With Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Bobby Kersee’s Search for Greatest Hurdler Ever Is Over

The longtime track and field coach was looking for someone who could eclipse Edwin Moses’s legacy.

Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone celebrates after winning the women's 400m hurdles in a world record 50.65 seconds Sunday. / Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

This might sound apocryphal, but Bobby Kersee predicted this, or something like this, for decades. He predicted that he would find a hurdler—someone, somewhere, like Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone—who would surpass the nearly-impossible-to-approach legacy of the greatest hurdler who ever lived.

That would be Edwin Moses, Kersee’s rival and friend, the most consistent winner, ever, in track and field. Whether Moses ranks as the greatest track star ever could be debated. He would certainly be part of the debate, in part because his sustained dominance cannot be debated at all. Moses won 107 straight 400-meter hurdles finals; each dependent on dozens of factors (weather, opposition, his health, injuries) outside his control. His win streak lasted just over a decade—one in which he set the world record four times.

Anyway, Kersee grew sick of watching Moses win so often and began studying the Bionic man up close. Kersee asked Moses for training tips, got them and became his shadow at tracks all over the world. Eventually, Kersee made Moses a promise. Kersee would find someone to beat him. He didn’t care how long it took.

“Edwin Moses taught me a lot about the 400-meter hurdles, because of [those] reasons,” Kersee told Sports Illustrated last week. “He’s a large part of why I’m successful in coaching the 400-meter hurdles, especially with Sydney.”

First, Kersee needed to find someone worthy of fulfilling the promise he made all those years ago. Someone like … McLaughlin-Levrone. During the global pandemic in 2020, she decided to change coaches. Kersee’s, ahem, track record was undisputed: His athletes included Allyson Felix and Athing Mu. He coached and married Jackie Joyner-Kersee, one of America’s most decorated track stars. Over the years, he coaxed athletes into nearly 30 gold medals. At least one Kersee competitor has won a gold medal at the past 10 Olympics.

Kersee had worked with plenty of elite athletes and boasted a coaching résumé as strong as any in the sport. But he had never had someone quite like Moses, not until McLaughlin-Levrone. He became her fourth coach in five years. She chose Kersee because he wanted to hone her technical proficiency above all else.

It didn’t take long for Kersee to see the difference. Early into their time together, he had already come to view her as the “female Edwin Moses.” 

Either way, uncommon greatness tethers them. In 2022, Moses watched McLaughlin-Levrone train up close at Hayward Field in Eugene, Ore., then watched her, after he returned home to Atlanta, shatter the world record she had set (again) at qualifying. She lowered her time by 0.73 seconds. “I’ve been trying to beat you long enough that I should know what I’m doing,” Kersee told Moses then.

Laughing last week at their history, these stories and McLaughlin-Levrone’s ties to Moses, Kersee momentarily turned serious. That race, at the 2022 world championships, she clocked a time of 50.68 seconds. That specific lowering took all of 30 days. For context, before 2019, no female hurdler had ever broken 52 seconds. Not once!

Kersee understood two irrefutable truths that night about McLaughlin-Levrone. First, her performance deserved a prominent spot on whatever lists exist ranking the best performances in the sport’s history. Think: Bob Beamon’s legendary leap (1968) or Usain Bolt’s 100-meter dash (2008) or Michael Phelps’s medal haul (also ’08); any achievement, essentially, that defies logic, that’s greatness above greatness. The second truth Kersee understood: He knew, even that night two years ago, that McLaughlin-Levrone had much more to deliver.

“[That] was one of the greatest races I’ve ever witnessed in my 40-something years of coaching,” Kersee told SI last week. Even then, he knew it wouldn’t be her peak.

Still, Kersee cautioned against assuming she would win Sunday at the 2024 U.S. track and field trials. Remember, he also coaches Mu, the 800-meter gold medalist who tumbled in her final last week at Hayward Field and finished last; she won’t defend her gold in Paris. Hence Kersee’s care in setting expectations for McLaughlin-Levrone. He only wanted her to stay healthy and finish in the top three, qualifying without any damage to her chances next month in Paris.

“I cannot look past the Atlantic [Ocean] until we take care of business here at home,” Kersee says. “That’s what makes our Olympic trials so tough. You have to be ready at that given moment—and you can’t make any mistakes. You don’t come here worried about records. You don’t come worrying about anything else.”

The “female Edwin Moses” gave her coach little to worry about en route to Sunday’s final. For the past couple years, McLaughlin-Levrone hadn’t simply considered competing in the no-hurdles version of the 400. Nor did she map out the pros and cons of racing against the 200-meter-dash specialists. Oh, no. McLaughlin-Levrone actually did both, dominating whichever race she entered.

She focused on what they call the flat 400 last year, then, at the U.S. championships, blazed through one lap in 48.74 seconds, good for the second-fastest time in U.S. history and the 10th-best ever. This year, on May 9, she went to Los Angeles and won both the 100-meter hurdles and the 200 meter (flat version). That month, her 22.07-second time in the 200 (clocked at another race, the Los Angeles Grand Prix), marked the fastest time this year, run by a female sprinter, at that time, at that distance, in the world. It wasn’t until May 31 that McLaughlin-Levrone even competed in a 400-meter hurdles race. She did, in Atlanta, for the first time since 2022.

By then, though, McLaughlin-Levrone had shelved her multi-distance ambitions. At least in the individual sense. For now. She would only compete in the 400-meter hurdles at qualifying and in Paris. In all likelihood, she will also run in the 4x400-meter relay, as she did in Tokyo, where she won a second gold. Adding a flat 400 or a flat 200 wasn’t crazy, she had told reporters in Los Angeles. But that wasn’t in the plans … yet. She wanted to defend her title in the event she has long called “my first love.” She could train for the other distances the next time around, if she chose to, when the 2028 Olympics take place in Los Angeles.

If the seesawing schedule presented an issue, it wasn’t evident at the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials. McLaughlin-Levrone ran her preliminary round in a breezy 53.07 seconds. She clocked a 52.58 in her semifinal and promised the Hayward Field crowd the same thing she promised Kersee on Sunday afternoon during warmups: that she would start fast and see what happened. On track, after her semi, she told the crowd she planned to “let it fly”—“it,” in this instance, being her own body—and see what happened. Hence another world record. Or what McLaughlin-Levrone refers to as “Sunday.”

“You’re going to run through that line like you’ve never ran through that line before” @GoSydGo

Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone reacts to her world record race. #TrackFieldTrials24 pic.twitter.com/I097TtzcXS

— NBC Sports (@NBCSports) July 1, 2024

She’ll head to Paris in even better form than when she went to Tokyo. In the interim, she got married, published a book about her life and career and partnered with New Balance on a clothing line. Her chief rival, Dutch hurdler Femke Bol, will be waiting. But come on! The only competition left is fate. It would take an illness, an injury, some sort of calamity to cost her another gold or two next month.

Maybe that’s the Syd-at-Hayward greatness. Maybe it’s just her. Perhaps soon, if not already, Edwin Moses will be the “original male Sydney McLaughlin.”