Ledecky also became only the third American woman to win four gold medals in a single Olympics, following fellow swimmers Amy Van Dyken and Missy Franklin.
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But as that particular door was marked “Doping Control” and as doping control is a process that is both sacrosanct, procedurally speaking, and necessarily private, Ledecky was not available. The man to beat in the 800 meters is David Rudisha of Kenya, who holds the world and Olympic records.
For most great Olympians – which is to say, all except National Basketball Association superstars and a handful of others – the Olympic quadrennial is a largely lonely stretch, bookended by intense bursts of attention.
RIO DE JANEIRO-It turns out Michael Phelps and Katinka Hosszu are human after all, though Katie Ledecky and Anthony Ervin may not be. She joined Debbie Meyer as the only women to sweep the 200, 400 and 800 freestyle races at the same Olympics. If you like watching an individual force of nature change the course of a team event, look no further than her anchor leg in the 4×200 relay.
“I kind of knew when I first started coming back that it wasn’t going to be an easy process and I was going to force myself to go through pain I didn’t really want to go through”, Phelps said.
Few people know the USA women’s soccer team like former coach Pia Sundhage – but that’s not always a good thing for the Americans.
“I don’t know what to believe”, he said. “Not the little ones – what’s the big one?” The event was won by Wang Zhen of China.
“I just wanted to lay it all out there”, Ledecky said after Friday’s 800m race.
Before the Games began, Ledecky was asked if breaking the eight-minute barrier was within her reach. And she has confirmed every ounce of her promise with her feats in Rio, which include world records in the 400m and 800m.
Dirado, who won 4x200m freestyle relay gold in Rio, tracked front-runner Hosszu throughout, edging ahead in the final meters to win in 2min 05.99 seconds.
Carter won the shot put competition with a throw of 20.63 meters on her final attempt, surpassing New Zealand’s Valerie Adams (20.42 meters, a season best for her).
THE SWAMP: In another embarrassment for the Maria Lenk Aquatics Center, a planned practice session had to be called off to give officials more time to clean the green-tinged water – a four-days-and-counting scenario that prompted American diver Abby Johnson to dub it “the Swamp”. “And that was the whole point”. Around the stadium Friday, they chanted at him the same thing they had in London four years earlier: “Four more years”.
This particular BFHG had a target date: the 2016 Olympics.
Meyer first met Ledecky and her family a few years ago at a conference.
Gemmell’s three-year vision and Ledecky’s training have paid off.
Ledecky won her second consecutive gold medal in the 800 – and the fifth gold of her career overall – by a margin of almost 12 seconds over silver medalist Jazmin Carlin of Great Britain.
She now owns the top 11 performances ever in the event.
Since her first Olympic Games in 2004, the 6-foot-2 legend has never lost a match at the Olympics. During the preliminaries of the 800 she set an Olympic record that was about six seconds slower than her world record.
She also set the American record that night.
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But Ledecky is eager to get on to the next phase of her life. On Friday night, they would stand next to one another on the medal stand and then sit next to each other in a postrace news conference.
