Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone: “This is a huge challenge”

Hurdles world record-holder discusses the enormity of the task she has set herself in going for 400m gold in Tokyo

When Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone competes at a major championships, the world expects to see records being broken. On no fewer than six occasions, the American has produced the fastest time in history over the 400m hurdles – most recently with her command performance of 50.37 in winning her second consecutive Olympic gold in Paris last summer. 

At this month’s world championships in Tokyo she is returning to the scene of another of those historic runs – the 51.46 that took her to a maiden Olympic title in 2021. However, this time she will be tackling a different event. 

The 26-year-old has chosen, instead, to embrace a fresh challenge and focus all of her energies into the flat 400m. It is a task she is relishing, having first hoped to do it in 2023 before a knee injury derailed that plan, but it will be far from easy.

While McLaughlin-Levrone has been streets ahead when it comes to the hurdles, in the flat 400m she is the hunter rather than the hunted. Her time of 48.90 in winning the US trials was just two tenths of a second shy of the national record set by Sanya Richards-Ross 48.70 in 2006, but Bahrain’s former world champion Salwa Eid Naser (48.67), and reigning world and Olympic champion Marileidy Paulino of the Dominican Republic (48.81) have gone quicker in 2025.

The 400m world record of 47.60 was set in 1985 by East Germany’s Marita Koch but is a mark that is viewed with great suspicion given the nation’s systematic doping of their athletes at the time. Though McLaughlin-Levrone believes it can be beaten in future, she isn’t expecting it to be threatened in Tokyo. What she is expecting, however, is some strong competition from the likes of Paulino and Eid Naser, albeit the latter’s career has also been blighted by doping following her two-year ban in 2021 due to whereabouts failures.

“It’s a long-standing record for sure and a very fast time,” McLaughlin-Levrone said of Koch’s record, on a World Athletics media call. “I think, over the past few years, the performances that we have put on have created an appetite for records whenever I step on the track which, to a degree, I guess is fair. 

“But, at the same time, those come when they come and – especially an event like the 400m – takes time. It takes a lot of learning the event. There’s always a question when…