Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone might be on top of her game right now. But the journey to achieve this was a road filled with numerous difficulties, which she had to overcome to become a better athlete. One of the biggest hurdles she had to overcome in her early career was to overtake Dalilah Muhammad. The hurdler has spoken numerous times about how she found it difficult to deal with the defeats with her fellow US counterpart.

The hurdler first faced Dalilah at the 2019 Toyota USATF Outdoor Track & Field Championships. There, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone gave an incredible performance, finishing the race in 52.88 seconds. But Dalilah ran even faster at 52.20 seconds, taking home both the medal and the world record. Disappointed by the outcome, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone knew that she had to take some action to improve herself as a hurdler. Despite showing incredible talent at track, she was still struggling to cross hurdles some time. With the World Championships on the horizon, she needed to fix this problem quickly.

After the defeat at the Track and Field Championships, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone knew she didn’t have much time. She had to prepare herself for the World Championships and find a way to defeat Dalilah Muhammed within just two months. But the hurdler didn’t seem to have mentally recovered from the earlier defeat.

In her book Far Beyond Gold, she wrote, “When I got home, the familiar anxiety returned, particularly during training when, one day, I mistimed my jump, slammed into a hurdle, and crashed into the track. It was embarrassing. Stupid. Completely avoidable. And I had no idea how to fix it. No sense of control.” Slowly days went by, and Sydney still hadn’t found a way to improve her hurdling problems. To be a top athlete and struggle to cross the obstruction is a huge disadvantage.

Thus, together with her coach, she decided on a quick fix. Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone said, “There was not enough time left to fix my problems. It may have been my overthinking about the entire thing, but at some point, I stopped trying to fix my approach to the hurdles—it was too close to Doha to make a drastic change in my technique. Instead, my coach and I put the equivalent of a Band-Aid on the problem. We moved the starting blocks back two feet from where they were normally positioned by the starting line. Yes, this meant I would be starting the race at a deficit: two feet behind the other runners.”

Thus, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone decided on this new approach to combating Dalilah Muhammed. While nobody knew if this method would help her beat her competitor, it would certainly help Sydney finish the race in a lesser time. This is what the hurdler was hoping for.

Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone had more issues going into Doha

The new approach used by Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone was working, as she could see her time getting lesser and lesser in training. While now she was taking twenty-three steps before the hurdle, she was facing much lesser problems crossing them. She also improved her speed and conditioning before the World Championship in Doha. Thus, her plan seemed to be working.

Still shaken by her loss to Dalilah Muhammed before, all that was left for Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone in training was to be put into practice in defeating her. But there remained something still troubling her. “No matter how strong I was off the blocks, no matter how fast I could run on the straightaways, there were still those ten hurdles I had to jump over. And I still feared I wouldn’t be able to clear them effectively,” she wrote in her book.

Also, another fear related to the climate of the host city bothered her, as she was never used to humidity. But, putting all this in the background, she finally ran in the IAAF World Championships. She again was able to put forward her personal best with a time of 52.23 sec, so close to the Dalilah world record.