2025 World Championships Daily Dispatch #6: Making It Rain

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We’ve grown accustomed to seeing Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone breaking records and standing atop podiums. That’s nothing new.

But usually there are ten hurdles standing in between the track superstar and another epic performance. This time around, McLaughlin-Levrone, the two-time Olympic champ and reigning world record holder in the 400m hurdles, took the harder path to gold. She opted instead for the flat 400m, turning a two-way battle between two athletes at the height of their powers, Marileidy Paulino and Salwa Eid Naser, into a triple tango.

Except, by the time SML got to Tokyo, it wasn’t much of a competition after all. The first time McLaughlin-Levrone raced Paulino, at the Paris Diamond League in 2023, Paulino had gotten the better of the American, who was still figuring out the cadence and pacing of a 400-meter race with no rhythmic step pattern to rely on. Two years later, McLaughlin-Levrone has entered another class entirely — which surely she’s known for months now, but she only showed the rest of the world on Tuesday, when she shattered the American record in the semifinal.

Sydney wasn’t done, however. In Thursday’s 400m final, facing off against Paulino and Naser who, even after her performance Tuesday, had faster PBs and a much deeper racing resume at the distance. Yet once again, a fully peaked and prepped McLaughlin-Levrone can’t be matched by anyone in the world, and she claimed her first gold medal in her new event in historic fashion, running 47.78 in the rain to become the second woman ever under 48 seconds.

47.78 is the fastest time in the world in 40 years, missing a world record by 0.18 seconds that many view with a suspicious eye given its East German, mid-1980s origin. In two races, McLaughlin-Levrone took nearly a full second off Sanya Richards-Ross’s American record that had stood for 19 years and once again redefined expectations of the possible for a second event. She dragged the athletes behind her to historic heights as well, as Paulino became the fourth woman under 48 in second in 47.98, Naser clocked the fastest third-place time ever, and the entire field broke 50 seconds.

The men’s race was also historic for its new faces. Despite winning the silver medal in the Olympic 4×400m, Botswana had never had a man stand on the podium in the open 400m at a World Championships. Yesterday, they got two, with Busang Kebinatshipi taking the crown in a world-leading 43.53 ahead of his compatriot Bayapo Ndori in third. Jereem Richards of Trinidad and Tobago split them up with a national record 43.72, a really impressive run considering he was navigating tighter turns on the inside lane.

The men’s and women’s 200m semifinals are now set as well. Four American women earned lanes led by 100m champ Melissa Jefferson-Wooden’s 22.00 qualifier, but they’ll have to contend with reigning champ Shericka Jackson, who clocked a 21.99 in her semi to make it clear she won’t go down quietly when the time comes. Another great U.S.-Jamaica clash is shaping up on the men’s side, too. It initially looked like Noah Lyles’s greatest threats to a fourth 200m gold would be Olympic champ Letsile Tebogo and silver medalist Kenny Bednarek, but 21-year-old Jamaican Bryan Levell has come into his own in dramatic fashion, clocking a 19.78 in the second semi-final to send a warning shot across Lyles’s bow. The American volleyed right back, however, running a world-leading 19.51 in his semifinal to send a clear message: I’m not aiming for another bronze.

You can listen to Mac Fleet, Eric Jenkins, Mitch Dyer, Chris Chavez, and Anderson Emerole proclaim odes to Sydney while wearing silly hats on the live show, as well as daily Good Morning Track and Field shows with Aisha Praught-Leer tuning in from home. You can also catch up with all our athlete interviews over on the CITIUS MAG YouTube channel, and subscribe to make sure you don’t miss any of the action.

Race Of The Day: Women’s 400m

Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone will justifiably get the bulk of the headlines from this event, but it’s worth noting what a historic moment her mere presence has triggered. By choosing to shift her event focus, she created the circumstances for three of the five fastest women in history to collide in the same event, at the same time.

Marileidy Paulino, who didn’t lose a race in all of 2024, set her lifetime best. Salwa Eid Naser, the former world leader and the fastest active 400m runner prior to the final, ran her best time in six years. Paulino and Naser also join world record holder Marita Koch as the only women in history to run under 48.2 on multiple occasions, and the Tokyo final is the first time ever two women have broken 48 seconds in the same race. Naser and Paulino deserve as much credit as McLaughlin-Levrone for elevating the event to levels not seen in decades.

