EUGENE, Oregon – The 2024 U.S. track and field Trials came to a close Sunday with Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone winning the women’s 400-meter hurdles, and in world record time, 50.65 seconds. “Honestly… when I crossed the line,” she said, “I was, like, oh, snap.”
Sydney is a generational talent. She is so ridiculously good, almost two full seconds ahead of runner-up Anna Cockrell, in 52.64, she might well do in Paris in the 400 hurdles what most world-class female racers can only dream of in the open 400 – run in 49 seconds. Sydney is so good she has run the fastest time in the world this year in the open 400, 48.75 seconds. But she’s not going to run that in Paris. Only the 400 hurdles.
Sydney is so good that her 400 hurdles now is like a men’s 400 hurdles featuring Edwin Moses in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Edwin won 122 in a row. Sydney doesn’t race that often. Not hardly. Still, the point is the same. With respect to Holland’s Femke Bol, until proven otherwise, it’s not who’s going to win. It’s how much by.
This is why they very deliberately scheduled her race at Hayward Field for the very last one on the program, after 10 days – the best for last, all that.
Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone at the finish line in world-record time, Anna Cockrell behind to the right // Getty Images
Any edition of the Trials, especially now amid the inevitable – on some level understandable – coronation and adoration of Sydney is necessarily an exercise in numbers and math. Like 50.65.
The thing, though, that makes the Trials perhaps the greatest run in sports, the unrelenting pressure to make the hardest team in the world – and here the track Trials, without argument more than the swim Trials, because track and field is far more diverse – is not the unforgiving numbers. It’s the people. Their stories.
A race like Sunday’s women’s 400 hurdles, though, tends not to be about all nine people but more about one. Sydney. “She’s really fast and she’s really strong,” Cockrell said. “It’s hard to put it any other way.” This explains the schedule of the Trials. But not the magic, the reason the Trials holds the imagination, in the United States and beyond.
It is not, can never be, about simply a single star.
It is the dream.
“You don’t need anyone but yourself,” CJ Allen, runner-up in Sunday’s men’s 400 hurdles, told an appreciative crowd gathered late Sunday at Hayward’s western side to celebrate Trials’ medalists. He has finished his master’s and, as he told reporters a few minutes before, a doctorate: “If you want it, and you’re dedicated enough and consistent, it’s possible.”
The dream is indeed that I-can-do-it that burns inside each of us, and at these Trials it manifested itself multiple times in multiple ways — for instance, 16-year-old Quincy Wilson learning Sunday night he had scored a spot on the men’s 4x400 relay team after finishing sixth last Monday in the open 400.
Then there was the race that perhaps most plainly illustrated everything about the Trials: Saturday’s women’s 200. Three years (Tokyo, COVID) wrapped into 22 or so seconds. All nine finalists had the Olympic standard. Only three could go to Paris.
So many stories.
And tears.
The defending Olympic champion in the women’s 100 and 200, Jamaica’s Elaine Thompson-Herah, is out because of an Achilles tear. If prospects in Paris for American sprinters are all the more intriguing, the pressure before Saturday’s race in Eugene was all the more pressing.
“Sending the best of the best, that’s for sure. These ladies earned it,” said Abby Steiner, who would finish sixth.
A quick recap:
Gabby Thomas would win the race, in 21.81; Brittany Brown taking second, in 21.90; McKenzie Long, third, 21.90.
3-1-2 in the women’s 200: McKenzie Long, Gabby Thomas, Brittany Brown // USATF
At the finish line of the women’s 200 // USATF
Sha’Carri Richardson, the 100 winner a few days before, took fourth, 22.16.
Thomas, winner of bronze in the 200 in Tokyo, had run 21.78, the world’s best time this year, in the semifinals.
The back story for the 27-year-old Thomas:
She studied neurobiology at Harvard. She then earned a master’s degree at the University of Texas. At night, she works in an Austin volunteer health clinic for people without insurance. When Gabby and her twin brother were little, their mother waitressed and took classes to become a professor.
“She showed me in real time growing up what it’s like to go after your dreams and to achieve them, and to become successful,” Thomas has said.
Racing out in Lane 8, she won, in 21.81 seconds, and said after, “There were so many nerves going on in the moment. I can breathe now.”
