EUGENE (Oregon), July 23: In the hurdles world before Sydney McLaughlin, it took years to shave fractions of seconds off records, and winning races didn’t always mean rewriting history.
This once-in-a-lifetime athlete is obliterating that mindset as quickly as she’s destroying the records she sets again and again.
For the fourth time in 13 months, the 22-year-old McLaughlin set the world record. On Friday, she ran the 400-meter hurdles at world championships in 50.68 seconds. She shattered her old mark by 0.73 seconds, a ridiculous number for a race of this distance and an amount of time that, in the world before McLaughlin, it had taken 33 years to trim.
She beat second-place finisher Femke Bol of the Netherlands by 1.59 seconds. McLaughlin’s main rival, Dalilah Muhammad, finished third in 53.13 seconds, a time that would’ve won the world title with ease a mere seven years ago.
And yet, as McLaughlin summed up her takeaways from the evening – an evening in which she delivered in a race she has turned into one of track’s must-see events – she was far from ready to declare she had run the perfect race.
The 400-hurdles record of 52.34, held by Yuliya Pechonkina of Russia, had sat on the books for 16 years when Muhammad, not McLaughlin, lowered it to 52.20 at US championships in Iowa in 2019. (AP)
