Katie Ledecky’s first two gold medals at the Rio Games were solo efforts.
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Katie Ledecky, 19, won her third gold medal in swimming at the 2016 Rio Olympics, anchoring the U.S. Women’s team in the 4×200 relay race,.
“Finishing up with a relay and with these thee awesome girls was a dream come true”, Schmitt, who earned her third consecutive medal in the event, said through USA Swimming.
Ledecky, who will attend Stanford in the fall, turned in a split of 1 minute, 53.74 seconds, almost 2.5 seconds faster than her next-fastest teammate, Allison Schmitt.
Ledecky said she had got to bed at about 3.15 a.m and, not being one for sleeping in, was up again at about 9 a.m.
Balandin chased down Yasuhiro Koseki of Japan, who led at the halfway mark and held off a late charge from silver medalist Josh Prenot of the U.S. Prenot finished in 2:07.53, just seven one-hundreths of a second behind Balandin’s 2:07.46.
The Australians settled for silver, and Canada took the bronze.
The teenager from suburban Washington, D.C., has one more race to go in these Olympics, and it might be the biggest lock of all. She will swim the 800-meter freestyle, an event she owns, later in the week. Canada was third. The final time was 7:43.03.
Eighteen-year-old Kyle Chalmers dethroned defending champion Nathan Adrian in the final of the 100-meter freestyle Wednesday night, taking that title Down Under for the first time in 48 years.
On Thursday at the preliminary heats for the 800, Ledecky was back doing what she does best, tearing up the lanes and leaving her competition in the dust.
Franklin’s torch has been passed to Ledecky, who joined Michael Phelps and Hungary’s Katinka Hosszu as three-time swimming gold medalists in Rio. “But in this day and age, the 100 freestyle is maybe the most fickle event out there”.
A gold one, at that.
Balandin touched in 2:07.46. Anton Chupkov of Russian Federation took the bronze finishing in 2:07.70.
“I’m very proud to win a medal for my country”, the 21-year-old said through an interpreter.
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“We do a lot of work for my backstroke at training camps, tuning little things here and there, and I felt like I was able to translate a lot of that into my race”, Franklin, the four times gold medallist from 2012, told reporters.
