Katie Ledecky Maintains Excellence As Swimming World American Female Swimmer of the Year
Katie Ledecky’s super-human feats in the pool are easily taken for granted.
Only Ledecky could win two gold medals and two silver medals at the Olympics and be asked if she’s disappointed. Only Ledecky could utterly dominate an Olympic final yet still be confronted by the lack of a world record as somehow underwhelming, as if they’re as easy as she’s made them look the last decade.
That’s the price of Ledecky’s unprecedented dominance. Every racer behind the blocks at the Olympics is trying, first and foremost, to better their past selves. For Ledecky, named Swimming World American Female Swimmer of the Year, doing so means confronting the boundary of what is humanly possible. No one else shoulders that level of expectation.
But then, there’s only one Ledecky. And if there was any doubt about the 24-year-old’s stature as the greatest distance swimmer of all-time, success at a third Olympics should silence them.
Ledecky isn’t just collecting medals at a historic pace, up to seven gold and three silver for her career. She’s doing it while logging an astounding amount of racing, 6,200 meters against the clock in total in Tokyo. (For comparison, Emma McKeon raced 1,450 for her seven medals, Caeleb Dressel 1,050 for his five and Ariane Titmus 3,200 for four).
Ledecky rightly enters the record book as the first women’s 1500 freestyle gold medalist in Olympic history, a rightful honor given her profile. She’s the first woman to three-peat in the 800 freestyle, one better than her distance predecessors Janet Evans and Brooke Bennett. (No man has ever three-peated in the 1500, their longest event). She added silver in the 400 free, and even fifth place in the 200 free was a finish she managed to find the bright side of.
It’s not just what Ledecky has accomplished but how she’s done it. Her embrace of 15-year-old Katie Grimes, anointed as her American distance heir apparent and one half of the “Katie squared” duo, is quintessentially Ledecky, though such a welcoming attitude is all too rare. The same holds for her joy at seeing Erica Sullivan take silver in the 1500 free. And her magnanimity toward Titmus, even as they waged epic battles, is indicative of a growth mindset. While athletes of far less stature are busy creating enemies out of shadows, Ledecky’s positivity turns rivals into benevolent motivation. Someone as obsessed with the process of improvement as Ledecky doesn’t need extrinsic motivators.
“We’re really friendly and it’s amazing what she’s accomplished this week as well,” Ledecky said of Titmus. “I’m really thrilled to have that kind of competition as something that fuels me, and I know it fuels her as well. So I hope that I can keep up and stay competitive moving forward.”
Those connections bode well for continuing her career. Ledecky is committed to pursuing the Paris Olympics in 2024, shifting her training base to the University of Florida to challenge herself. She’ll be just 31 when the 2028 Olympics arrive in Los Angeles.
Ledecky’s journey through Tokyo reinforced an important theme across the Games. She’s not a machine. It may be easy to forget, in the reams of top times in history and how she coldly dispatches rivals in the water. But Ledecky took time in Tokyo to enjoy the moment, to appreciate her voluminous accomplishments and to not take it for granted.
“I told myself before that race to soak it all in because you never know,” she said after the 1500. “You never know if you’re going to be back on the Olympic pool deck. I remember having that thought even back in Rio – I don’t know if I’ll be in Tokyo. It’s never a guarantee.”
That willingness to embrace vulnerability and to derive genuine joy in her craft bodes well for Ledecky’s ability to navigate the peaks and valleys of another cycle.
This is awsome and I love to swim too.