There is the contest between the lanes and the contest beyond them. A pistol pops, cleats bite rubber, and for approximately 50 seconds, 10 sets of hurdles transform from stumbling blocks to the grounds for expression in Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone’s inner, sanctified realm. Win, lose, skip, skid, fly, crash: Everything here is fair. Everything is good.
The price of good is that it’s fleeting. Oldest story around. Good appears one day, only to dissolve the next. It becomes nothing in her slender palms—the ones she’s surrendered to the racetrack at countless starting lines, held up in devout supplication to her God, clenched and pumped to the tune of two Olympic golds, three World Championships, and a world record that she won’t stop shaving decimals off of. Such is the nature of her calling. Years of labor are condensed to minutes—and then, no matter how stirring a performance, it ends the same each time, always whisked offstage.
Sydney calls this disappearing act “limbo.” The lulls of a lifetime spent in dedication to moments that scatter as quickly as they occur. Her unmaking hides in this tension, in the unavoidable “What now?” that undergirds her craft like the polyurethane she so expertly navigates. Expectation and self-perception tend to collide. Bit by bit, fear by fear, insecurity by insecurity, she is torn apart. Laid bare, from within and without. Even at her pace—especially at her pace—there is no bypassing the valley of the shadow of doubt.
“[It] can be maddening if you allow it to,” she testifies, as much with her eyes as with her words. “Because it is. I mean, it can consume you if you allow it to.”
So she wraps herself up. In bundles of scripture, first and foremost. Ask Sydney what keeps her stitched together in the latest maelstrom and she’ll tell you Proverbs 29:25:
The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the Lord shall be safe.
She will speak of mindfulness and ordained gifts to shepherd and the refuge of family. She will sometimes tie herself in knots. Downplay an entire adulthood spent in the public eye (“I honestly hate even using the word famous”) while pinpointing which of its confines she most chafes under (“Sometimes I miss the not having people know everything about you”). Once even divulging—according to a coach—that though she thinks of various futures atop podiums, draped in flags and precious metals, the mind of the most prematurely prodigious athlete in the history of American running sometimes wanders to a quiet, penitent life, where she is just the wife of a pastor.
Just a figure out of frame.
She’s in the picture now. Wedged between discount DVDs and Bruno Mars CDs, Sydney sits front and center in an outmoded Barnes & Noble, itself the crown jewel of an even more dated suburban New Jersey mall. Fifteen miles from the town where she grew up, a line of fans clutching the track star’s recently released memoir snakes its way around the aisles leading to her perch. She’s gripping a Sharpie as she greets each visitor, peering directly at them, sometimes standing to pose for a photo. It’s less cutthroat competitor than savvy diplomat.
Sydney, in a chunky, gray sweater and pale, collared shirt, shakes hands, swirls her signature, and periodically nods her head. “I’m an introvert, but I have extroverted tendencies,” she later tells me. “I can do well in very outgoing settings, but I need to recharge.”
The crowd skews younger and giddier than what the book—a rumination on faith, mental health, and resolve—would seem to invite. Team USA Nike gear is the standard uniform. Folks fret over properly operating their iPhone cameras. At one point, a teen bawls tears of joy into her mother’s arms as they leave the meet and greet. About half an hour in, the Olympian even obliges another visitor with a FaceTime request, waving to their phone and signing their copy without breaking her smile. “She’s very gracious when it comes to that,” her father, Willie, says, watching from afar. “She gets it from her mother.”
In the seven months between that evening and the Summer Games, Sydney would put the finishing touches on a training regimen that she hopes will propel her to her second straight individual Olympic gold. Since the Tokyo Games in 2021—buoyed by her coach, the legendary Bob Kersee—she’s widened her on-track horizons, competing in multiple events, most notably the 400-meter flat. In June, she’d break her own world record in the 400-meter hurdles at the U.S. Olympic trials. Now, this Thursday, she’ll compete in the women’s Olympic final for the event.
Six years after having first gone pro, the 25-year-old rarely registers in diamond-league races, the most common high-level competitions in the sport. A portion of this is tactical—when you’re the best at your event, the benefits of longer recovery periods often outweigh those of frequent meets. But another part is more personal: Sydney, who recently married, tells me she tries to think of herself as an athlete for only “so many hours of the day.” It’s a lesson she’s gleaned in losses, but also in wins. Hide your legend far enough out of sight, and you might just find enough space to surpass it. Hers is a life guided by both devotion and acceptance, and the balance between the two. On the track, as away from it, the challenge of upholding one often complicates the impact of the other.
“She’s always on the cutting edge. It’s just so much work, so much pressure,” her father says, proud but protective. “To perform at the level that she does, there’s a cost to that.”
The cost of a dash back when she couldn’t tie her laces was no less than a king-size Hershey’s bar. Willie McLaughlin knew his daughter was special from the first time she stepped on a track, though he was not above coaxing an appearance out of her. According to the family, Sydney ran her first competitive 100 meters at the age of 6, and this and other efforts were, for a time, compensated with chocolate. That is, until she found something sweeter between the lanes. She sprang up from a clan of athletes—a father who’d made it to the semifinals of the 1984 U.S. Olympic trials for the 400-meter; a mother who’d filed her half-mile time to two minutes and 12 seconds; an older brother who’d go on to run for the University of Michigan.
