Mclaughlin sets 400m hurdles world record

Agence France-presse

EUGENE: Sydney Mclaughlin punched her ticket to the athletics World Championships with a world record 51.41sec victory in the 400m hurdles at the US trials on Saturday.

Mclaughlin shaved five-hundredths of a second off the world record of 51.46 she set in winning Tokyo Olympics gold last August, delivering a dominant performance at Eugene’s Hayward Field that saw runner-up Britton Wilson cross the line more than a second back in 53.08sec. Shamier Little was third in 53.92. The trio will represent the United States on the same Hayward Field track in July—when reigning world champion Dalilah Muhammad also aims to defend her title. With a bye as champion, Muhammad—who beat Mclaughlin in Doha in 2019 but took silver behind her in Tokyo

—received a waiver to skip the trials to recover from a hamstring injury.

Mclaughlin showed she didn’t need her great rival to push her to new heights in this championship season, and sounded a warning for those coming to challenge her in Eugene, where she broke the world record for the first time last June. “Anytime I come here I can just feel something amazing is going to happen,” Mclaughlin said. She said nothing compared to the “awe” of breaking the world record for the first time, but that doesn’t mean she won’t be aiming to do it again next month. “This is just a great indicator of where we are,” she said. “Hopefully we’re going to go home and work on a few things and try to come back and improve on it.”

Her performance capped a day of 11 finals and a farewell to the US championships for Olympic great Allyson Felix, 21 years after she ran in her first.*

Olympic 400m hurdles champion Sydney Mclaughlin ran 51.41s at the US Championships to break her own world record, again. A look at her numbers: