Stingy steps, lead legs and blazing speed: How Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone dominates
Credit to Author: Katie Barnes| Date: Sat, 3 Aug 2024 06:56:29 EST
SYDNEY McLAUGHLIN-LEVRONE squats on the track and covers her mouth with her hand, her neon nail tips catching the light of the setting sun. The fans at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon, rise from their seats, pump their fists and shout her name. McLaughlin-Levrone looks down toward the track and shakes her head.
As other runners celebrate around her, McLaughlin-Levrone relaxes back on her hands, chest heaving as she catches her breath. She slowly stands up and walks over to the infield, where her husband is waiting. She gives him a quick hug and kiss before slumping to the grass.
The 24-year-old American has just set the world record in the 400-meter hurdles for the fifth time in her career.
She sprinted 400 meters and cleared 10 30-inch hurdles in 50.65 seconds, beating the second-place finisher by six strides and nearly 2 seconds at the U.S. Olympic trials in June. She broke her own world record by .03 seconds.
“I’m amazed, baffled and in shock,” McLaughlin-Levrone said on the track.
It’s a sentiment that track experts share today.
The 400-meter hurdles demands a blend of speed and endurance, precise jumping and flexible thinking. It’s one of the most difficult races in the Olympic program.
“You’ve got barriers that you’ve got to focus on, but you’ve still got to be fast, you’ve still got to be strong,” Arkansas women’s track and field coach Chris Johnson says. “And then, you’ve got to be technically sound. And then, you’ve got to manage the race. And that’s just very hard to do.”
McLaughlin-Levrone, who owns six of the top-10 times ever recorded in the event, does it better than anyone else. How? We asked coaches, hurdlers and even a fellow Olympic gold medalist to break down her path around the track, step by step, and discovered she’s part mathematician, part scientist and part magician.
The quest for the perfect 400-meter hurdles always starts with her right foot. It’s the first one to strike the track after McLaughlin-Levrone bursts out of the starting blocks. It’s also the driving force that propels her 45 meters to the first hurdle.
The opening sprint is the fastest portion of the race. And make no mistake, McLaughlin-Levrone is fast.
She ran the 200 meters at the Los Angeles Grand Prix in May and won it in 22.07 seconds. She blew away a field that featured Gabby Thomas and Brittany Brown, who finished one-two in the U.S. trials and will represent the United States in the 200 in Paris.
At the 2023 U.S. track and field championship, she entered the flat 400 meters, a lap around the track without the hurdles, and she posted the second-best time in U.S. history. Her 48.74 seconds was four-hundredths of a second off the American record held by Sanya Richards-Ross. She proved that was no fluke in June 2024 at the New York City Grand Prix, when she finished in 48.75, the third-fastest time in U.S. history. For further perspective, the top time at the U.S. trials this year was Kendall Ellis’ 49.46.
“The flat speed that she has in the 100 to the 400 is not typical of a 400 hurdler,” says Lashinda Demus, the 2012 Olympic gold medalist and 2011 world champion in the 400-meter hurdles. “She has foot speed to run with the top sprinters in the world.”
It takes McLaughlin-Levrone 22 steps and less than 6 seconds to get to the first hurdle. Cue, once again, her right foot.
Imagine leaping over a Great Dane. That’s the task McLaughlin-Levrone faces 45 meters into the race. At least the hurdle is stationary. The trick is, she doesn’t want to clear it by a lot, but she doesn’t want to clip it, either.
“Getting over quick and low is one of the things we think of,” Demus says. “You don’t want to be in the air too long. You want to get back down to the ground so you can spend more time moving and not floating.”
McLaughlin-Levrone’s right foot leads the way over the first obstacle.
On the other side, she lands on her right foot and continues churning her legs to maintain her momentum.
“You’ll be going so fast it’ll just push you to the second hurdle,” says Rachel Glenn, who finished fifth in the 400-meter hurdles at the U.S. trials but punched her ticket to Paris in the high jump. “And that second hurdle will come up really fast. … Don’t slow down. Don’t speed up. But keep all that momentum that you have.”
