Dubois may be living in Los Angeles, but do not speak to her about Californian glitz.

“I don’t know if it’s just me or how my mindset is when it comes to camp, but I am an hour away from the beach and I’ve been once for a training day,” says the British world champion lightweight, speaking via a video call.

“I’m about a half-hour away from Beverly Hills as well, but I’ve not seen that yet. I’ve been here six weeks and it is train, home to rest, back to the gym to train, home to rest again. I watch films, some boxing, read. That’s as exciting as it gets.”

Dubois has good reason to be focused. On Saturday, she defends her WBC and WBO titles against American Amelia Moore on Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions (MVP) card in Birmingham, England — her first fight since a surprise split from her long-time coach Shane McGuigan, who guided her from amateur standout to becoming a unified world champion with 13 wins and one draw. She is now trained by American Manny Robles, a switch that caused ripples of shock throughout women’s boxing.

Why do it?

“I’m not going to get into the reasons too much,” Dubois says. “I think the more important thing is that, one, the training has been so different. Sparring has been really high level. And everything that I’ve been wanting and I’ve been looking for, you know, I’ve been ticking those boxes.

“People have been saying, ‘Usually people leave coaches after they’ve lost or after something bad happened.’ And I just think, ‘You know, I ain’t going to wait for that.’ If I feel like I need something, I’m going to go out there and get it. I don’t need to wait to mess up to make a decision that is already sitting in my head.

“The most important thing is to continue to develop, not just as an athlete, but as a person. I feel like I’m doing that, I’m very happy.”

Caroline Dubois has split from her former coach Shane McGuigan (Richard Pelham/Getty Images)

Dubois’ split with McGuigan was all the more surprising given he had been a constant in her life during a period of personal turbulence. In 2024, Caroline, one of her brothers and one of her sisters (she comes from a family of 11 children) effectively split from the rest of their family after a breakdown in relations with their father, Stan (who also goes by the name Dave).

Another of Dubois’ brothers, Daniel, is a heavyweight world champion in his own right, having also been schooled under Stan’s strict, boxing-focused lifestyle which Caroline has previously called “overbearing”. Daniel was also coached by McGuigan at the time, but he moved from the gym under his father’s instruction and Caroline stayed put. The siblings are not on speaking terms.

It feels like a lot for anyone to cope with, let alone a fighter in her early 20s trying to make her way in a notoriously unforgiving profession. Yet Dubois exudes positivity and self-belief, perhaps not surprisingly given this is the same fighter who, as a nine-year-old, tucked her hair into a cap and pretended to be a boy called ‘Colin’ so she could train at a males-only gym in London.

“The worst position to be in at the end of your life is if you’ve got a million regrets,” she says. “You don’t want to be like, ‘The reason why I’m not happy or satisfied with my career is because of this person or that person’.

“With my family situation, obviously it’s very personal and very complicated, but I look at the decision and, again, no regrets, a hundred per cent accountability.

Caroline Dubois with her brother Daniel in 2019 (James Chance/Getty Images)

“To live the life you want to live, you do have to make sacrifices. And these are some of the sacrifices that I make and not just myself, but my brother and my sister as well. And I’m just proud of our journey together and what we’ve achieved. And it is only just the start.”

Dubois has had no shortage of role models as she seeks to carve her own path in boxing. One of them is Claressa Shields, the multi-weight U.S. world champion who Dubois believes shows young women they can speak up and be confident in themselves.

Shields, 31, came from humble beginnings in Flint, Michigan, to win back-to-back Olympic golds and then world professional titles in five different weight classes. She’s outspoken, brash and labels herself as ‘GWOAT’ – the Greatest Woman of All Time.

Dubois watched Shields’ last fight from her training base in L.A. as she beat Kaye Scott in front of a packed State Farm Arena in Atlanta. Shields is a big fan of Dubois and has attended her fights before.

“Claressa Shields has been one of my biggest inspirations for a very long time and I’ll always be vocal about that,” said Dubois. “What she’s done, where she’s come from, especially, that has inspired me on another level.

“I’m just so proud of her. I was watching the card, of course, and seeing the arena slowly fill up, seeing the crowd just get time for a walkout, her energy… for a woman to do that, an American woman, a woman of colour, I’m just in awe. She’s a legend and has always been very supportive of me. She messages me, checks on how I’m doing.

“She gives me good advice to promote yourself. People are so afraid in the UK to be a little bit outspoken, to come off confident. They’re very afraid of that.

“When you see someone like Claressa, who has been so successful, it lets you know that you can be confident. You can talk your s—. If you believe it, you can say it. Proclaim it before it happens. Speak it into existence. Claressa is the number one for that.”

Caroline Dubois shows off her world title belts with Claressa Shields (Richard Pelham/Getty Images)

Shields is 31, so may not be going anywhere anytime soon, but another superstar is leaving the firmament in the form of Katie Taylor. The Irish fighter is retiring following her September 5 bout against France’s Flora Pili in front of 82,000 fans in Dublin’s Croke Park.

There will be a void left by Taylor, while Puerto Rican Amanda Serrano, who had three epic bouts with Taylor, is also at the end of her career after her 50th victory recently.

Dubois, who features on the undercard of American Mikaela Mayer against England’s Chantelle Cameron in a WBO and WBC super-welterweight bout this weekend, feels the women’s sport needs more than one star to carry it forward.

“The aim is to become undisputed, to be involved in the biggest fights, the biggest nights, the biggest moments possible in women’s boxing,” she said. “I want to be a face, a trendsetter and pushing it.

“But I feel like there can be multiple faces. There doesn’t need to be one unanimous face. It’s a terrible thing when there is, because it means that the sport is dead.

“Look at the men’s sport — there’s loads of different stars. Women’s boxing needs to be that. I want to be a part of it.”