SAINT-DENIS, France — Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone rounded the final turn on the Stade de France track as the crowd roared. This was supposed to be the night that someone had challenged her stranglehold on the 400-meter hurdles, that finally, a worthy competitor turned this much-anticipated Paris Olympics race into anything but a coronation. But as the Dunellen native hit the seventh hurdle, it was obvious that Dutch star Femke Bol would be just another runner trying for a distant second.
As she cleared the 10th hurdle and strained toward the finish line, the only obstacle in her path was, as usual, track history. McLaughlin-Levrone crossed the finish line in 50.37 seconds, obliterating the record in the event for a sixth time.
She became the first woman to repeat as Olympic champion in the 400 hurdles, winning her third gold medal. She grabbed an American flag from someone in the crowd, stepped back onto the track and stood with it draped over her shoulders. She stood alone.
In a mild surprise, it was fellow American Anna Cockrell who won the silver medal in 51.87, with Bol taking bronze in 52.15.
Cockrell was the first runner to greet McLaughlin-Levrone, sitting on the track with a hug as the world record flashed on the screen. For McLaughlin-Levrone, it was also like winning a college-football road game. She stepped into the stadium to see orange — the distinctive Dutch national colors — in every direction.
They came out to support Bol, who five days earlier had led her nation to a come-from-behind victory in the 4x400 mixed relay to add to her stardom . Bol is the reigning 2023 world champion, and given her steadily improving times, was the best and only rival who could outrun the former Union Catholic star. McLaughlin-Levrone doesn’t do braggadocio.
She used the words “amazed, baffled and in shock” when she set the world record at the U.S. trials back in June, even as she was the only person in the stadium that night who was surprised.
This victory was another chapter in a career that has been defined by her appearances at this quadrennial showcase. In 2016, she was the youngest U.S.
track and field athlete in 36 years when she made the team after her junior year at Union Catholic. She would admit in her autobiography that she was wracked with anxiety and a crippling fear of failure that caused her to take her foot off the gas in the semifinals of the event. The world didn’t see her inner turmoil, though.
It just saw the future of her sport. Then, after a one-year pandemic postponement, the Tokyo Games in 2021 became an official announcement of sorts that she had arrived. She had surpassed a worthy rival in Dalilah Muhammad to set the world record in the 400 hurdles, and inside a nearly empty stadium in Japan, she won her first two Olympic gold medals.
The hype was real. Now, one day after her 25th birthday, McLaughlin-Levrone not only outraced the worthiest rival yet to her dominance in Bol. She managed to win despite the massive expectations on her shoulders.
The world didn’t just expect a good race in her signature event. It expected a glimpse of track greatness , and the former New Jersey high school star delivered. “Pressure is an illusion.
It’s what you make of it,” she said in Tokyo, and if that’s true, few athletes in Paris have made more of it. This was a night for Olympic drama. An hour before McLaughlin-Levrone came onto the track, American sprinter Noah Lyles lined up in an attempt to become the first American since Carl Lewis in 1984 to win the sprint double.
But Lyles, who won the 100 meters in a photo finish, finished a stunning third as if to prove that these races are not a forgone conclusion for anyone. Fittingly, Lewis was in the stadium for the ceremonial les trois coups , or the banging of a stick called a brigadier three times to open the night’s competition. The Willingboro native, with 10 Olympic medals, is New Jersey’s undisputed greatest track and field athlete.
But the hurdler he watched from a luxury box is gaining on him. McLaughlin-Levrone became just the fifth American ever to win the same track event in back-to-back Games. The others — Wyomia Tyus (100 meters), Jackie Joyner-Kersee became (heptathlon), Gail Devers (100 meters) and Valarie Allman (discus) — include some of the all-time greats in track history.
The hurdles victory, and a possible second gold in the 4x400 relay on Saturday night, puts McLaughlin-Levrone on a similar trajectory. The 400 hurdles is widely regarded as one of the most difficult events in track in that it requires speed, endurance and a degree of troubleshooting. No woman has done it better than the New Jersey native.
From her days dominating meets in Central Jersey, McLaughlin-Levrone has been on a path from nearly the moment her father, Willie, first bribed his then 6-year-old daughter to run with chocolate bars. She broke records at Union Catholic, was named Gatorade’s national track athlete of the year twice and turned pro after a single college season at Kentucky. “It is a little scary, knowing that you have an example to set as well as being able to compete and perform,” McLaughlin said during a daylong visit with NJ Advance Media in her Southern California home a few years ago, not long after signing the star-driven agency WME to represent her.
“But it’s what I want to do and what I’m in the sport to do.” On Thursday night in Paris, it’s exactly what she did again. MORE N.
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