About four seconds go by between McLaughlin-Levrone landing for the first time and hurdling for the second. That’s when she shows off her next advantage.
Experts have compared it to being right-handed but writing with your left. McLaughlin-Levrone approaches the second hurdle and this time leads with her left foot to clear it.
Alternating lead legs is something only the most elite hurdlers can do. McLaughlin-Levrone has been doing it since high school. That versatility enables her to avoid the bane of all hurdlers: the stutter step. Aside from crashing into a hurdle, there’s no greater speed killer than having to rearrange your horizontal stride before going vertical. It’s like jamming your feet into quicksand and then jumping 30 inches.
Instead, McLaughlin-Levrone surges as she approaches hurdles, knowing she’ll be fine no matter which leg is up next.
“There’s so many different ways to run it,” she says. “And I feel like every time I’m on the track I’m figuring out, ‘OK, what’s the best way?'”
Her high school coach Michael McCabe struggles to explain her athletic know-how, but one example sticks in his memory. McLaughlin-Levrone had just returned from a college recruiting trip, and they were hanging out in the gym. She picked up a basketball and, he says, made five 3-pointers in a row.
“Form is terrible, but she picks up the ball and can put it in the basket because she just has that athletic IQ,” McCabe says. “She just figures it out.”
Being able to “figure it out” on the fly while sprinting toward a hurdle gives McLaughlin-Levrone a distinct advantage, says Joanna Hayes, who won gold in the 100-meter hurdles at the 2004 Olympics. She also coached McLaughlin-Levrone early in her professional career.
“If you can alternate, you have a benefit over someone that cannot alternate,” says Hayes, now the director of UCLA track and field and cross country, “And that’s really just the bottom line.”
And now, rewind back to that first hurdle and the 35 meters between it and the second hurdle. McLaughlin-Levrone takes 14 steps. Most of her competitors need 15. The fastest men can do it in 13. (Rai Benjamin, who won the 400-meter hurdles at the U.S. trials, has been known to take it down to 12.)
“It’s as simple as that,” Demus says. “She [runs] less steps than everybody else.”
But taking longer strides requires more energy, so there’s an element of risk-reward.
“Your distribution of energy over the races is going to determine, basically, how fast and how well you’re going to run,” Johnson says.
McLaughlin-Levrone and her coach, Bobby Kersee, have worked to perfect her stride pattern for years. Typically, that means the 5-foot-9 McLaughlin takes 14 steps between the second and seventh hurdles and then 15 steps between the final three.
But there’s a reason there’s a saying about the best-laid plans.
“In the 400 hurdles, something is going to happen,” says Glenn, who took third in the NCAA championships for Arkansas in June. “I think it’s just how you react to a mistake and how you correct it as you go along.”
The track looked more like a Slip ‘N Slide when McLaughlin-Levrone won her signature event at the 2018 NCAA championships. The hail and rain had stopped, but puddles were plentiful all along the track’s surface. She crossed the line in a play-it-safe 53.96 seconds, 1.21 seconds off her own collegiate record (which still stands), but 1.75 seconds ahead of the second-place finisher.
At the 2021 U.S. trials, her knee started bleeding after she had to situate herself in the blocks four times after three false starts during her first heat. She cruised to victory in that heat, slowing down the home stretch and conserving energy for the semifinals to come.
There are any of number of things that can distract a runner in a race as technical as the 400 hurdles — wind, adrenaline, fatigue, the competition, the fans. As Glenn says, something is bound to happen in a race that requires competitors to leap 10 times while sprinting around a track.
“If you can’t make that adjustment without panicking and stutter-stepping, then you’re going to be in trouble,” Hayes says.
So it’s not just the physical skills that make McLaughlin-Levrone the best the world has ever seen. It’s also her mental agility.
“It has to be innate and it has to be practiced,” Hayes says. “And understanding, again, the thinking part, understanding that, ‘This is my pattern. This is what I want to run. This is what I normally run … but I know if I have to make an adjustment, I can make it without worrying about it.'”