By the time Sydney arrived in high school, each member of the household was united in their appraisal: She would be the best of them. She still looked like a kid her freshman year, with a frame as long as it was wiry. It took only a few practices for her coach at Union Catholic High School to see that she stuck out from her peers, like the ribbon atop her hair. She was the best underclassman on the team, boys or girls.
The most common question she got during her first year at the academy was whether she was actually a freshman. Brush shoulders in the hallway, and you might not even know she was an athlete, but spot her in the homestretch of some invitational, and your eyebrows would be practically singed. A Lambo in the shell of a Honda, she has a look that’s never been singular, but her movement profile is—and once she gets going, there are few things capable of pushing her off the road. “Almost like in real time, she could make adjustments,” her high school coach, Mike McCabe, remembers. “She could do things quickly that might take somebody two weeks to figure out. She could do it in seconds.”
During her first indoor meet of her freshman year, she broke the school’s 300-meter record. By the time the outdoor season started, she was already showing up in the local papers. In her first outdoor meet, not only did she outrun the school’s 400-meter hurdle record, she clocked in at a little over a minute, a D-I-caliber split at the time. Within three months, she’d cut another six seconds off her personal record, an eon in the event. The next winter, she ran the third-fastest 60-meter hurdle time in U.S. high school history.
There was a part of her dominance that was, like any prodigy’s, a boon of sheer ability, cosmic fortune, and genealogy. But the higher and faster she rose, the more that rise was fueled by the work along the margins, in the crevices of athletic ingenuity where faculty, force, and fastidiousness fold into one. She was beyond her years in competition but also in tactical command. On the same days when Sydney would beat her opponents by enough distance to make it seem plausible that her lane didn’t have hurdles, she’d nitpick her form after the meets. Where peers moved through quicksand at the end of races, hamstrung by their physiology, Sydney outmaneuvered each sinkhole. At 15 years old, she’d lap the field and spend her time afterward geeking out about running “more fluent,” improving not just her diet or her training hours, but her “whole mindset.”
Her mindset was shredded—for the first but not the last time—on a July day in mid-2016. Forty-five minutes before her opening women’s 400-meter hurdle race in the U.S. Olympic trials, Sydney was certain she had to get out of there. She’d describe it as a “mental breakdown.” “In my mind,” she later recalled, “I didn’t want to run.” She was 16, potentially the youngest American competitor at the Summer Games in half a century. McCabe, her high school coach, held her feet to the fire or at least outlasted her angst.
Sydney advanced in that first race, then another, and another, all the way to the final round of the trials. In videos, you can see her feeling her way through the finishing contest, processing her surroundings, calculating her choices, one metal obstacle at a time. She is a girl among grown women. Her face is still decidedly cherubic, her legs like rubber stilts, but her eyes betray little by way of emotion. About two-thirds of the way through the contest, she cuts down the distance between her and the pack of main front-runners and manages to steal third, qualifying by a few fluid, effortless strides. (The woman she beat out for the final spot told reporters afterward that the high schooler was “the truth.”)
A few weeks later, at Estádio Olímpico Nilton Santos in Rio, a similar breakdown cost her a chance at a medal in the 2016 Summer Games. Physically, Sydney was ready to compete on the world stage. If she had run close to her personal record of a little more than 54 seconds, she would’ve earned fifth in the event. But internally, she’d picked herself raw. “I was like, ‘I’m going to be the one that fails and that we don’t make Team USA top three,’” she told me. “To the point where I was like, ‘Dang, I don’t even want to make the final,’ and just allowed that to dissuade me.” In the end, she didn’t get past the semifinal.
For another 16-year-old, the appearance would’ve been their crowning achievement. For Sydney, it was both a searing and public failure, and the moment when her life changed fundamentally.
When she came back to New Jersey, she did so not just as some high schooler. She won the Gatorade high school athlete of the year award in back-to-back years. She appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. The sport that she’d wrapped herself up in since she could remember became something different because she had become something different too. Fans from all over the state arrived at track meets to observe her. One opposing coach, in trying to describe the phenomenon, actually uttered the words, “She is the spark that ignites the roaring fire, and others cannot help but be warmed by her flame.”
A competitor from another school asked for her autograph at a bathroom stall. Folks clung to the closest viewpoints at stadiums. Anything to get a look.
“You go to meets and kids wanted to meet her and get her autograph,” McCabe remembers. “Kids at meets that she was racing against.” Sydney’s parents studied the stories of other sporting prodigies and committed to doing everything possible in her late teens to allow her to have a sense of normalcy. Eventually, she would attend the University of Kentucky for a single season, temporarily forgoing a likely seven-figure payday. While she was in undergrad, her parents scouted the major agencies that they knew she would eventually need to consider signing with, hoping to shield her from the burdens and responsibilities of such a young professional career.
