The longtime track and field coach was looking for someone who could eclipse Edwin Moses’s legacy.

This might sound apocryphal, but Bobby Kersee predicted this, or something like this, for decades. He predicted that he would find a hurdler—someone, somewhere, like Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone—who would surpass the nearly-impossible-to-approach legacy of the greatest hurdler who ever lived.

That would be Edwin Moses, Kersee’s rival and friend, the most consistent winner, ever, in track and field. Whether Moses ranks as the greatest track star ever could be debated. He would certainly be part of the debate, in part because his sustained dominance cannot be debated at all. Moses won 107 straight 400-meter hurdles finals; each dependent on dozens of factors (weather, opposition, his health, injuries) outside his control. His win streak lasted just over a decade—one in which he set the world record four times.

Laughing last week at their history, these stories and McLaughlin-Levrone’s ties to Moses, Kersee momentarily turned serious. That race, at the 2022 world championships, she clocked a time of 50.68 seconds. That specific lowering took all of 30 days. For context, before 2019, no female hurdler had ever broken 52 seconds. Not once!

Kersee understood two irrefutable truths that night about McLaughlin-Levrone. First, her performance deserved a prominent spot on whatever lists exist ranking the best performances in the sport’s history. Think: Bob Beamon’s legendary leap (1968) or Usain Bolt’s 100-meter dash (2008) or Michael Phelps’s medal haul (also ’08); any achievement, essentially, that defies logic, that’s greatness above greatness. The second truth Kersee understood: He knew, even that night two years ago, that McLaughlin-Levrone had much more to deliver.

“[That] was one of the greatest races I’ve ever witnessed in my 40-something years of coaching,” Kersee told SI last week. Even then, he knew it wouldn’t be her peak.