She seemed to thrive on it.
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“It’s kind of the end of a four-year journey”, Ledecky said. After the race, she talked to Channel 11’s Gordon Loesch. Meyer won the 200, 400 and 800 freestyles as a 16-year-old in 1968.
In recent days, Meyer’s been texting with Ledecky’s’ mom, Mary Gen.
He was part of the first three-way tie for silver in Olympic swimming history, joined on the next-highest step by longtime foes Chad le Clos of South Africa and Laszlo Cseh of Hungary. “But joining Debbie in that history is incredible”.
Ledecky burst onto the scene during the 2012 London Olympics, when she stunned everybody by winning gold in the 800m freestyle. She beat world number one Sumiya Dorjsuren of Mongolia to take the title and prove that Brazil is a world force in women’s judo even if the country does not always treasure them.
Carlin said: “Obviously it’s been a tough week and I’ve been feeling a bit ropey the last couple of days but it was my last swim at the Olympics and I wanted to go out and do the best job I could do”.
No one, that is, except Ledecky and her coach Bruce Gemmell, who planned the 19-year-old’s rise to superstardom three years prior.
“I’m pretty sure I’ll just go on lockdown at my house”.
USA’s Katie Ledecky poses with her gold medal on the podium of the Women’s 800m Freestyle Final during the swimming event at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games at the Olympic Aquatics Stadium in Rio de Janeiro on August 12, 2016. In fact, her time of 8:14.63 was so good that it was the second-fastest time ever in the event.
Then, Ledecky played the waiting game, hanging on the rope for a while to let the rest of the field finish.
Nearest challenger Jazz Carlin (Great Britain) was more than 11 seconds back in claiming silver, with Boglarka Kapas of Hungary taking bronze.
“She is the real deal”, says Dr. Michael Joyner, a physician and Mayo Clinic researcher who is one of the world’s top experts on fitness and human performance.
In typical Ledecky fashion, she blew her competition out of the water, opening up a 2.59-second lead at the 200 metre mark and building on that every 100 metres until she touched the wall, as she broke her own mark of 8:06.68 set earlier this year. “She’s obviously someone I’m very excited to look forward to watching race”.
She was surely thinking about all the work she put in to make it there, not to mention all the changes to come as she gets ready to head off to college.
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“She’s doing times that women have never done before because she’s not afraid to think outside the box”, Phelps said. “I wrote my parents an email this morning just saying thank you and I started bawling on my bed and then my roommates came in and comforted me”.
