The women's 800m promises to be one of the most hotly contested events in Budapest.
On the track, eight women will be crowned champions at the World Athletics Ultimate Championship in Budapest in September, from the sprint queens in the 100m to the distance specialists over 5000m.
In the second instalment of a four-part series, we look at the track tussles looming at this season’s athletics climax.
100m hurdles
Unpredictability. It’s what makes sport so special and few events are harder to predict than the sprint hurdles. Ditaji Kambundji wasn’t many people’s pick to win the world title last September and, after clocking a massive personal best, her shocked face as she crossed the finish line suggested she hadn’t expected it either.
The Swiss athlete’s form was good indoors this year but, in an electric world indoor 60m hurdles final in March, she just missed out on a medal despite a season’s best. There will also be no shortage of suitors aiming to upstage her in the 2026 outdoor season finale in Budapest.
If 2025 is anything to go by, the event should be rapid. Eight women ran 12.30 or faster last year and the athlete topping those times, Masai Russell, will be keen to translate her 12.17 into a podium place after missing out in Tokyo. The US athlete has started the season well by winning at the Diamond League meeting in Shanghai in 12.25.
So many have shone already this year with four athletes – Kambundji, Devynne Charlton, Pia Skrzyszowska and Nadine Visser – all separated by a mere hundredth of a second going into the 60m hurdles at the World Indoor Championships in Poland, and then there was Charlton’s world record there in the final.
800m
Prior to this season, Keely Hodgkinson had never won a world title indoors or out. The British athlete righted that wrong in Poland in March and just days before that she broke a 24-year-old world short track record aptly set on the very day she was born.
It has been an impressive return after the disappointment of bronze in Tokyo when she would likely have been a shoo-in for gold had she not been hampered by a double hamstring tear, the second just after a trip to Buckingham Palace.
Kenya’s surprise world champion Lilian Odira will once again be aiming to challenge her, while Hodgkinson’s training partner Georgia Hunter Bell, the silver medallist in Tokyo, is yet to decide whether to focus on the 800m or 1500m this season.
400m
The big question was whether USA’s Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, a world gold medallist in two different individual disciplines, would stick to the 400m or revert to the 400m hurdles. It turns out neither. Instead, come Budapest, she will be in the early stages of motherhood after announcing her pregnancy at the start of the year.
Even without her, this field is stacked with potential champions, including Olympic gold medallist Marileidy Paulino, who was second to McLaughlin-Levrone in Tokyo.
US athlete Aaliyah Butler will surely aim to be in contention, too, along with Salwa Eid Naser and Amber Anning, who forewent the World Indoors to focus on the outdoor season. Then there’s Natalia Bukowiecka who hoped to win gold at the World Indoors in front of her home crowd in Poland but was denied by just eight hundredths of a second by break-out star Lurdes Gloria Manuel.