Brown, 29, grew up east of Los Angeles. She did not win a California high school championship. She went to Iowa, not a classic track school. At her first meet as a pro, in Switzerland, she finished dead last.
When she was younger, she has said, she recorded herself on an iPod nano, “a little monologue,” watching Michael Phelps swim at the Games:
“I said something along the lines of, ‘Michael Phelps, I just watched you, you’re so amazing, I want to be like you one day, you reached all your goals and I hope to do that one day.’”
At the 2019 world championships in Doha, Brown took silver in the 200, behind Britain’s Dina Asher-Smith. In Eugene for the 2021 Trials, she did not make it out of the rounds; she did not go to Tokyo. Then she got hurt. A signal that she was back, in a big way, came in late May, at the Oslo Diamond League, when, running in Lane 8, which there is literally against the retaining wall, she won in 22.32, beating – among others – Marie-Joseé Ta Lou-Smith of the Ivory Coast and Shericka Jackson of Jamaica.
On Saturday, again in the outside lane, here Lane 9, Brown crossed in 21.90. A personal best. From a lane where she could not see anyone behind her.
Pause. Appreciate. Do you know how tough that is?
“It is hard running blind like that,” Steiner, who was in the center of the track, in Lane 5, would say. “She fought for that. She wanted it. A lot of respect to her for doing that out of Lane 9, for sure.”
And to pull it off at exactly the right moment?
“I just did this four weeks ago in Oslo,” Brown said. “I’m so grateful for even the hard stuff. And the weird stuff. I’m just super-grateful.”
Long, 23, is from Pickerington, Ohio, southeast of Columbus. She went to college at NC State, then Ole Miss. Just a few weeks ago, she won both the NCAA 100 and 200 meters. She had the best 200 time in the world this season – run June 8 here in Eugene at the NCAA championships – until Thomas’ semi 21.78. Long ran here at the Trials in the 100, too, but did not make the final.
Shortly before the season started, Long’s mother, Tara Jones, 45, died of a heart attack. At the NCAA meet, Long told reporters she believes she talks to her mother every day. When she got in the blocks for her final race, she said, “I told her, ‘Mom, this is my last race, push me through’ – and she did.”
After Saturday’s race, she said she and her mother had dreamed of going to Paris together – she on the track, mom in the stands.
“I know my mom was smiling from cheek to cheek,” she said. “I know she is beyond proud of me.”
Richardson’s personal best in the 200 is 21.92 – which she ran in the semis and at the world championships in Budapest last summer, which got her bronze.
To make this team, she would have had to have run better than that.
She could not do it.
To reiterate, she is the 2024 Trials 100 winner – celebrated now by many in the media and beyond after the weed fiasco three years ago.
What she thinks of what happened in the 200 is known only to her and her circle.
She did not stop to talk afterward.
To wrap up now, jumping one spot, to sixth, to Steiner. She finished in 22.24.
Steiner, 24, is from a different town near Columbus, Dublin, Ohio. Like McLaughlin-Levrone, she starred at the University of Kentucky. At the 2022 world championships here at Hayward, Steiner won gold in both the 4x1 and 4x4 relays. She is a 2022 Bowerman Award winner, given each year to the top female and male college track and field athlete.
Last summer, she had surgeries on both feet. She was back training beginning of December – that is, jogging on a track. “Unfortunately,” she said, “the timeline just didn’t work out for us this year.”
Abby Steiner after the race
She said of running sixth, “I think no one is going to be happy when they don’t get top three.
“Yeah, was looking for a little bit more from myself. I feel like I have it in me. So going to go back and look at what I did wrong and just keep learning for the rest of the season.”
What’s the feeling to come up this short, Steiner was asked, knowing you had this one shot?
She paused. She turned away, wiping away tears.
“Sorry,” she said – that is, about crying in front of a gaggle of reporters.
“Obviously, very disappointing. Like I said, no one comes here wanting to do anything other than represent the country in the Olympics. You know, we put our heart and soul into this sport. Put in so much work during the season to get here.
“So,” she said, and for all the triumph at the Trials there is always this, for every world record the dream unfulfilled, “it doesn’t feel good.”