The hurdles are just sidewalk cracks for McLaughlin-Levrone

The five-time world record holder is set to lead Team USA into Paris.

It is the most demanding and least merciful event in track and/or field, or at least it was until Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone started running it.

The 400 meter hurdles is its own animal. It asks for high-speed precision. Hurdlers count the steps between each barrier. The number will determine which leg attacks the hurdle first. Bobby Kersee, McLaughlin-Levrone’s coach, says it’s like deciding to write something down lefthanded, while running a lap in 50 or so seconds.

The “flat” 400, which McLaughlin can also run at Olympic levels, is also considered a torture chamber. But the 400-hurdle club is more exclusive. Edwin Moses, who figured out how to run 12 steps between hurdles, won 122 consecutive races. “Crazy people,” he once said, “run this race.”

Now we’re in a year divisible by four, which means Americans will put down their preoccupations to watch the Olympics in August. McLaughlin-Levrone is nearing that hurdle in perfect rhythm. She won the gold medal in Tokyo three years ago and is the reigning World Champion, and at the Olympic Trials she won with a time of 50.65 seconds, the fifth time she has set a world record. Anna Cockrell finished second to McLaughlin-Levrone. She was 1.99 seconds behind her. That’s Secretariat stuff.

At the 2021 Olympic trials, McLaughlin-Levrone became the first woman to break 52 seconds, going 51.90 to lower the world record by .26 seconds, a feat that some likened to Bob Beamon’s 1968 long jump. She’s simply running a different race from anyone else, a feeling that swimmer Katie Ledecky and not many other people have experienced.

The time between start and finish is the easiest part for McLaughlin-Levrone. For years, everything else was a struggle. When she first attended the Olympic Trials, as a 16-year-old in 2016, McLaughlin-Levrone admitted she gave up the fight in the semifinals. She was wracked by nerves and her own expectations.

“I slowed down to make sure I wouldn’t make it to the finals,” she wrote in her book, “Far Beyond Gold.”

“Still, I have grace for young Sydney. She was absolutely terrified of what would come next. I crossed the finish line in 56.2 seconds. As soon as the race was over, my inner voice practically screamed, ‘Yes, your season is done!’’’

She had been a brilliant high school performer in north Jersey. Both her parents were runners. Neither was pushy. Her  dad Willie would tell her, “Be the butterfly” before every race, a reference to Muhammad Ali. But while the rest of the track world was recognizing McLaughlin-Levrone’s outrageous talent, she was trying to smooth out her general anxiety, and navigating several romantic breakups.

Only when she met Andre Levrone through Instagram did she find her proper lane. Levrone played football for Virginia for the Baltimore Ravens. He was a committed Christian, while McLaughlin-Levrone had dutifully attended church but never processsed it. As the couple slowly developed a relationship without skipping steps, McLaughlin-Levrone began to run down her dreams, none of which were as wild as the reality she writes.

Track and field is always the fulcrum of the Games. Those who actually visited the 2012 Games in London know that Usain Bolt, not LeBron James or anyone else, was the main attraction, and when Bolt lined up in the makeshift Olympic Stadium for the 100 meters, it was so quiet you could almost hear Big Ben ticking. Noah Lyles of the U.S. tries to fill that void, through his mouth and his feet; he won the 100 and 200 at the Trials. But both sides of the 400 hurdles will elbow their way to the fore.

The men’s race could, and should, provide another matchup between Norway’s Karsten Warholm and Rai Benjamin of the U.S. Both of them obliterated the world record in Tokyo. Warholm ran 45.94, Benjamin 46.17. Benjamin, in fact, was .53 seconds below the world record, which would have been the largest improvement on the record in 53 years. It has been called the best race in the history of the Olympics, if not track and field.

 “If you’d told me I would run 46.1 and lose, I would have told you to go to your room,” Benjamin said. The two have extended the story since, with Benjamin and Warholm trading victories on the European circuit.

Shortly before Warholm and Benjamin redefined the event in Tokyo, Warholm ran 46.70 in Oslo. That broke Kevin Young’s record of 46.78. Young did that at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Moses had the previous record, at 47.02, and Hungarian analysts said Young’s masterpiece was the equivalent of a 30-foot long jump.

Young grew up in Compton, Ca., across the street from the Watts Towers, and was familiar with gangs. He went to UCLA, overcome dyslexia to graduate, worked with coach John Smith, found his spotlight overseas. In Brussels he heard the crowd count the steps he was taking between hurdles, the way they once did with Moses.

“Our goal is to make sure this event is identified with Kevin Young,” Smith said at the time, and Young held that record for nearly three decades.

Track and field notoriety is a curious case. Runners and pole vaulters and even shot putters were commonplace on Sports Illustrated’s covers. But the networks, and most fans, abandoned the sport when Ben Johnson, Florence Griffith Joyner and others were caught in drug scandals. Others who were never busted were tainted by association. Carl Lewis was respected within the sport but never revered by the public.

Michael Johnson, who made the 1996 Atlanta Games historic, is promoting a track-only circuit that will both hasten and simplify the sport. Netflix premiered a documentary series on July 2, in hopes of duplicating the Drive To Survive shows that have put a charge into Formula One racing.

Meanwhile, the U.S. keeps pumping out sprint and hurdle champions and has made impressive headway in distance events. It doesn’t need a star. It has several. It just needs witnesses who know just what it means,, each time McLaughlin-Levrone beats the clock.