How Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone Became the Unrivaled Queen of the 400-Meter Hurdles

The 25-year-old’s relentless pursuit of excellence and wide-ranging training regimen have propelled her to heights never before seen.

McLaughlin-Levrone showed that she has no equal in the 400-meter hurdles with another world-record-setting performance at the Paris Olympics. / Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

SAINT-DENIS, France — For years, as Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone dabbled in other distances, while also getting married, publishing a book and partnering on a clothing line, she could seem bored by her own dominance. She had created perhaps the best “problem” in sports, making the breaking of her own world record in the 400-meter hurdles more or less her standard.

She competed in the 400 flat last year, showed up at U.S. championships and clocked the 10th-fastest time ever run at that distance. This year, she also tried out the 100-meter hurdles and the 200-meter dash—and ran the fastest time in the world at the time in the latter event.

In late May, McLaughlin-Levrone flew to Atlanta to return to her specialty in the HBCU Pro Classic, a “legends” meet hosted by the most legendary hurdler of all, Edwin Moses. McLaughlin-Levrone hadn’t competed in that in nearly two years. She had, however, made vague allusions to improbable Olympic race combinations. The kinds only someone with her talents would even dare consider, let alone attempt. No combination of those four races, she insisted, should be considered “crazy.”

Don’t mistake any part of that sequence for boredom, whimsy or even McLaughlin-Levrone pushing her own limits. Don’t mistake any of that sequence for anything other than what it was—a step-by-step plot to become even better in the event she had already conquered. The 400 hurdles require speed, technical prowess and endurance, making that discipline essentially the other three events mashed together.

Each stint McLaughlin-Levrone spent working on the other disciplines was targeted to improve her 400 hurdles supremacy in one specific way. The 400 flat bolstered her endurance. The 200 increased her speed. The 100 hurdles concentrated the combination of hurdling at higher speeds. If the plan worked as intended, even small improvements would yield faster times in a race where she already held the majority of the fastest results ever.

All along, McLaughlin-Levrone knew exactly what she wanted: to come to Paris and not just win another 400-meter hurdles gold. She wanted to come to Paris and obliterate her own world record once more.

And she did, plan executed perfectly. She won another gold. And she ran a faster time than had ever been run before in the 400 hurdles. 

McLaughlin-Levrone set a new a world record on her way to gold Thursday, posting a time of 50.37 seconds. / Simon Bruty/Sports Illustrated

She came back for precisely this, one more otherworldly performance. To describe her as the favorite in this event is akin by to describing a dictator as the favorite to win their presidential election. Beating the competition is no longer McLaughlin-Levrone’s race. Her race is against previous versions of herself—and against history. In the latter category, despite turning just 25 on Wednesday, she already stands with Moses, the two of them alone.

“She’s a purist,” Moses says on McLaughlin-Levrone’s birthday, at his hotel in Paris’s 6th arrondissement.

His thoughts drifted to that legends meet in Atlanta this past spring. Moses already knew her coach, Bobby Kersee, the same man who watched him win 122 straight races in the 400 hurdles, had made Moses a promise. He would—one day, someday, somehow—shape a hurdling machine to not just compete with Moses but beat him.

It took decades, but in McLaughlin-Levrone, Kersee made good on his promise. In spending time with the McLaughlin-Levrone camp, Moses saw many ideal elements: her coach, how Kersee had studied him and for how long; the small, tight nature of her support system; and her appreciation of HBCU history on a tour of Morehouse College, which opened a window into her mind and how it worked. She understood the history that tethered them and the history that tethered her to the larger world.

Yeah, McLaughlin-Levrone understood a lot of things. But she understood nothing better than how to run this specific event with unprecedented speed. Sure, she was fast and athletic. But those were obvious to anyone who ever saw her on a track. Her technique stood out to Moses, as did her international experience that contrasted with her age. He saw technical improvements that came from Kersee. And, while McLaughlin-Levrone did describe the toll that training to break world records exacted on her body, Moses also saw someone who understood that toll and beckoned it anyway.

All of these attributes combined, he says, to make her “a very, very efficient hurdler.” To continue lowering those world record times, that’s exactly what she needed. Efficiency that came from tiny, almost imperceptible improvements, greatness borne from the slimmest margins; slimmer, in fact, each time she dared another attempt.

Which is how one athlete and her most elite competitors take a discipline and do what McLaughlin-Levrone and company have done in the 400 hurdles. It’s mind boggling, the progress they’ve made. In 1995, Kim Batten of the United States held the world record. Her time: 52.61 seconds. In 2005, Yuliya Pechonkina of Russia held it. Her time: 52:34. In 2015, Pechonkina still held the record; it hadn’t changed in a decade. It wouldn’t, until 2019, when American hurdler Delilah Muhammad ran a 52:20 in Iowa. That mark, McLaughlin-Levrone said Thursday, left her “baffled.”

She would soon do the baffling, turning writing about her exploits into a Mad Libs exercise. Something like this: Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone competed in (CITY) on (DATE). And just when it appeared she could not (SYNONYM FOR ‘LOWER’) her own world record, she did, running a (TIME THAT DAY), as other competitors ran and watched in (ADJECTIVE).

McLaughlin-Levrone trained at multiple distances over the last four years in order to lower her own benchmark even further. / Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

McLaughlin-Levrone set her first world record in July 2019, the first time any woman had broken 52 seconds in the 400-meter hurdles. She lowered her mark in August ‘21 (while winning gold in Tokyo), then in June ‘22, then in July ‘22, then in June this year, then again on Thursday night.

