Katie Ledecky, who has secured her Olympic legacy, still seems to have so much more up her sleeve

August 4, 2024

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Katie Ledecky, who has secured her Olympic legacy, still seems to have so much more up her sleeve

NANTERRE, France — Katie Ledecky doesn’t care about every record she breaks. There are so many that it’s impossible to keep track of them all.

But there was one streak that started on August 3, 2012, and she didn’t want it to end here on Saturday night. Because that was the day she won her first ever Olympic gold medal. She was 15 years old, the youngest swimmer on the U.S. team. So quiet. A little awkward. So shy.

But that day, when she touched the wall to win the women’s 800-meter freestyle final, she became the best and fastest swimmer in the world. She touched many walls and won many races in the years that followed. And now almost anyone will tell you that she is the best female swimmer in the history of the sport. Because she is.

On August 3, 2024, exactly 12 years to the day of her first Olympic gold medal, Ledecky won her ninth. It is more than any American woman has ever won in an Olympic career. Michael Phelps is the only Olympian to have won more.

He was also the only swimmer to win the same event four times in a row, doing so in the 200-meter individual medley from 2004 through 2016. On Saturday, he was joined by Ledecky, the only other swimmer to win the same event in four consecutive meets — and she did so in her beloved 800 freestyle.

“I didn’t want August 3rd to be a day where I didn’t want to go on,” Ledecky said with a laugh. When asked how she knew it was the anniversary of the gold medal that changed her life, she said it’s a date that’s etched in her memory. “It’s almost like your birthday.”

She put pressure on herself on this day, this year. She really wanted to emulate Phelps. He had been such an inspiration to her as a child, just as she is to so many young children now.

“Considering that Michael is the only one who’s ever done it, I think that shows how hard that is to do — especially an 800,” Ledecky said. “It’s just a lot of miles, year after year, and the work you put in to make it happen.

“I didn’t expect this at all in 2012, that I would come back after the Olympics and be able to do the job. I knew it would be very difficult today.”

It was tough, especially because Ledecky herself changed the way everyone swam this event. She changed distance swimming forever by being so dominant and forcing competitors to be creative. In her memoir, she explains how some middle distances (like the 400-meter freestyle) are seen as “almost a sprint.” She continues, “When I was young, I took that race like lightning, and now a lot of other swimmers follow that pattern.”

Rival Ariarne Titmus (right) gave Katie Ledecky a push in the 800-meter freestyle on Saturday, but the American was able to maintain her power in the event. (Xavier Laine/Getty Images)

The 400 is an event that Ledecky may struggle to recapture. Her main rival, Australian Ariarne Titmus, now owns that race. The world record, back-to-back Olympic gold medals, everything. That was an event Ledecky owned at her peak, winning gold in it in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. There, she took bronze.

Titmus approached Saturday’s 800 freestyle final in a similar fashion. She got off to a fast start and was neck-and-neck with Ledecky for the first 450 meters before eventually finishing 1.25 seconds behind her for silver. But Titmus was proud of herself for challenging Ledecky at all. “I gave it a great race,” Titmus rightly said. “I gave it my all.”

“I know how hard it is to defend a title,” Titmus said. “It’s so much harder to win it a second time, and to be at the top for 12-plus years is incredible. I told her after the race that she made me a better athlete. I have so much respect for what she’s done in this sport — more than anyone else. She’s been winning this race since I was 11 years old, and I’m turning 24 next month. It’s just remarkable. She’s unreal.”

Saturday’s final was Ledecky’s last race of the Paris Games. She takes home two gold, one silver and one bronze medal. She now has 14 Olympic medals in four Games. She said later that losing to teenage sensation Summer McIntosh in February in the 800-meter freestyle — an event she hadn’t lost in 13 years — helped prepare her for what it would take to win here on Saturday. “It sparked something in me,” Ledecky said. “I had some of my best distance sets right away.”

Ledecky hopes she can keep doing it all. She’s 27 now, and she’ll be 31 when she swims the 800 meters in Los Angeles for the 2028 Olympics. It’s not that old, really — and Ledecky has said for years that she plans to be there. But it’s a lot of age for an elite athlete. When asked if she’d like to win a fifth consecutive Olympic title in the 800 meters, Ledecky said she’d love to.

“But it’s not easy,” she said. “I take it year by year and give it everything I have, while I still have it.”

At the same time, Ledecky still seems to have so much more in her. It’s hard to imagine her not wanting to train, not wanting to grind. That’s her favorite part. She admitted Saturday night that she’s “a little bit dreading” the break from the pool she’ll have to take after the Paris Games.

“Sometimes you just want to get in the pool,” Ledecky said. “I know I’ll be back in the pool soon.”

Katie Ledecky now has nine Olympic gold medals. Only Michael Phelps has won more in any sport in Olympic history. (Xavier Laine/Getty Images)

As retired Olympian Cullen Jones put it, “For me, swimming became a job. For her, swimming became a lifestyle.”

Ryan Murphy, who at 29 is on the U.S. team, said he struggles to answer some of the questions Ledecky asks every day. “What’s it like to climb the mountain and then stay on the mountain?” Murphy asked rhetorically. “Katie has been that way for over a decade. It would have been a lot easier for her to say, ‘You know, I’ve won three (gold medals at) the Olympics in a row, and I can get complacent,’ but she doesn’t.”

That idea is anathema to everything that makes Ledecky who she is. She would never cut corners. She would never cheat the sport in that way.

Or herself. Even when she shouldn’t be training, she’s in the pool. In Gainesville, Florida, she treats Sunday as her day. She swims as much or as little as she wants. Alone, no timekeeping.

“I remind myself: There are no rules,” Ledecky wrote in her memoir. “I don’t have to do a certain amount. I don’t have to go a certain speed. I can just be in the pool and play. No pressure. Just me and my connection to water, just the way it started when I was young, when I first dunked my face in the water and couldn’t wait to do it again.”

“For me, the pool will always be a sanctuary, a place to calm the mind, to return to the water from which we all came. A place to dive in and feel transformed. And that, as much as anything else, is why I keep swimming.”

Sometimes the simplest explanation is the truest. Ledecky is driven to keep going with nothing left to prove in some of swimming’s most brutal events because she can’t imagine being anywhere else. She’s happiest in the water.

So, she’ll be there later this summer and probably all fall. Even though she should take a break. She can’t.