Must watch: Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone is absurd

Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone is the greatest big-moment athlete of your lifetime — possibly of anyone’s lifetime. 

On Thursday in Tokyo, she won her first world championship gold medal in the 400 meters — one lap around the track, a foundational event — and in the process became the first clean athlete in history to dip under 48 seconds. The race featured the fastest women’s 400 field ever assembled. Marileidy Paulino became the second clean athlete under 48. 

It may have actually been the greatest race in the history of humans racing other humans:

The world record in the women’s 400 is an outrageous 47.60 seconds, a mark that’s been unachievable and unchallenged since it was set by East German Marita Koch in 1985. The record is an extreme outlier, not seriously threatened by anyone in forty years. 

Koch consistently ran in the 48s in her prime, which is deeply not normal. We know with certainty that she was doped because original records of East Germany's state-sponsored, Stasi-enforced steroid program eventually surfaced — and this was old-school iron curtain doping, not modern microdosing. Koch was basically taking a loaf of oral Turinabol annually, although she never tested positive for anything in her time. 

(To be clear, we shouldn’t assume Koch was any sort of sinister villain who acted in isolation. She almost certainly had no personal choice with respect to doping. It was under state control and likely not optional. Her times were the product of an elite athlete’s intersection with the East German steroid industrial complex.)

Sydney’s remarkable 47.78 in the rain in Tokyo was the result of an audacious multi-year attempt to approach an unapproachable record. Back in 2023, she began proof-of-concept testing. She took out a Diamond League 400 at a blistering and inadvisable speed, running a 22.67-second 200 meter split in Paris. Obviously doomed. Hopeless. She didn’t detonate in the race, but she also didn’t win. 

It was also the clearest possible message that she was eying Koch’s mark, not merely medals. 

As much as any track and field athlete in recent memory, Sydney uses non-championship meets to sharpen, to experiment, to identify limits. She is utterly fearless (possibly indifferent) where track’s regular season is concerned, willing to compete in events that belong to other athletes. If her name is attached to a meet in April or May, it’s likely she’s running the 100 or 200 or the 110 hurdles. There’s little chance she’s racing her primary event, the 400 meter hurdles — the race in which she’s set and reset the world record six times. 

We may have never seen an all-time athlete who’s more willing to finish second or sixth in a meet that won’t define her legacy. 

We have also never seen an athlete who’s any better than Sydney at timing a peak in any given season. Over the past five years, when a global championship is on the line, she has never not been in world record form. Sydney simply never misses. 

If she’s capable of sub-48 on a wet track, then a dirty and seemingly unreachable record is suddenly vulnerable.  

I would advise you to scroll up and give Thursday's race a rewatch. Nothing of the sort has ever previously occurred and, technically, there's no guarantee we'll see such a thing again. But if she sincerely cares about running 47.59, then it's definitely happening.