TOKYO —The greatest race in Olympic women’s track and field history was epic from the first step.
Dalilah Muhammad of the U.S., the reigning Olympic and World champion, blasted out the starting blocks, charging around the turn. Midway down the backstretch, Muhammad, running in lane 7, had already opened up a seemingly insurmountable gap, running well below world record pace.
Behind her, running in lane 4, Team USA’s Sydney McLaughlin, the world record holder, remained patient.
“The race doesn’t really start till hurdle seven,” she said.
McLaughlin, 21, began to cut into the gap around the final turn but Muhammad, 31, continued to hold on into the homestretch, over the eight hurdle, then then ninth. She stuttered into the 10th and final hurdle but still led McLaughlin now less than a step behind as the race headed toward the world record shattering, cliff hanger ending the sport had spent the last two years expecting.
“I saw Dalilah ahead of me with one to go,” McLaughlin said “I just thought, ‘Run your race.’”
It wasn’t until the final 10 meters that McLaughlin’s momentum carried her past Muhammad to claim the gold medal in 51.46 seconds, a new world record, and a 400 hurdles final that left the world–and even its participants– in stunned disbelief.
.”I can’t really (get) it straight in my head yet,” McLaughlin said. “I’m sure I’ll process it and celebrate later.”
It was a blockbuster that will be celebrated for decades, a late morning that was a near mirror image of the men’s final less than 24 hours earlier where Norway’s Karsten Warholm and Rai Benjamin of the U.S. were both under the world record. Muhammad, leading over all then hurdles, also dipped under the old world record, claiming the silver in 51.58. The Netherlands’ Femke Bol took the bronze in a European record 52.03, just off the previous world record of 51.90 set by McLaughlin in winning the Olympic Trials in June, and well under the previous Olympic record of 52.64 set by Jamaica’s Melaine Walker in 2008.
USC’s Anna Cockrell, the NCAA champion, was disqualified.
“This year we have fantastic results in the 400m hurdles, for women as well as men,” said Viktoriya Tkachuk of Ukraine, the sixth place finisher. “I don’t understand how this is all happening, honestly.
“It’s history.”
A historic moment
The sport had obsessed about a McLaughlin-Muhammad showdown in Tokyo almost as soon as the pair crossed the finish line at the 2019 World Championships in Doha, when Muhammad ran a world record 52.16 to hold off McLaughlin by just seven-hundreths of a second.
In reality, Wednesday’s epic had been building since the 2016 Olympic Trials when both runners made Team USA, McLaughlin then a 17-year-old New Jersey high school junior.
Muhammad claimed gold later that summer in Rio de Janiero while McLaughlin was eliminated in the semifinals.
“It’s been a growing experience – 2016 wasn’t everything I wanted it to be, so just being able to put the pieces together, I am really grateful,” McLaughlin said. “I made the mistake in 2016 of letting the atmosphere get to me (she didn’t make the final). But this time I stayed in my bubble and did the same things I had been doing before.”
McLaughlin would go on to win the NCAA title at Kentucky as a freshman and then turn pro, signing with New Balance, and relocating to Los Angeles, eventually training with Bobby Kersee, who has guided the gold medal careers of Allyson Felix, Joanna Hayes, Gail Devers and Jackie Joyner-Kersee.
“This is his 11th Olympics he’s coaching, he has been around the block a few times and knew what it was going to take to get me to this point,” McLaughlin said. “He just changed my perspective on how I approach the race, so yeah, I owe it all to him.
“I knew he saw something different in me than a lot of people did. He knew how to get me there.
“His numbers don’t lie, so when he says you can do something, you can do it.”
By 2019, those numbers which included improvements in the flat 400 and the 100 hurdles, seemed to point toward McLaughlin taking down the the then 16-year-old world record of 52.34 set by Russia’s Yulia Pechonkina. A series of victories on the Diamond League circuit in which McLaughlin flirted with the Russian’s mark did not to discourage the world record speculation.
But it was Muhammad who broke the record with a 52.20 win at the 2019 U.S. Championships in Des Moines. Muhammad lowered the mark again at Worlds but it was clear McLaughlin was closing the gap.
“I don’t know if it’s a rivalry,” McLaughlin said. “I just say iron sharpens iron. It’s two people pushing each other to be their best.
“You need that. I don’t think it’s a rivalry, there is no bad blood. It’s just two athletes wanting to be their best and knowing there is another great girl who is going to get you there.”
While McLaughlin continued to impress early this season, Muhammad battled to come back from a hamstring injury and after contracting COVID-19 twice.
“I think that at my Trials, a month before Trials, my fitness started coming back around and I felt in good shape at the Trials,” Muhammad said. “I am feeling good now, COVID is thankfully behind me and the injuries (hamstring) that followed. So, I am feeling good and ready to run.”
Still Muhammad was no match for McLaughlin at the Trials, finishing more than a half-second behind her at 52.42, still the eighth fastest time in history.
But Muhammad looked Rio fit in the Olympic rounds. Adding to the intrigue was Bol, who posted a series of impressive wins on the Diamond League circuit this summer in the U.S. duo’s absence.
Then on Tuesday, Warholm became the person to break 46 seconds in the 400 hurdles, running 45.94 with Benjamin also finishing in 46.17, more than a half second under the Norwegian’s previous world record, raising expectations for the women’s final even higher.
In less than a month Warholm has knocked nearly a second off what had been for parts of three decades one of the sport’s most unapproachable world records—Kevin Young’s 46.76 winning time at the 1992 Games in Barcelona.
“I think you will see something similar in the women’s 400m hurdles with Sydney, Dalilah, Femke,” predicted Kyron McMaster of the British Virgin Islands, fourth in the men’s final. “Those three are amazing. They are looking powerfully great. They are about to go do something great like Warholm did.”
McLaughlin and Muhammad for two years skimmed past questions about the Olympic Games and just how far they could lower the world record like they were just another set of hurdles. But on the eve of the final the record was clearly on their minds.
“I think a lot of people expected a world record, myself included especially after watching the men’s race and all the races after that have run on this track so far which have been really fast,” Muhammad said. “The anticipation was crazy and just thinking about what might happen in our race was becoming overwhelming. I knew it would be a fast race, I was looking forward to it and anticipating something crazy.”
The pair, Muhammad said, would “put on a show.”
That they did.
By the top of the backstretch McLaughlin’s record seemed certain to fall.
“I knew it was a world record race,” said Jamaica’s Janieve Russell, the fourth place finisher.
By the time the race hit the homestretch it was clear the pair was delivering a race even beyond the pre-Olympic expectations.
“I always know Sydney is going to show up,” Muhammad said “and when you have someone as strong as her, you can’t mess up and that is where the pressure really lies, not having any room for error.”
And McLaughlin continued to charged but Muhammad refused to fold.
“After the ninth hurdle, I thought, ‘I’m about to win this,’” Muhammad said.
But her stutter step at the 10th hurdle opened the door and McLaughlin rushed through.
“We practice the last 40 meters so many times,” McLaughlin said of her training with Kersee. “It was nothing unfamiliar for me. I knew I had to go and give it everything I had and dip at the line.”
A day earlier Benjamin was despondent over not winning the gold medal. But now Muhammad seemed at peace with her role in delivering a women’s race the likes of which the world had never seen before.
“Just like the men’s race, all three of our times would have won any Olympics, any other year,” she said. “I’m so proud to be part of that history.”