Culture
Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone shows anything's possible for her at Paris Olympics and beyond
Follow our Olympics coverage in the lead-up to the Paris Games.
Victory was well secured by the time Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone rounded the corner before the final straightaway at Icahn Stadium in New York. She’d blown through the stagger of the 400-meter race at the NYC Grand Prix on Sunday and ended any hope for the other seven runners in the field. All that remained was making Sanya Richards-Ross sweat.
McLaughlin-Levrone declared before the race she was aiming for the American record. And as she glided down the final 100 meters, resisting the Manhattan wind, she almost got it. She clocked in at 48.75 seconds, just shy of Richards-Ross’ national record of 48.70 set in 2006.
“So close,” McLaughlin-Levrone told reporters afterwards. “But you know what, it’s all good. There’s so much time to do that. It’s always just about refining it and learning the race.”
It was the fastest time by anyone this season in the 400 — on her first time competing in this discipline in 11 months. This isn’t even her best event. It was the second time in three weekends that McLaughlin-Levrone competed in an event that was not her specialty and walked away with the reigning best time in the world this year.
WORLD LEAD FOR SYDNEY!
Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone clocks 48.75 to win the women’s 400m. 💨
📺 @nbc & @peacock | #ContinentalTourGold pic.twitter.com/QA0Gx8fv7d
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) June 9, 2024
Sunday was further proof of how McLaughlin-Levrone could do whatever she wants in the sprint universe. So much so, the natural inclination is to want her to do it all.
Sunday, she blew away the field in the 400-meter race — her first time competing in this discipline in 11 months. Three weekends ago, at the Los Angeles Grand Prix, she ran the 200-meter dash in 22.07 seconds — three-tenths of a second better than her time from two weeks earlier and the second-best time in the world this year. Before this May, per World Athletics, she hadn’t run the 200 since 2018.
She’s currently slated for one event at the USA Olympic Trials later this month: the 400-meter hurdles, for which she owns the world record. She is the reigning Olympic champion in the event, and her showdown with Femke Bol of the Netherlands promises to be one of the most riveting sprint battles in Paris.
But watching McLaughlin-Levrone in one race is like circling just one block in a luxury rental car. Like having but one scoop of your favorite ice cream.
She’ll likely be on a relay in Paris as well. But her infrequency only generates demand. She is arguably the most dominant and also the most mysterious. Though definitely among the most talented, she’s also among the most judicious with it.
She has the qualities of an all-time great with the potential to accomplish deifying feats. But one of the fastest women in the world is executing a patient pursuit of historic glory.
Her performance at the NYC Grand Prix might prompt pressure to add the 400 meters to the 400 hurdles at the trials and go for the double. The 400-meter races are spread over the first three days of the Olympic trials — held June 21-30 at the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field — with the hurdles commencing on Day 7. At the Paris Olympics, the heats, semifinals and finals for each event are on alternating days from Aug. 4-9.
She said if she did something crazy in New York, it might prompt her to add the 400 meters at the trials.
“I don’t think I’d count that as crazy,” she told reporters, flashing her million-watt smile.
A double isn’t without risk. An injury in the 400 meters would jeopardize her best event, the 400-meter hurdles — the final event of the trials. She already missed the world championships in August because of injury. Plus, she’s never run the flat 400 meters under the pressure of international stakes. The first time coming at the Olympics would be a daunting challenge.
But McLaughlin-Levrone is so captivating that she makes us crave more from the living legend. One of the faces of New Balance, she’s a model athlete, as reputed for her character and affability as her speed.
Sha’Carri Richardson might end up the biggest name in track and field, and she has the vibrant personality to match her explosiveness. Noah Lyles has a similar magnetism. He dominated the 200-meter race (19.77 seconds) in the NYC Grand Prix.
🗣️ “I’m just trying to get my rhythm in the 100. That’s really what it’s been all about. I’m the 100m world champion in 2023 and I’m not planning on giving that title up. I’m planning on being the Olympic champion.
I know I have the 200 on lock. All I need is two or three 200s… pic.twitter.com/x8PXcWik1h
— CITIUS MAG (@CitiusMag) June 9, 2024
But McLaughlin-Levrone is a superstar in her own right. Her wholesome graciousness has its own appeal. Her limited presence increases demand. And her smooth running style is its own form of breathtaking.
She has two gold medals from Tokyo, one in the 400-meter hurdles and one in the 4×400-meter relas. A repeat performance would give her four gold medals just days after her 25th birthday.
Carl Lewis has the American record with nine gold medals in track and field. Allyson Felix totaled 11 medals, seven gold, in her illustrious career — the most for any track and field athlete. When McLaughlin-Levrone is done, she could be the most decorated Olympian in American track and field history.
That’s why, though track fans would love to see her more, her choreographing of this long play is interesting. She’s appeared in five events in 2024 and run in five disciplines. All of it is but preparation for the 400-meter hurdles, working on the various elements to peak in time to defend her crown in her build-up to the trials. But in doing so, she only flexed the variety of her options.
It is not a crazy thought for her to go for the 400 double in Paris and then turn around and go for the 200-meter/100-meter double in Los Angeles in 2028. She could go for the 100-meter hurdles or even switch to the 800 meters if she wanted. She’s that good.
McLaughlin-Levrone is running her own race. Pun intended. In a sport where accolades translate to revenue, in a country where track stardom has a shelf life, she seems to have no interest in microwaving her grandeur. She’s on a focused, meticulous path and her talent obscures the horizon. And the scarcity of her presence means these flashes of brilliance must be savored.
(Photo of Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone crossing the finish line Sunday in New York: Dustin Satloff / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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