Switzerland
2016

Amsterdam: Five Medals and Thirteen Finals

Switzerland sent 47 athletes to the European Championships in Amsterdam, 6–10 July 2016, forty of them as individual starters. By the federation's own count they came home with five medals and thirteen places in the top eight.

• GoldTadesse Abraham — half marathon, 24 seconds clear of Kaan Kigen Özbilen1:02:03
• GoldSwitzerland — half marathon team: Abraham, Lyon, Lehmann, Kreienbühl, Berni, Kempf3:12:04
• BronzeMujinga Kambundji — 100 m, behind Schippers and Lalova-Collio11.25
• BronzeKariem Hussein — 400 m hurdles, after a 48.87 semi-final49.10
• BronzeLéa Sprunger — 400 m hurdles, behind Petersen and Linkiewicz55.41

The two golds came in the same race and belonged to the same man. Tadesse Abraham, born in Eritrea, won the half marathon in 1:02:03, and his time led the Swiss six to the team title by two seconds over Spain. The bronzes were all on the track: Mujinga Kambundji in the 100 m, Kariem Hussein in the 400 m hurdles two years after winning the event in Zürich, and Léa Sprunger in the women's 400 m hurdles, in 55.41.

Behind the medals sat a deep row of near misses. Selina Büchel and Clélia Rard-Reuse were both fourth, in the 800 m and the 100 m hurdles; Fabienne Schlumpf was fifth in the steeplechase; Angelica Moser, aged eighteen, was seventh in the pole vault. The women's 4×100 m team — Ajla Del Ponte, Sarah Atcho, Ellen Sprunger and Salomé Kora — set a Swiss record of 42.87 in the heats and finished fifth. The full European picture of that week is in our Netherlands 2016 page, the host nation and Schippers' 100 m, and Spain 2016.

From this season · in the archivePuma Switzerland International Team 2016 Pro Elite Red PoloThe red polo of the Swiss team's 2016 Puma allocation: the federation badge and UBS on the left chest and the white Puma cat on the right, from the team clothing of the 2016 season.90,00 €View piece →

Portland and Rio: The World Level

The season had opened with a near miss on the world stage. At the World Indoor Championships in Portland on 17 March, Nicole Büchler cleared 4.80 m at her third attempt, facing elimination, for a Swiss indoor record — and finished fourth on countback, in the first women's pole vault in which four athletes went over 4.80. Switzerland had two athletes in Portland. (How that championship works is explained in our guide to the World Indoors.)

Five weeks after Amsterdam, the same squad went to Rio. Swiss Athletics entered 17 athletes, twelve of them as individual starters, and the result was two places in the top eight and no medal: Büchler sixth in the pole vault with 4.70, Abraham seventh in the marathon in 2:11:42, eighth at 40 km and still moving up. Every Swiss medal of those Games came from another sport.

The drop was steepest for the European medallists. Kambundji reached the semi-finals of both the 100 m (11.16) and the 200 m (22.83). Hussein went out in the heats in 49.80, running on a left foot that had been inflamed since the end of May. Sprunger also went out in the first round, in 56.58. Schlumpf took the Swiss steeplechase record down to 9:30.54 in her heat, then finished last in the final. The relay ran 43.12 in the heats, a quarter of a second slower than in Amsterdam, and Kambundji was not in it.

None of this was a collapse. Switzerland had not won a senior medal at an Olympics, a World Championships or a World Indoors since Viktor Röthlin's marathon bronze in Osaka in 2007, and would not win another until March 2018, when Kambundji took bronze in the 60 m at the World Indoors in Birmingham. 2016 sat in the middle of that ten-year gap. At home the pattern held: at Athletissima in Lausanne on 25 August and at the Diamond League final at Weltklasse Zürich on 1 September, no Swiss athlete reached an individual podium. The best individual result was Hussein's fifth place in the Zürich final, in 49.21; the women's relay was second in Lausanne and fourth in Zürich.

Marcel Hug's First Paralympic Gold

The Swiss medals that did come in Rio came in September, from a wheelchair racer. Marcel Hug lined up for the T54 800 m final on 15 September with four silver and two bronze medals from four Paralympic Games — two of the silvers won earlier that week — seven world titles and a nickname, the Silver Bullet. In 2016 he had already won the London and Boston marathons.

