2026 has been the year of Audrey Werro. From an up-and-coming youngster the Swiss has transformed herself into the queen of 800m running, running three of the top five fastest times in history and winning a first European title, a second Diamond League Final and the inaugural World Ultimate Championships.
The signs were there at the World Indoor Championships in March: Keely Hodgkinson set a new indoor world record but Werro’s silver medal-winning time was still the fifth-fastest on a short track in history. When the outdoor season began, she simply blew the field apart, winning 16 of the 17 times she took to the start line. (We’ll come on to that 17th.) It was a season of astonishing dominance.
Speaking to The Independent over video call from her family home in Fribourg, Werro has a smile on her face as she recalls an “incredible” year. She says: “At the beginning of the season, I was not expecting to run that fast. It was really a big surprise for me, but I’m really happy with all the wins I had, and I’m also really proud of the consistency.”
Werro has always been a talent, a former under-20 and under-23 world champion and winner of the Diamond League Final last year. Even so her rise has been stratospheric: her personal best now stands at 1:53.70, a whole two seconds quicker than her best from 2025, 1:55.91. “When I think about it, I know that I trained really hard during the spring,” she says. “So this is just the outcome of all the training.”
The PUMA athlete didn’t make any dramatic changes to her lifestyle or training plan before her breakthrough season, but says it all clicked into place now that she could dedicate herself to athletics full-time, upping her training from ten sessions a week to around 12, having previously juggled it alongside finishing her education.
Unlike many athletes Werro hasn’t moved away in search of results; she still lives with her parents and trains at Club Athlétique Belfaux, the club she joined at the age of nine, and with her original coach, Christiane Berset Nuoffer. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, she says: “I feel good, I have good results with this structure, so I see no reason to change. I’m really close to my family, so it would be hard for me to go to another country to train.”
Werro shook off a fall in her European Championships semi-final to win gold (PA)
A naturally shy and introverted personality, she said it was a “long path of learning” to get comfortable with what is now her preferred front-running strategy, which she began adopting to counteract her natural shyness. Her trademark ‘lion’ celebration, which came from her father Claude telling her to be a lion and fight for herself on the track, has had a similar effect. “I’m not shy anymore on the track, but in life I’m still shy, so I think I really have two personalities. This year, yes, I had a lot of confidence in myself.”
Despite her astonishing results athletics does not entirely define her life, and she is unfazed by both the attention on her and the fast-moving nature of the sport. “I feel like there’s a little bit more pressure [now] because I won a lot of races this year. Now I want to continue winning, and I know it’s not possible to win every time you run, so I have to keep that in mind – one day someone will beat me and it’s just normal.”
Outside her sport she has “calm” hobbies – reading, painting, drawing – and she has carried on learning English after finishing school. “I think it’s important for me to still use my brain a little bit, because it’s also helped me to think about another thing than athletics, and sometimes it’s good to not think about the training, the competition.”
And it’s hard to argue with how Werro approaches things given her extraordinary success this year. Her solitary defeat over the outdoor season came in a chaotic semi-final at the European Championships, when she was accidentally tripped and fell, eventually finishing in last place before she was advanced to the final by officials.
PUMA athlete Werro won 16 of her 17 outdoor races this season (Getty Images)
She sports a wry smile as she recounts the race. “When we are in the front, we are not expecting to fall because it feels safer, but at the same time behind me, I know that the girls are fighting for the place. During the last 100m I feel my foot hitting someone or something, I don’t know at the moment what happened, but then I’m just on the ground and at this special moment I think my dream of winning a medal is just going away.”
The first thing on her mind was finishing the race. “I remember when I’m in the last metre of the race, I’m already thinking about the next step. I’m like maybe 70 per cent sure that I will go in the final. At the same time, I know that if I’m not in the final, it’s not the end of the world. I know that I have another chance in two years. That was important for me to keep that in mind.”
Her calmness in the face of the biggest goal of the season potentially going up in smoke is impressive. She explains, “This is normally how I process things and for me it’s important to really have a plan for the future. At the European Championships, the plan was I go in the final or I come back in two years for revenge. I think this is also one of my strengths, that I can just stand up and continue.”
Werro, Hodgkinson and Broeders-Bol have formed a trio hunting down the world record (Getty)
It is something she has worked hard on, fine-tuning routine for the day of every race, and in the past two years she has enlisted the help of a sports psychologist, Janique Sciboz, to hone her performance. She says, “I’m always a little bit stressed, but it’s a positive stress that allows me to be focused on the goal. I have a good structure for the day so I know every hour what I need to do.”
Sciboz also gave her “keys” to help her stay grounded and focused, including short periods of meditation. Werro explains: “It’s a lot of visualisation of the race, and then I also have some keys that I can do when I’m a little bit too stressed or when I’m not concentrated enough.”
Despite Werro’s dominance the women’s 800m has been the star attraction of every meet this year, with her rivalry with Hodgkinson and the rapidly-improving 400m hurdles specialist Femke Broeders-Bol developing at pace. Werro says she is grateful to have them pushing her on: “It definitely helped me because I know that they are really close to me and I cannot just rest on everything I already achieved this year, I need to still work. It’s a really positive rivalry that we have between us, it’s really important to have a rivalry to just continue to progress.”
Werro got the better of Hodgkinson and Broeders-Bol in Birmingham (PA Wire)
Werro’s major targets for 2027 are claiming a European indoor title in the spring and glory at the world championships in Beijing in September. But her biggest goal is simple: “I want to continue to progress and to run fast. I feel like I had a lot of consistency this year, and now it’s just easier to build on this consistency. And maybe to do the world record.”
Of course, we have to discuss the world record, Jarmila Kratochvilova’s controversial figure which has stood since 1983. Werro came within 0.42s of it this year, running the fastest time in 40 years, but that mark still stands. How close is she to toppling it?
She is measured as ever as she says: “I think I’m definitely capable of breaking the world record. I just need to continue training because this year I was really close to it. But I still keep in my mind that the other athletes, Femke, Keely, are also really strong, so maybe they will break the world record before me. And this is just life. So yeah, I think my main goal is just to run fast, and try not to focus too much on the world record.”
That calm laser-focus has already made her one of the most successful 800m runners of all time – and it is not hard to see her ascending to even greater heights in 2027.
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