EUGENE, Oregon (July 12) — Defending world champion in the women’s 400m hurdles, Dalilah Muhammad has fully recovered from the injury that kept her out of the US Championships and is now ready to renew her passionate rivalry with American compatriot Sydney McLaughlin at the World Athletics Championships 2022 in Oregon, this week.
Muhammad has balanced her training and competitions this season to cater to her injury in her pursuit to defend the world title she won in 2019 with a then-world-record time of 52.16 seconds.
The 32-year-old revealed that a troubling hamstring was responsible for her withdrawing from the USATF Outdoor Championships 2022 last month, but she is now completely healed, feeling much stronger and is ready to run faster than she’s gone before.
“I kind of tweaked my hamstring about two weeks before U.S. championships and I just didn’t want to risk it,” Muhammad told Reuters this week.
“My injury wasn’t super severe, but it just didn’t make sense to kind of risk going out there and kind of reinjuring it and retweaking it.
“I’m feeling really strong now,” added the American whose season-best is 53.88 seconds, the eighth fastest in the world this year. “I’m capable of running fast… I’m capable of running a PR.”
Muhammad ran a personal best of 51.58 seconds to finish second to McLaughlin (51.46) in one of the featured world record races at the Olympic Games last summer.
And while recovering from her hamstring injury last month, the 2016 Rio Olympic champion watched McLaughlin lowered the world record again at Hayward Field with an astounding 51.41 secs to win the national title and threatened to go even faster at the world championships.
The two-fastest women to ever run the 400m hurdles owns the top five quickest times in history and eight of the top 10 overall.
McLaughlin owns five of the best times, Muhammad has three, while Dutch talented superstar Femke Bol (52.03), the third-fastest ever in the event, holds the next two.
“It’s just super amazing that you have two women both in the same country that are able to run as fast as we’ve been able to go,” Muhammad told Reuters.
“That’s kind of amazing to just see that and the same two people during the same time period running so well.”
The women’s 400m hurdles heats at the World Athletics Championships at Hayward Field on the campus of the University over Oregon in Eugene, are set to start on Tuesday, 19 July.
