The Sydney Project: how elite athletics traps McLaughlin but also sets her free

It’s 2022. Sydney McLaughlin is 22. She crosses the line and sits down on the track. There are no wild celebrations or overt displays of emotion. Maybe she’s simply stunned at the fact that she’s just run a world 400m hurdles final in a time that would have earned seventh place in the final of the 400m flat. Maybe she’s reflecting on the mathematical improbability of lowering the world record from 52.16 to 50.68 in the space of 13 months. Maybe she’s just thinking about the lactic acid still burning inside her legs.

At the press conference, the focus is not on what she has just achieved but what she might yet achieve. More world records? The 50-second barrier? A switch of events? The world has seen a miracle, and all it wants to know about is her next trick. “The sky’s the limit, for sure,” she says. “I need to ask my coach about our next goal. He calls the shots.” She doesn’t say what she wants for herself.

McLaughlin looks compact, reserved, constrained. They call her a robot, a machine. They roll their eyes when she talks about her faith and dedicates her triumphs to the glory of God. And you remember an interview she gave a long time ago, when she was still a teenager, still a schoolgirl, the point at which her inner and outer worlds were beginning to collapse in on each other. “Whenever I got frustrated,” she said, “I’d go to practice and run it out. Get the stress out on the track. I make it look easier than it is. People don’t see the struggle.”

It’s 2016. Sydney is 16. From the moment she could run, running was the fate chosen for her. Her parents were star athletes. So were her brother and sister. She was sent to Union Catholic, where the school fees are $18,000 a year and the expectations are stratospheric. She