EUGENE, Ore. — Sydney McLaughlin exited the World Championships Sunday night as the biggest name in the sport and arguably the greatest female athlete on the planet.
Perhaps more than any other athlete, the barrier shattering 22-year-old also represents the biggest dilemma facing track and field, especially the American sport.
McLaughlin, who trains in Los Angeles obliterated her own world record in the 400-meter hurdles with a 50.68 clocking Friday, becoming the first woman to break 51 seconds with a performance that indicated she almost certainly will be the first woman to break 50 seconds as well.
“After that race, I think 49 seconds is possible,” Dalilah Muhammad, the former Olympic and world champion, said before pausing. “For Sydney.”
McLaughlin’s fourth world record in 14 months and her 47.91 anchor leg in securing a Team USA victory in the 4×400-meter relay Sunday night has even led to talk that she might be capable of taking down East German Marita Koch’s 37-year-old 47.60 400 record, a mark almost certainly aided by banned performance enhancing substances.
But the biggest barrier facing McLaughlin and the sport is whether she can break through with the American public?
Will McLaughlin attract an audience after Oregon ’22 worthy of her talent? Or will she be the best athlete most of America has never heard of?
Mondo Duplantis of Sweden’s world in record in the pole vault, the meet’s final event, brought down the curtain on the first World Championships held on American soil and the most dominant team performance in the competition’s 39-year history.
With 20-year-old Athing Mu out leaning Great Britain’s Keely Hodkinson 1-minute, 56.30 seconds to 1:56.36 and the U.S. sweeping the 4×400 relays, Team USA finished the 10-day competition with a record 32 medals, 13 of them gold.
But whether Oregon ’22 was the transformative event that World Athletics and USA Track & Field, the sport’s global and national governing bodies, may have hoped for will not be known for months likely even years.
The initial numbers are mixed.
While World Athletics president Sebastian Coe and meet organizers referred to Sunday night as “another sell out,” Hayward Field, the $270-million stadium rebuilt and financed by Nike co-founder Phil Knight, a former Oregon miler, was not full for any session. The 13,000 something seat stadium was not even half full for several sessions. While the fans were knowledgeable and often loud, when the final numbers are in Oregon ’22 will almost certainly have the lowest total attendance in Worlds history.
The attendance numbers were suppressed by COVID concerns, the inaccessibility of this college town of 170,000 a two-hour drive from the closest international airport, the city’s small hotel/motel inventory, and some world class price gouging by the local hospitality industry.
The meet attracted 400,000 new followers to World Athletics’ social media platforms with 7 million engagements. Videos on World Athletics’ platformed drew 41 million views, Worlds Athletics president Sebastian Coe said.
The Worlds drew 13.7 million viewers to NBC’s platforms, more than any other Worlds, with three days of numbers still to be tabulated.
The question is how does the sport, in particular American track and field, build on those numbers moving forward? How do you make America notice Sydney McLaughlin?
“If you’re going to be a household name you have to put the name in the house,” said Gail Devers, a two-time Olympic 100-meter champion.
World Athletics and USATF hope to do that by increasing world class competition opportunities in the U.S., including in the Los Angeles market. Eugene’s Prefontaine Classic will host next year’s final of the Diamond League, the sport’s premier circuit. It will mark the first time the final has been held outside of Europe.
There’s even talk of the U.S. hosting the 2027 Worlds, a year out from the Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
“We’d love to continue hosting events,” said Max Siegel, USATF CEO. “The more that we can support to give the visibility to the sport is great for all of us. The timetable is something we’d have to work through.”
In the sport should benefit from an unprecedented window in which there will be a Worlds or Olympic Games in seven of the eight years between 2022 and 2028.
“The upside is if you look at the next six or seven years we have athletics absolutely center stage in a northern hemisphere terms in the most broadcastable part of the year,” Coe said.
Siegel said World Athletics and USATF are collecting “qualitative and quantitative data to see where the sport sits. We’re coming up with tons of strategies to reposition the sport, the brands and to tell the stories of the athletes. And even more so we have a pretty robust plan leading up to LA 2028 from the grassroots. So whether it’s television and story telling, strategies that reach out to influencers that we’re going to capitalize on this event and use it as a catalyst to reposition the sport.”
There’s certainly nothing wrong with the product.
“Track, Coe said, is in the midst of a “golden generation.”
The U.S. men swept the medals in the 100, 200 and shot put, the latter won by Ryan Crouser with a meet record 73-feet-7 1/4 inch throw in possibly the great competition ever in the event. Noah Lyles won the 200 in 19.31 seconds, breaking Michael Johnson’s 26-year-old American record. With Michael Norman winning the 400 and Grant Holloway became the first nation since 1991 to sweep the individual gold medals in the sprints and high hurdles.
The Americans, however, weren’t the only athletes shining in Eugene.
Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce won her fifth Worlds 100 meter title, running a meet record 10.67 seconds and leading a Jamaican sweep of the medals. Countrywoman Shericka Jackson, the 100 silver medalist, set her own meet record, winning the 200 in 21.45, the second fastest time in history. Nigeria’s Tobi Amusan ran 12.12 to break the 100 hurdles world record in Sunday afternoon’s semifinals. Amusan ran even faster in winning the final, 12.06, although the wind was beyond the allowable limit for record purposes.
Duplantis, the son a Louisiana father and Swedish mother, then closed out the night be clearing 20-feet-4 1/2 (6.21 meters) adding a centimeter to his own four-month old world record.
“Since they’ve been able to get back to at least a semblance of normality,” Coe said “the performances have actually been off the ground.”
So now that Duplantis and McLaughlin have taken their sport into a new stratosphere, will the public follow them?