He led the 800 m from the gun and won it in 1:33.76, his first Paralympic gold. Three days later, on the last day of the Games, he won the T54 marathon in 1:26:16, one second ahead of Kurt Fearnley of Australia in a sprint finish. With his silvers in the 5000 m on 11 September and the 1500 m on 13 September, that made four medals in Rio — all four of Switzerland's Paralympic athletics medals.

His teammate Manuela Schär left Rio without a medal; her best result was fourth in the 1500 m. Both are still racing ten years later. Hug won the Boston Marathon wheelchair race on 20 April 2026, his ninth Boston title. Schär won the Sydney Marathon on 31 August 2026 and with it became the first woman to win all seven World Marathon Majors.

What the 2016 Team Became

Of the Swiss records set in 2016 in championship events, none survives in October 2026. Abraham's 2:06:40 from Seoul in March was lowered by Abraham himself, finally to 2:04:40 in Valencia on 1 December 2024, at 42, in the last marathon of his career. Büchler's outdoor pole vault record of 4.78 (Doha, May 2016) fell to Angelica Moser in 2024, and her 4.80 from Portland lasted until 26 August 2026, when Moser cleared 4.85 in Zürich. Léa Sprunger's 22.38 for 200 m went to Kambundji in 2019; the relay's 42.87 was improved in London a year later; Schlumpf's 9:30.54 lasted until she broke it herself in 2017. The one 2016 mark still on the federation's list is Sprunger's 38.93 in the 300 m hurdles, an event that is rarely run.

The athletes went different ways. Sprunger became European 400 m hurdles champion in Berlin in 2018 and retired at the end of 2021; her 54.06 from 2019 is still the Swiss record. Büchler retired in 2020. Selina Büchel, twice European indoor 800 m champion, retired on 9 November 2022 after more than a year of long COVID had kept her from training. Hussein served a nine-month ban in 2021 after nikethamide, a stimulant prohibited in competition, was found in a sample from the Swiss Championships; it cost him the Tokyo Games, and by 2023 he was combining hurdling with work as a doctor.

Five of the 47 who went to Amsterdam were at the European Championships in Birmingham in August 2026. Moser won the pole vault with 4.80, retaining the title she had won in Rome in 2024. Kora and Del Ponte took silver in the 4×100 m. Kambundji, back racing in July after a pregnancy, ran the 200 m semi-finals, and Schlumpf, a marathoner now, finished nineteenth in 2:32:11. Kambundji and Moser are also the two in this squad who went on to close the global gap: Kambundji with global medals from 2018 onwards, Moser with World Indoor bronze in 2025 and 2026.

The Puma Switzerland Kit

The 2016 competition kit is easiest to read in photographs. In Amsterdam, Kambundji raced in a white-and-red crop top with UBS and the Puma cat on the chest and red-and-black briefs with a white cat; in Rio, Büchel wore a red crop top with the Swiss cross badge and “Suisse” across it. Red and white, a Swiss cross, the Puma cat and the bank of the federation's leading partner: that is the whole visual language, and it carries over to the team clothing.

Our five pieces from the 2016 allocation are that team clothing. The tracksuit is grey marl with red zips and piping and a red Puma cat. The T-shirt is white with “suisse” in red lowercase across the chest. The two polos, one white and one red, carry the federation badge and UBS on the left chest and the cat on the right. The backpack is red and black, with SUISSE running down the front beside a Swiss cross. In Rio, as the photograph of Büchel shows, the track kit was the same Puma kit; what the Swiss Olympic delegation wore away from the track is a separate question, and not one this page answers.

The 2016 warm-up · in the archivePuma Switzerland International Team 2016 Pro Elite TracksuitGrey marl Puma tracksuit from the 2016 Swiss team issue: hooded full-zip jacket and trousers with red zips and piping, the red Puma cat on the chest. Team allocation, never sold in shops.180,00 €View piece →

Other national kits from the same summer are in our Great Britain 2016 page and Netherlands 2016.