Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone sets world record in Olympic Trials finale

EUGENE — Amid a roar that had been building all afternoon, filling Hayward Field to its brim with a noise that now seemed like it would echo all the way to Paris, one woman had been rendered speechless.

Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone stood just past the finish line of the Olympic Trials 400-meter hurdles final and looked up at the scoreboard.

When the giant board flashed 50.65 seconds, a new world record, she covered her mouth with both hands, a gesture that could not conceal her disbelief.

“Honestly I was not expecting that,” McLaughlin-Levrone said. “I’m just amazed, baffled and in shock.”

In that regard McLaughlin-Levrone might have been as alone as she was in her record breaking triumph.

“She sets the world record and we’re not even shocked,” said Dalilah Muhammad, the 2016 Olympic champion who held the world record in the event before McLaughlin-Levrone.

McLaughlin-Levrone’s fifth world record in three years capped what even before she stepped onto the track might have been the best single day at the Trials this century. All five races before McLaughlin-Levrone’s grand finale produced meet records. Two of them, Rai Benjamin’s 46.46 win in the men’s 400 hurdles and Masai Russell’s 12.25 victory in the 100 hurdles, resulted in world leading marks.

Russell will be joined in Paris by Alaysha Johnson and Grace Stark, second and third respectively, both clocked in 12.31, also under Gail Devers’ 24-year-old meet record (12.33). Johnson is unsponsored and ran in hand me down shoes given to her Tonea Marshall, who finished fifth (12.38) between Nia Ali, a three-time world champion (12.37), and former world record-holder Keni Harrison (12.39).

Nikki Hiltz won the 1,500 in 3 minutes, 55.53 seconds as six runners were ran under the previous Trials record (3:58.03) and eight were under 4:00. The crowd was first brought to its feet by a dramatic final 400 in the day’s first race, the 5,000, in which Grant Fisher, who won the 10,000 on the opening night of the Trials, just held off Abdi Nur 13:08.85 to 13:09.01 as the first seven men finished under Galen Rupp’s 12-year-old Trials record (13:22.67).

Bryce Hoppel’s 1:42.77 broke an 800 meet record that had stood for 32 years. Behind him runner-up and training partner Hobbs Kessler, third earlier in the 1,500, ran a personal best 1:43.64 to become the first American male to make the Olympic team in the 800 and 1,500 since Rick Wohlhuter in 1976.

Hoppel, a former NCAA champion at Kansas, joined the training group led by former Michigan coach Ron Warhurst last November.

“He passed the inspection,” Kessler said.

“Track and field is on the up and up,” Benjamin said. “This weekend shows it, with the emergence of the Grand Slam Track (grand prix style circuit promoted by Olympic champion Michael Johnson) and everyone running fast and all the major hitters coming on this weekend shows where we are. Stadiums are packed. People are running fast. And you know what was happening this weekend. Noah (Lyles) running 19.5 (in the 200). The 110 hurdles 13.03 got leff off the team.

“It’s phenomenal what’s happening right now.”

But even in what Sebastian Coe, the former Olympic champion and president of track’s global governing body, calls a “golden generation,” McLaughlin-Levrone stands out; an athlete who”Sydney McLaughlin is Sydney McLaughlin,” Benjamin said. “Sydney McLaughlin is not Simone Biles. She’s Sydney McLaughlin and I think she carries her own weight and carries it well.”

She has carried that weight since she made her first Olympic team as a 16-year-old New Jersey high school junior in 2016. McLaughlin-Levrone became the first woman to break 52 seconds in the 400 hurdles with her 51.90 win at the 2021 Trials. A year she returned to Hayward Field to become the first woman under 51 with her 50.68 victory at the 2022 World Championships. In between she won the Tokyo Olympics in a world record 51.46 and then lowered the mark again at the 2022 U.S. Championships.

“Every single time she gets on the track people are expecting her to break a record,” Benjamin said. “Which is insane every single time to get on the track. And I think we kind of got lulled into this, this state of just fast times and everybody expects it every time because it’s like a dopamine spike.”

And now the expectation is that it’s only matter of time that the first woman under 52 and 51 seconds breaks the 50 second barrier.

“She can break 49,” Muhammad said. “I still believe that.”

Even McLaughlin-Levrone has not shied away from taking aim at sub-50.

“It’s really exciting, thinking about how to improve upon history,” she said. “That’s always something I’m looking at.”

“The record is going to take care of itself,” said Bobby Kersee, McLaughlin-Levrone’s coach.

Sunday’s world record was vindication for Kersee who has been criticized for his handling of

McLaughlin-Levrone and Athing Mu, the 2021 Olympic 800 meter champion who fell in the Trials’ 800 final and did not make the Olympic team.

“One-hundred percent vindicated him,” Benjamin said of Kersee.

Kersee was in a car speeding up Interstate 5 en route to the Portland International Airport for a flight back to Los Angeles later Sunday night during the 400 hurdles final, trying unsuccessfully to get the race to come up on his Peacock app.

Kersee is a anxious and superstitious soul who has a practice of leaving the stadium during races.”This is the fifth world record (by one of his athletes) that I’ve missed,” he said.

But the news of record did not surprise him.

“Through the (qualifying rounds) she was as smooth as I’ve seen her,” Kersee said.

Much of the criticism of Kersee has focused on McLaughlin-Levrone and Mu’s limited racing schedule and that McLaughlin-Levrone skipped foreign meets on the Diamond League circuit.

McLaughlin-Levrone raced the 400 hurdles only once this season before the Trials, focusing on the 100 hurdles, 400 and 200.

“I stand by the main thing that I did which was not racing her in Europe,” Kersee said. “We had enough good American meets.

“I think the we would have seen similar results here for Athing too if she hadn’t gotten hurt,” Kersee continued referring to a hamstring injury that left Mu, a question mark only days before the Trials. “Athing would have run below 1:54, high 1:53 if everything had come together.”

(Mu, Kersee said, will run a “couple of races in the States” in the coming weeks “and put up a couple of good times and then we’ll wait and see who wins the (Olympic 800) gold medal and hopefully they’ll give us a shot after the Olympic Games.)

“People give her a lot of sh– for not racing throughout the years,” Benjamin said. “But I think people don’t understand the enormous sacrifice and the enormous pressure that those women are under to perform well.

“There should be more kindness and more understanding towards her and Athing. Look at what happened she didn’t really race much this season and she came out and broke the world record. So like just leave her alone. Let Bobby Kersee do what he does and let Sydney McLaughlin do what she does.”