Australian Shane Gould probably is the greatest female swimmer in Olympic history after winning five individual medals at the Munich Games in 1972.
Advertisement
“Until you truly are an unbelievable aerobic machine that Katie is, an absolute spectacle, I don’t think anybody can understand it”, team-mate and Olympic 100m freestyle champion Nathan Adrian said, while another USA team member Ryan Lochte said Ledecky “swims like a guy”.
This is Ledecky’s second Olympics. She is already the first Kiwi woman to win three medals at a single world championship (in 2013) and in 2014 she broke the 1,500 freestyle short course world record. “No offense, it’s just what I want to do” and what her coach Bruce Gemmell tells her.
She did, because that’s what she does.
In an interview with Catholic Standard before she flew to Brazil for the Rio 2016 Olympics, Ledecky disclosed that her Catholic faith plays an important role in her preparations and competitions.
You could make a very good case that she’s the world’s fastest woman in the water today. She’s a maniac in the pool, but the girl next door on the pool deck. Swimmers’ exertions take place in the pool, where the beauty and the power of their strokes is lost in the spray, as is their strain. And see it, she most definitely did.
At her pre-Olympics news conference on Wednesday, Ledecky fielded questions from the worldwide media, majority standard ones she hears at every major meet, and true to form, revealed little true insight into her motivations and dreams.
But Katie Ledecky is far from simple. Her father is a Harvard-educated lawyer. Janet Evans won both of those and the 400 individual medley at the Seoul Olympics in 1988.
Ledecky will also be in the women’s 4×200 freestyle relay, while Phelps likely will be in the men’s 4×100 medley relay.
She’ll also spend her time at the pool actually being in the pool.
Anything other than clear Ledecky victories in the 400m and 800m frees would be a massive shock, but in the 200m she faces stiff competition from Sweden’s Sarah Sjostrom – despite being a butterfly specialist – and Italy’s Federica Pellegrini.
“If you think back to 2000, I was a little boy at 15, and now I am getting ready for Rio at 30”. She will not be defending her title in the 100 meter backstroke due to not qualifying, but will still be competing in the 200 meter free and the 800 meter free relay.
Until Ledecky came along, Pellegrini was the world record holder in the 400m free but did her time using a now-banned polyurethane swimsuit.
The Serbian tennis player is now world No. 1 in men’s singles, and favourite to win gold in Rio, with odds of 10/11. Ledecky now owns the 10 fastest 800m freestyle times in history. “She does the work, and it shows, and I think that is something that is awesome to see”. She is, it would seem, both a sprinter and a long-distance swimmer. The top six usually make 4x100m free relay duty, with one, two or three carry-overs from the prelims to the final, but Ledecky’s personal-best time from January ranks her fifth among Americans this year.
Only when considering a question that seemingly came out of nowhere – whether she could see herself someday going below eight minutes in the 800 free – did Ledecky offer a glimpse of how her athletic mind works.
Advertisement
It helps explain why Ledecky wants to attend Stanford and swim for the Cardinal instead of cashing in on a potentially lucrative professional career. Even without that advantage, Ledecky smashed the four-minute barrier and subsequently lowered the record to 3 minutes 58.37 seconds, one of 11 world records she has set.