While Sydney remembers their efforts with pride and gratitude, she looks back on that time in her life and acknowledges that no amount of sheltering could ever totally insulate the person going through it. “Especially at that age, you’re like, ‘Listen. You give me attention. You give me the opportunity,’” she says. “You don’t know what’s going to come with all that.” While her first few years as a pro showed the same kind of rapid growth that had defined her amateur career, she struggled, at least initially, to defeat American champion Dalilah Muhammad on the international stage. In the 2019 World Championships, Sydney moved with ruthless efficiency only to stutter toward the end of the eighth set of hurdles, costing her a chance to finally top Muhammad (who broke her own world record). At 19, Sydney had just run the third-fastest time in the history of the sport, a new personal best. And yet the consensus, internally and externally, was that the prodigy that was promised had yet to fully break through.
Nothing was broken, but there was something to fix. Around the beginning of the pandemic, unfulfilled by her performance in her two years as a pro, Sydney hired Bob Kersee as her personal coach. Kersee, who has spent the better part of the past 50 years helping prodigious talents maximize their lives on the track, had seen her career blossom from afar. Up close, he eschewed a comprehensive overhaul of her speed training, instead focusing on her fluidity between hurdles and her overall mental endurance. Of the utmost importance, he emphasized shrinking the amount of steps she took between hurdles, from the standard 15 in the women’s game to 14, a tactic frequently used in men’s races.
The results were emphatic, in both style and function. Almost immediately, her speed between each set of hurdles increased, giving her a leg up on opponents—particularly toward the ends of races, already her bread and butter. Even as a teen, she was the single smoothest hurdler on either foot since two-time gold medalist Edwin Moses. Now, she was also the most efficient, cutting down opponents when facing deficits, surging past them when running even. Stylistically, it all combined to solidify her standing as perhaps the single most artful mover on a track since Usain Bolt. Watch her form approaching and eluding a hurdle close enough, and it looks like ballet on rubber.
Competitively, the impact of the shift has been staggering. At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Sydney won her first individual gold, becoming the youngest medalist in event history. The next year she won her first World Championship in Eugene, Oregon, setting a new world record and beating her longtime rival Muhammad by two and a half seconds. Two years later, she broke her own world record, the first in a series of milestones. Today, six of the top 10 race times in the event belong to her, despite the fact that times are going down all over the sport. Her most recent personal best, set in June during the U.S. trials in Eugene, would’ve been only a little over a second off the medal stand of the women’s flat 400-meter in the Tokyo Olympics. She’s continued that dominance in Paris: On Tuesday, she beat the second-closest competitor in her heat by 1.5 seconds as she qualified for the finals.
On Wednesday, she celebrates her 25th birthday. While barely scratching her apex, she’s managed to become the first hurdler ever seen as the face of the USATF team. She has her own signature collection with New Balance; she even appears to be on the cusp of becoming part of that ever-so-rare stratum of Olympic athletes who can break through the once-every-four-years news cycle that dominates her sport. She makes teenage girls cry at book signings and has competitors racing for second place, and, to top it all off, she’s turned a notoriously unpopular event into must-see TV. What unites the little girl who took candy bribes, the teenager who could qualify for an Olympic roster alongside athletes 10 years her senior, and the champion, who at 25 is so dominant that she can swap events, is this sheer force of athletic gravity, the way she pulls everyone in eyesight into her orbit.
“She has something about her that is just absolutely phenomenal,” women’s USATF head coach LaTanya Sheffield says. “And people want a piece of that, want to be near that. They want to experience that. They want to see it. They want to feel it. They want to touch it. They wanna use whatever sense that they can to get close to that. Because you don’t see that every day. And even as head coach of the Olympic team, I want to be near that.”
Sydney knows the difference, of course, between attention and bona fide empathy. She understands that all the work she’s done in the dark—in gym rooms, recovery pools, training sessions, strategy meetings—will never truly make it out of the shadows. That for as much as folks are drawn to her, they may never understand her or the life she’s constructed out of blessings and diligence. That the only one who can trace how she got here is the woman she looks at in the mirror.
“Talent is a part of it, but the amount of detail that goes into the work every single day is immense,” Sydney tells me. “It’s very specific, and it’s very rigorous. Our bodies actually are not supposed to do some of the things that we do. We’re not supposed to run as fast as we do or lift as much as we do. That’s why injuries make us age prematurely. … Until people really see what that looks like daily, it’s hard to really understand how intense that process is.”
She is, again and again, revisiting her private realm. Only she knows the pathway. Only she knows which journey will be her last. On Thursday, crouched at the starting line, she’ll talk to herself, or her God, or all 10 ordained obstacles that stand in her way. The hard part is over. She’s past all shadows of doubt. The course of good. “There’s certain races that I’ve run, and I don’t even really remember what happened because my body just took over. And it’s like the most beautiful time,” she says, awaiting the next contest—between lanes and beyond.
“This is my expression of me.”
