If Ledecky can pull off golds in the 200-and 800-meter freestyle in Rio, she will become the second woman ever (Debbie Meyer, USA in 1968) to achieve three wins in those three events.
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The four-time Olympic gold medalist holds the world record in the 200-meter backstroke and is the first USA woman to swim seven events in an Olympics. “I just wanted to hammer it, hit the touch and give them a bigger lead”.
In other heats, newly crowned 400m individual medley champion Katinka Hosszu of Hungary set an Olympic record as she dominated the 200m IM prelims with a best time of 2:07.45.
Her arms churning effortlessly through the water, Ledecky touched almost 5 seconds ahead of her closest pursuer and quickly whipped around to look at the scoreboard. She’ll also likely anchor the women’s 4×200 free relay, bringing her potential medal total to five. “That’s what I wanted and I had been so close to breaking that all year, the past two years”. She won in 3:56.46, followed by Britain’s Jazz Carlin and American Leah Smith, who were nearly five seconds behind.
Italy’s Federica Pellegrini, who set the world record of 1:52.98 in 2009 in a now-banned synthetic body suit, was fifth fastest and expecting fireworks in Tuesday’s final.
She led right from the start and touched in 55.48, knocking off the mark of 55.64 she established at last year’s world championships.
The British swimmer cruised to victory in the 100-meter breaststroke with a time of 57.13 seconds Sunday night, shattering the mark of 57.55 he set a day earlier in the preliminaries.
Good Morning America sat down with Franklin ahead of the 2016 Olympic Games and put her through a lightning round of questions to discover her favorite snack, pre-meet pump up song, must-see TV show and more.
South Africa’s Olympic champion Chad Le Clos, who beat Phelps in London 2012, eased into the semi-finals with the third best time of 1:55.57. Sjostrom finished fourth in the 100 fly at the London Games four years ago, missing out on the bronze by just 23-hundredths of a second. The bronze went to Cody Miller of the United States, whose time of 58.87 held off teammate Kevin Cordes.
In all, six world records have fallen on the first two days of swimming.
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Phelps and the Americans didn’t mind a bit.
