On September 18 last year Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone ran 47.78 for 400 metres in Tokyo and became world champion in an event she had only just moved to. It is the second-fastest women’s 400 ever run, behind Marita Koch’s 47.60 and nothing else. New Balance’s own athlete bio for her still lists her disciplines as 400 metre hurdles and relays, and its achievements stop at Paris 2024. The brand is selling her third signature collection off a page that has not registered the biggest thing she has done.
What the collection actually contains is three shoes and five pieces of apparel, released September 8. The footwear is a FuelCell Rebel v5, a 9060 and a SuperComp MD-X v3 spike. The Rebel is reported in Meteorite and White at $145, with a style code of MFCX8E5 carried by one outlet and corroborated by nobody, so treat that code as reporting rather than fact.
The Rebel v5 is a good shoe and it is not a racing shoe. New Balance launched it in 2025 at $140 as, in the brand’s own words, the shoe that gets you out the door running, for picking up the pace or logging daily miles. It runs 35 millimetres at the heel and 29 at the forefoot for a six millimetre drop, on a PEBA-blended FuelCell midsole under a bonded FANTOMFIT upper, at 7.9 ounces in a men’s 9.5. There is no plate in it. The plated shoes sit above it, the SuperComp Rebel at $200 and the SuperComp Elite v6 at $275, both now built on a foam New Balance calls Infinion rather than FuelCell.
So the athlete who has rewritten the 400 metre hurdles world record six times, and who still holds it at 50.37 from the Paris final, gets a seasonal colour on an unplated daily trainer she does not race in. That is not a criticism of the shoe. It is a question about how a brand allocates its signature architecture, and the answer is visible in the style codes. Her 2024 collection carried athlete-coded numbers ending in SYD, a small thing that told you the shoes were hers. The 2026 pair, as reported, do not.
Set that against the same brand’s recent output. New Balance press released a first signature shoe for Tyrese Maxey, a fourth for Kawhi Leonard and a first signature collection for Shohei Ohtani. For Sydney’s first signature collection in March 2024 it issued no press release at all. The August announcement for this one is the first time the brand has put her name in its own newsroom for a product, and even that release brands the collection as Sydney Levrone’s rather than using the name she competes under and the one every outlet then used in its headline.
She is credited in the release as leading the creative direction, and she sounds like she meant it. “Designing my third Signature Collection allowed me to tap into the things I genuinely love to wear every day,” she said. “This collection reflects my creative side more than ever before.” Kara O’Malley, a senior merchant in product creation at New Balance, said Sydney had been deeply involved from concept to final product. Both of those things can be true while the shoe is still a catalogue model in a new palette, because nothing in the release or in any reporting claims a single material or geometry change from a standard Rebel v5.
Retail is reported at $145, five dollars above the standard Rebel v5’s $140, which could be a collection premium or a line-wide increase that nobody has confirmed either way. For placement, that is the entry tier of New Balance’s performance running range and roughly half what the brand charges for the carbon-plated Elite. It is also a hundred and thirty dollars below the spike in her own collection, which is the shoe in the set that actually relates to her job.
The collection released September 8 at newbalance.com and unnamed select retailers. New Balance published no colorway names, no style codes and no prices in its own announcement, which is why everything specific in this post comes from release reporting. One more thing worth watching: she does not appear on the front page of either World Athletics world list for 2026, in the 400 or the hurdles. What that means is not clear from the outside, and it is not something a product page is going to tell you.
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