McLaughlin-Levrone is a talented juggler. She can keep multiple balls (or clubs or rings or scarves) in the air, moving between her hands, while talking about how she learned to juggle in the first place (her fifth-grade teacher taught her). That skill, the coordination between mental and physical focus, is not dissimilar from the task of running around the track while leaping over hurdles and dealing with wind, rain or the inevitability of something not going your way.
Like falling behind in a race for an Olympic gold medal.
Reigning gold medalist Dalilah Muhammad clung to a slight lead over the 10th and final hurdle at the Olympics in Tokyo in 2021. McLaughlin-Levrone, who had fallen victim to the dreaded stutter step in front of the ninth hurdle, was closing fast.
And that brings us back to the original superpower of the New Jersey native who made her first Olympic appearance as a 17-year-old. She’s fast.
“There’s something about her that everybody just does not have,” Hayes says. “It’s just the way she strikes the ground, it’s different from other people. It’s like she’s floating on top of the ground.”
Her ability to harness that superhuman speed and marry it with her technical prowess and adaptability is what allowed McLaughlin-Levrone to catch and pass Muhammad in that gold medal run at the last Olympics.
After running a choppy series of stutter steps into the ninth hurdle and stifling her momentum, McLaughlin-Levrone opened her stride through the 35 meters to the final hurdle. Her final two steps before the last hurdle were nearly bounds. Then she led with her left leg, when she normally clears the 10th hurdle with her right.
All that meant the only thing left was the excruciating sprint to the finish line.
“She knows how to hurt in a race,” McCabe says. “She knows how to pretty much, for however you want to explain it, turn her brain off from the suffering and just race.”
McLaughlin-Levrone covered the last 40 meters between the final hurdle and the finish line in about 5.5 seconds, finishing in 51.46 to set her second world record.
“She’s just so fast,” Demus says.
But the reality, Demus says, is that over the course of the race, all runners slow down. The trick is to slow down slower than everyone else, or run at closer to maximum capacity longer.
“You’re probably running at top end speed for no more than about 50 meters,” Demus says. “And then, the remainder of the race is you just slowly slowing down.”
Here’s the final thing about McLaughlin-Levrone: She has no intention of slowing down. She has set the world record five times and says her next goal is to drop it below 50 seconds. Of course, she also wants another gold.
“Why would [she] still be running if she can’t get better?” Hayes says. “If she has no more goals in that race, she probably would do something different. Sydney, I believe, still has goals.”
While McLaughlin-Levrone considered switching to the flat 400 for Paris, she announced in June that she would be sticking with her “first love.”
Her main competition in Paris looks to be the Netherlands’ Femke Bol, who won bronze in Tokyo and set a European record with a 50.95 last month at the Resisprint La Chaux-de-Fonds. Only Bol and McLaughlin-Levrone have ever run this race under 51 seconds. The first round will be on Aug. 4, the semifinals on Aug. 6 and the finals on Aug. 8.
It well might take a perfect race at the perfect time for McLaughlin-Levrone to become the first woman to defend her Olympic gold medal in the 400-meter hurdles. As Johnson says, “They don’t get no do-overs.”
“She may be super freaked out,” McCabe says, “but she almost never allows that to creep into her performance.”
The pressure to go faster than she’s ever gone before. The pressure to win. The pressure to make history. It’s a lot for anyone, but McLaughlin-Levrone has all the tools.
She has the focus to do it.
“She just has so much confidence and trusts herself so much,” says Texas hurdler Akala Garrett, who finished seventh at the U.S. trials. “She doesn’t limit herself.”
She has the drive to do it.
“She’s worked on her craft, she’s gotten much better, technically,” Johnson says. “And she executes under stress.”
She has the talent to do it.
“When you combine somebody who wants to win and work hard with somebody who is just more naturally gifted than almost anybody I’ve ever seen …” Hayes says, “then she’s going win.”