Lane placement played a factor here as McLaughlin-Levrone had both rivals on her outside, giving her two targets to chase. And Paulino’s lactic-defying strength down the homestretch pushed Sydney all the way to the line in a way that doesn’t happen over hurdles, even with Femke Bol in the race. For a few meters, we even saw something extremely rare — an athlete closing a gap on McLaughlin-Levrone in the final meters — but ultimately it did come down to Sydney against the clock.

Over the next several championships, it will be in World Athletics’s best interest to recreate these circumstances or even craft a schedule where McLaughlin-Levrone can take on the 400m hurdles and the flat 400m in the same championships. There are increasingly few barriers left for her to break or boxes to check off, but for the good of the sport, we have to do everything we can to keep her aiming for new heights.

Athletes Of The Day: Curtis Thompson & Yulimar Rojas

We could honestly say that Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone is the athlete of the day, or the year, or the decade, but it’s worth acknowledging two great performers who picked up medals in the field events.

Neither triple jumper Yulimar Rojas nor javelin thrower Curtis Thompson won their respective events yesterday, but there’s a lot that went into their bronze medals. Rojas is the GOAT of the triple jump event, an Olympic champion, four-time World champion, and world record holder both indoors and out, but Tokyo was her first competition in over two years as she underwent Achilles surgery in early 2024, missing all of last season and most of this one.

Given that Rojas’s PB is 24 centimeters clear of the next longest jumper in history and half a meter past the next active jumper, it’s easy to argue that she has nothing left to prove and could’ve ridden her bum Achilles into an early but well-deserved retirement. But Rojas is a competitor, as shown by her determination to get back to the runway and attempt to defend her world title. It wasn’t meant to be this time, with her 14.76m only good for third behind Olympic champ Thea LaFond and 2025 leader Leyanis Perez Hernandez, but even a greatly-diminished Rojas still on the road to recovery is a force to be reckoned with.

Thompson was one of only two Americans selected to compete in the javelin in Tokyo, and he was the only Team USA athlete who contested the event last year in Paris. Much like Obi-Wan Kenobi, the five-time U.S. champ is often our only hope in an event where Americans are rarely contending for the podium. But Thompson seized the opportunity, hauling a 86.67m throw in the first round that managed to hold up against the competition through all five that followed, earning Team USA its first medal in the event since 2007.

Americans tend to pay less attention to events where we’re not dominating, so it’s worth spreading the love and raising a glass to the athletes who buck the trend and scrap their way to the podium no matter who’s watching.

Photo Of The Day

The GOAT of the triple jump deserves custom shoes — and Yulimar Rojas’s “I’m Back” spikes certainly made a statement.

Social Moment Of The Day

Olympic fourth-placer Shafiqua Maloney may not have made the 800m semifinal, but her dramatic hair still made it onto news feeds around the world.

What’s Coming Next

The headliners tomorrow will face off in the 200m finals, where Team USA and Team Jamaica will once again battle over six highly-sought medals. In the 400m hurdles, a clash of titans will take place in the men’s race once again as the three fastest athletes in history — Karsten Warholm, Rai Benjamin, and Alison dos Santos — look to see how they measure up against one another. The women’s race is more cut and dry, with Femke Bol the huge favorite, but American fans would love to see Dalilah Muhammad pick up one more medal on her way out the door.

The women’s 800m semifinal will determine who toes the line for the medals and whether Keely Hodgkinson’s post-injury dominance will continue. On the infield, a winner will be crowned in the wide-open men’s triple jump, and heptathlon action gets underway as American Anna Hall chases history against three-time Olympic champ Nafi Thiam of Belgium.

Tomorrow is the Championships’ shortest program yet, but it’s all quality over quantity as some of the meet’s most highly-anticipated events come to an epic conclusion. Don’t miss it!

Until next time — Catch up on anything you may have missed on the CITIUS MAG YouTube channel, Twitter, and Instagram and don’t forget to subscribe to the CITIUS MAG newsletter for more updates on the 2025 World Athletics Championships.