Simon Ehammer and Annik Kälin have turned Swiss consistency into something historic, completing a first national sweep of the World Athletics Combined Events Tour.
The World Athletics Combined Events Tour is not a place for the merely tidy. It rewards the athletes who can keep their nerve, body and arithmetic in working order across a season, then asks the tables to pass judgement.
In 2026, those tables came back Swiss.
Simon Ehammer and Annik Kälin have been confirmed as the winners of the men’s and women’s standings, completing a national double Switzerland had never previously managed in either the modern tour or its forerunner, the Combined Events Challenge, whose history stretches back to 1998.
Both had been runner-up in 2022. Four years later, they have done rather more than nudge the door open. Ehammer won the decathlon standings with 3703 points, Kälin took the heptathlon standings with 3653, and both did so with the second-highest winning scores ever recorded in their respective competitions.
A Swiss double built across three performances
The Tour is not decided by one glorious weekend and a well-timed lap of honour. Each athlete’s best three performances count, whether achieved indoors, outdoors, within the series or at major championships. Those performances are then converted into result scores using World Athletics’ scoring tables.
That structure matters. It strips away some of the noise that can cling to single-meeting brilliance and gives proper weight to repeatable excellence. For combined events athletes, who live in that awkward space between sprinter, jumper, thrower, hurdler and endurance runner, consistency is not a minor virtue. It is the job description.
Ehammer and Kälin each receive US$30,000 as Tour winners. The money is tidy enough. The history is better.
Ehammer starts with a world record and keeps moving
Ehammer’s year began indoors in Toruń, where he won the world indoor heptathlon title with a world record of 6670. For most athletes, that would have been a season-defining statement. Ehammer treated it more like the opening paragraph.
He then won the decathlon at the Hypo Meeting in Götzis with 8778, another Swiss record and a performance containing the best first-day score in decathlon history. In a sport where the first day can make a man look invincible before the second day quietly empties his pockets, that was a fair old marker.
The standings did not lack pressure. Germany’s Leo Neugebauer finished second overall on 3676 after placing second in Götzis with 8730, winning in Ratingen with 8573, and taking his first European title in Birmingham with 8611 ahead of Niklas Kaul. Hakim McMorris was third on 3597, helped by personal bests of 8420 at the Mt SAC Relays and 8599 in Talence.
The rest of the men’s top eight underlines the depth: Heath Baldwin, Makenson Gletty, Harrison Williams, Jeff Tesselaar and Karel Tilga all finished within the final frame. Ehammer still had enough daylight at the top.
Kälin turns records into a season
Kälin’s heptathlon campaign had a similar Swiss-record rhythm. She won in Götzis with 6726, then improved the national mark to 6819 when winning in Ratingen. Her final Tour total of 3653 stands as the second-highest winning score in the women’s standings, behind Anna Hall-Slayton’s 3781 in 2025.
That is a particularly clean kind of dominance: not one score standing alone, but a pattern. Kälin did not merely collect a big performance and hope it would survive the calendar. She kept sharpening the point.
Adrianna Sułek-Schubert finished second in the heptathlon standings with 3458 after winning her fourth heptathlon title at the Wiesław Czapiewski Memorial, where she set a meeting record of 6449. It also marked some of her strongest form since returning to competition after giving birth in 2024.
Noor Vidts, twice a world indoor champion, was third on 3407 after a steady outdoor season that included 6310 in Götzis and 6329 in Talence. Sveva Gerevini and Beatričė Juškevičiūtė both finished on 3392, with Anna-Elisabeth Ehlers, Vanessa Grimm and Szabina Szűcs completing the top eight.
The final standings
Decathlon
- Simon Ehammer, Switzerland — 3703
- Leo Neugebauer, Germany — 3676
- Hakim McMorris, United States — 3597
- Heath Baldwin, United States — 3572
- Makenson Gletty, France — 3550
- Harrison Williams, United States — 3542
- Jeff Tesselaar, Netherlands — 3529
- Karel Tilga, Estonia — 3517
Heptathlon
- Annik Kälin, Switzerland — 3653
- Adrianna Sułek-Schubert, Poland — 3458
- Noor Vidts, Belgium — 3407
- Sveva Gerevini, Italy — 3392
- Beatričė Juškevičiūtė, Lithuania — 3392
- Anna-Elisabeth Ehlers, Germany — 3378
- Vanessa Grimm, Germany — 3373
- Szabina Szűcs, Hungary — 3362
More than a flag on top of a table
There is a pleasing neatness to the Swiss sweep, partly because Ehammer and Kälin have been circling this level for years, and partly because combined events rarely hand out clean stories. Too many moving parts. Too many chances for a hurdle, a foul, a no-height or a bad 1500 metres to ruin the paperwork.
This one is unusually crisp.
Switzerland had never produced a Tour winner in either standings. Now it has both in the same year, both with historically high winning scores, and both by athletes who had already shown they were close enough to be dangerous. In combined events, that is about as close as the sport gets to a full stop.