As the U.S. track and field gold rush continued on the purple track at Stade de France, Tara Davis-Woodhall snagged the gold medal in the long jump, tears forming in her eyes. Roughly two minutes later, McLaughlin-Levrone and the other 400-hurdle finalists were introduced. The crowd showered her with an ovation, but it appeared to save its loudest roar for her supposed rival, the great Dutch star Olympian, Femke Bol.

Bol blew kisses back at her fans as television cameras panned the stadium, showing wide swaths of seating painted her country’s patented orange. No disrespect to Bol, but she never had a chance on Thursday. 

McLaughlin-Levrone shot from the starting blocks like toddlers shoot toward ice cream trucks, with every ounce of energy in their tiny bodies. She took off, legs churning, her stride the picture of efficiency. Her arms pumped like pistons. She leapt hurdles in stride, with the ease of a two-inch box jump.

By the first turn, it looked like McLaughlin-Levrone had already closed the gap between herself, in an inside lane, and Bol, who started to her right. By the second turn, McLaughlin-Levrone had sewn up her second gold medal triumph. By the third, she appeared to be roughly five meters ahead. At that point, only the world record stood in question. McLaughlin-Levrone trucked elegantly toward the finish, aware that what really mattered to her, why she had tried all those other disciplines and toiled through all those arduous workouts and implemented Kersee’s wisdom, was still ahead.

At the finish line, as the crowd screamed, McLaughlin-Levrone dipped her body in a race she led by maybe 15 meters. She did so to clock the fastest possible time. Her previous mark, set in the U.S. Olympic trials in late June, was 50.65 seconds.

This time, the screens blinked and the crowd gasped. She had run the 400-meter hurdles in 50.37 seconds—nearly two full seconds under the world record set in 2019 that left her and everyone else baffled. Her teammate, Anna Cockrell, snagged the silver. Bol won bronze. And, in a race that, for McLaughlin-Levrone, no longer lasts even 51 full seconds, she still beat every other competitor, the best 400 hurdlers in the world, by at least 1.5 seconds. That can only boggle the mind of every person who saw her win.

McLaughlin-Levrone hugged Cockrell and took deep breaths, but, let’s be honest, she didn’t look even a little tired. She walked over to her family and support team. Her sister-in-law handed McLaughlin-Levrone a sparkling tiara. “I thought she was joking,” McLaughlin-Levrone said later. “But she was serious.” Someone else handed her an American flag.

Even her celebration prep felt like an assembly line. Because they knew, she knew, everyone knew precisely where this night would end. The only question McLaughlin-Levrone truly answered Thursday was how.

“We’ve taken it so far,” she said later. “This was an event that wasn’t very popular. And we made it very popular, very quickly.”

McLaughlin-Levrone dominated her competition, beating the other best 400-meter hurdles in the world by more than 1.5 seconds. / Simon Bruty/Sports Illustrated

Yes, she believed that breaking 50 seconds in the 400-meter hurdles was possible. And, yes, she believed that the women sitting beside her at the news conference for the medalists were likely going to be the ones to break it.

In her event, breaking 50 seconds is like the first time someone broke the sound barrier. It’s not just historic. It’s epic. Transformative. Thought to be impossible to do. Just listen to Chari Hawkins, a world-class American heptathlete. One reason Hawkins says she always loved the Olympics is the range of abilities among the athletes and their individual but varied paths to the same place. There are those, like her, who will never reach McLaughlin-Levrone’s level. They know that. They’re O.K. with that. And there are those, like McLaughlin-Levrone, who inspire awe, in, even, other Olympians like Hawkins.

“They were born for this, you know,” she says. “You get to watch the most gorgeous runners, up close. They’re warming up, and they look like they’re just flying, right, and it’s the most beautiful thing in the world, to see these people who are just … magnificent.”

All of which leaves only one question, since McLaughlin-Levrone continues to answer all the others with world record statements. One day, she’ll need a t-shirt like that Cleveland Browns fan who listed all the franchise’s quarterbacks in recent decades, to commemorate how many new benchmarks she set. Maybe she will broaden her approach, through those disciplines, in Los Angeles. But the question that matters isn’t that one.

The question that matters is: Why doesn’t the larger American, mainstream sports public understand how rare, how special and, of course, how fast, McLaughlin-Levrone truly is? She’s Patrick Mahomes and Jayson Tatum and Shohei Otani—except she’s dominating all by herself. Not just dominating, but changing paradigms; most critically, of what’s possible in her discipline.

Even better, says track legend Michael Johnson, is to ask a related question. It’s not whether McLaughlin-Levrone deserves the highest levels of athletic acclaim. It’s why she hasn’t gotten that already?

He then answers his own question. “She’s a victim of her own circumstance,” he says. “She [has] broken [the world record] so many times, and she just keeps chipping away. People expect that from her, and they don’t see her, pushing boundaries, and they don’t know how hard it is to do that over and over again.”

McLaughlin-Levrone’s exploits are a primary reason Johnson is starting a professional league known as Grand Slam Track. And it’s the reason that, of all the American superstars he could have chosen, the first star he signed was her. She’s not just special, and she’s not just a once-in-a-generation talent. She’s singular, a genre of one.