Keely Hodgkinson and Lilian Odira Withdraw From the Diamond League’s Final 800m Race

The women’s 800m at Weltklasse Zurich on Thursday will be run by three of the five athletes the meeting announced for it. Keely Hodgkinson pulled her name out this week, Lilian Odira did the same on Monday, and the Diamond League has no other women’s 800m left on its regular season calendar.

Hodgkinson, the Olympic champion, said she had not recovered from the European Championships. “Unfortunately, the body isn’t quite ready to race again after the European championships, so we’ve made the decision to skip this race and get ready for the next one,” she said in a statement carried by the Independent. Odira, the world champion, wrote on Instagram that she had been unwell after the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and had felt weaker since Lausanne, where she finished seventh on Friday. “Since Lausanne I have felt weaker and after taking medical advice we decided it’s not wise to race on Thursday,” she wrote.

Weltklasse announced the field on Aug. 18, and Marathon Handbook previewed it as the race that would settle a season Hodgkinson and Audrey Werro had split between them. Four of the five arrived holding a title won in the previous 13 months: Werro from the European Championships, Hodgkinson from the Olympics and the world indoor championships, Odira from the world championships in Tokyo, plus Georgia Hunter Bell, the Commonwealth 800m champion and winner of the European 1,500m in Birmingham. Femke Broeders-Bol, the fifth, took European bronze and then ran 1:55.41 in Lausanne, a Dutch record, five weeks after Hodgkinson beat her in London. Tickets for the meeting sold out in under an hour when they went on sale in May, which the organizers said was the fastest in its history.

The calendar is what makes the withdrawals expensive for the series. Silesia, on Sunday, had no women’s 800m on its program, which left Lausanne and Zurich as the only two dates the event had left after Birmingham, and Hodgkinson has raced neither. The Diamond League wrote on Aug. 15 that Hodgkinson, Odira and Broeders-Bol were “currently on course for qualification, needing at most a few extra points in the remaining three meetings,” and that any of them who fell short could still reach the Brussels final through one of four wild cards. It has not published points standings by event, so where each of them now stands is not public.

Zurich would have been their fifth meeting of the year, and the first four left them level at two apiece. Hodgkinson won in Liévin on Feb. 19, where her 1:54.87 took the world indoor record, and again at the world indoor championships in Torun on March 22. Werro won in Stockholm on June 7 in 1:53.98, then in Birmingham on Aug. 14 in 1:54.81, a championship record that had stood 44 years, with Hodgkinson 0.20 behind in 1:55.01.

Werro reaches Thursday unbeaten outdoors, six races deep since the end of May, four of them Diamond League meetings. Two women in history have run quicker than her 1:53.80 from Paris in June: Jarmila Kratochvilova, whose 1:53.28 from 1983 is still the world record, and Nadezhda Olizarenko, who ran 1:53.43 in 1980. Werro’s 1:55.33 on Friday took the Athletissima meeting record off Hodgkinson, who had set 1:55.69 in Lausanne on Aug. 20 last year, a year and a day earlier.

Brussels holds this year’s final on Sept. 4 and 5. The World Athletics Ultimate Championship then opens in Budapest on Sept. 11, a $10 million meeting paying $150,000 to the winner of each event, where World Athletics says Paris Olympic champions have already sealed their places. Entry lists there are settled in the first week of September.