Hunter Bell Targets 800m 'Big Three' in Zurich After European 1500m Triumph
Georgia Hunter Bell has declared herself ready to race the three fastest 800m women in the world next week in Zurich, fresh off winning the 1500m European title in Birmingham on Sunday 16 August 2026. The Briton, who also holds 800m gold from this year's Commonwealth Games and the 1500m world indoor crown, said she is relishing the chance to face Audrey Werro, Keely Hodgkinson and Femke Broeders-Bol over two laps in Switzerland. Werro narrowly beat Hunter Bell in the 800m at last year's Weltklasse Zürich Diamond League meeting, setting a Swiss national record in the process. Now the rematch is on, and the landscape has shifted again. At the Birmingham 2026 European Athletics Championships, Werro won her first international title with 800m gold, while Hodgkinson and Broeders-Bol joined her on the podium as the three medallists. Hunter Bell, meanwhile, had been chasing her first major outdoor crown — and delivered, taking the 1500m title on the championship's penultimate day.
The depth of women's 800m running right now is extraordinary. Werro has run 1:53.80 this season, the third-fastest time in history and within half a second of the world record — 1min 53.28sec, set in 1983 by Czechoslovakia's Jarmila Kratochvilova, a mark that has stood longer than most athletes have been alive. Five women have broken 1:56 in 2026 alone. The record, one of the oldest in the sport, is genuinely under threat.
Hunter Bell is not stopping at three rivals, either. She said she and the top trio have been talking to world champion Lilian Odira about staging a 'big five' race before the end of 2026. The most likely stage is the Ultimate Championships in Budapest next month, where the winner takes home $150,000 (about £110,000) — a purse large enough to focus any athlete's mind.
For a general reader, what makes this compelling is simple: women's 800m running has not been this fast or this deep in decades. Werro, Hodgkinson and Hunter Bell were already ranked within touching distance of each other on the 2025 world list, and Broeders-Bol has since forced her way into the conversation. Add Odira, the world champion, and you have five athletes capable of running times that would, in almost any other era, have meant a comfortable victory.
Zurich next week will not feature all five. But it will pit the newly minted European 1500m champion against the three women who shared the European 800m podium, in a race that could go a long way to deciding who carries the favourite's tag into Budapest. Hunter Bell, for her part, sounds ready. "I'm looking forward to racing them," she said. The clock will have the final word.
