Ralph Mann surprisingly would once qualify Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone in the category of “running jumpers”—non-strategic, relying solely on speed and athleticism without a hint of an idea of which leg they’ll use to clear the hurdle, or worse, either stutter-step or overstride as they allowed themselves too much or too little a room. And then, there were “technicians” who would have the number of steps they’d take at the start, middle, and all the way to the end figured out to the T. When they first met in 2018, this was Mann’s initial assessment of Sydney: “Sydney had problems. She couldn’t hurdle with her opposite leg. With her primary leg, she was mediocre at best. And her training wasn’t to the point where she could handle the last three hurdles.”
In 2019, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone found herself facing a seemingly insurmountable challenge. At the U.S. National Championships, defending Olympic champion Dalilah Muhammad set a world record (WR), beating McLaughlin-Levrone by more than half a second. Two months later, at the world championships, McLaughlin-Levrone broke the world record herself but found herself behind Muhammad by 0.07 of a second. As unfortunate as it sounds, Sydney was absolutely clueless. Frustrated and desperate for an answer, McLaughlin-Levrone found Mann on the track’s infield and turned to the four-time AAU national champion.
She had a simple question: “What the hell do I have to do to beat her?” In retrospect, Mann, a silver medalist from the 1972 Olympics, later told NY Mag, “It’s kind of hard to tell the athlete that just ran the second-fastest time of all time in the event that something’s wrong.”Regardless, he did. She walked away, head bowed and spirits defeated. “In order to find yourself, you must lose,” McLaughlin-Levrone wrote on Instagram later that day. “Lose races, lose people, lose hope.”
