Annik Kälin became the first Swiss winner of the World Athletics Combined Events Tour heptathlon standings, closing the 2026 season with 3653 points. She finished well clear of Poland's Adrianna Sułek-Schubert, and her total stands as the second-highest winning score in the history of the women's competition.
A record broken twice in one summer
Kälin arrived in late June already carrying a fresh Swiss record of 6726 points, set weeks earlier in Götzis. She left with a new mark of 6819, a world-leading score and a meeting record, having reset her own national standard by nearly 100 points for the second time inside a month.
She built the Ratingen win on day one. A personal best of 12.60 seconds in the 100m hurdles sliced 0.27 from her previous fastest and lifted her to second on the Swiss all-time list. Later the same day she ran 23.00 in the 200m, improving on the 23.33 she had managed before.
The result moved her from 28th to 20th on the all-time world heptathlon list. Her Swiss record going into the season had stood at 6639, set at the Paris 2024 Olympics. By the end of June she had rewritten it twice.
A double first for Swiss combined events
The victory completed a historic symmetry for Switzerland. While Kälin led the women's standings, Simon Ehammer won the men's decathlon tour — the first Swiss double since the Challenge series began in 1998. Both athletes had finished runner-up in 2022 before breaking through outright.
Belgium's Noor Vidts placed third with 3407, a consistent campaign built on 6310 in Götzis and 6329 in Talence. Kälin now owns the second spot on the all-time winners' list, behind only Anna Hall-Slayton's 3781 from 2025. A Swiss woman had never led these standings before. Now the gap is closed.
