ABOVE VIDEO: Katie Ledecky, Allison Schmitt, Leah Smith and Maya DiRado receive their gold medals for the women’s 4×200 freestyle relay. Victor of three golds and five medals overall in London four years ago, she dealt with depression and didn’t qualify for an individual event in Rio.
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Lochte will be swimming in the 200-meter individual medley, one of his best events at the Olympics.
The U.S. trailed through the first three legs of the race, as Sweden, China and then Australia swapped the top spot.
Then Ledecky came on and blew them all away.
Some 23 seconds after Ledecky touched the wall, the last of the eight finalists finally ended the grueling race.
The Americans trailed for most of the first three legs of the race, but Ledecky erased a body length deficit during her anchor leg and brought the USA home in 7:43.03, more than a second and a half in front of Australia.
Hosszu settled for silver in 2:06.05, and Canada’s Hilary Caldwell took the bronze in 2:07.54.
The Washington Post’s Dave Sheinin writes that Ledecky is creating a new definition of peak performance in the 800-meter event, “much as Barry Bonds in his prime shattered the statistical norms that governed baseball”.
In 1968, a teenager in North Dakota watched transfixed as Debbie Meyer won the 200-, 400- and 800-meter freestyles at the Mexico City Olympics.
The Katie Ledecky-led USA team struck gold in the women’s 4 x 200 freestyle relay.
However, as 19-year-old Ledecky stormed to a famous victory, Carlin was in a fierce battle for the silver with Hungary’s Boglarka Kapas. Her time of 116.59 seconds was good for 14 place.
Just 15 years old at the time, Ledecky beat defending Olympic and world champion Rebecca Adlington for her first Olympic medal.
There was defeat for Michael Phelps in the final of the 100m butterfly where Singapore’s Joseph Schooling claimed his country’s first Olympic gold medal. That’s the question WUSA posited when it looked at The Baltimore Sun’s graphic that tracks how Olympic athletes with ties to Maryland are doing at the Games. Pieter Timmers of Belgium claimed the silver in 47.80, while Adrian made it onto the medal podium – with a bronze this time – in 47.85. “The memories mean more than the medals to me”.
‘All those early mornings where they were driving me to training and I was moody and didn’t want to go.
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Phelps and Lochte led the US men’s relay team to gold in the 4×200 freestyle.
