AS TENS OF thousands in the crowd cheered her on, the bright lights of Lucas Oil Stadium shone into a pool that had taken over a football field in Indianapolis. Katie Ledecky touched the wall in first place, looked up at the screen where the results were displayed, and shook her head.
She took off her goggles and bobbed in the water before turning back to reach again toward the wall.
Katie Ledecky with a DOMINANT 1500m free win in Indianapolis. Katie Grimes will join her in this event in Paris. NBC & @peacock | #SwimTrials24 pic.twitter.com/CQklctFNxJ
Only then did Katie Grimes, the second-place finisher in the 1,500-meter freestyle, touch the wall. A full 20 seconds had elapsed between Ledecky’s finish at the U.S. Olympic trials and that of Grimes, and Ledecky had secured yet another spot on the team for Paris, as well as officially taken over all of the fastest 19 times in the race’s history.
But she wasn’t satisfied.
Moments later, with the water dripping from her suit and her swim cap still firmly in place atop her head, the 27-year-old Ledecky spoke to NBC’s Melissa Stark in an interview that was shown on the jumbotron.
“I would have loved to have been a little faster, but I’ll take it,” Ledecky said flatly before perking up slightly. “I’ll be better in a few weeks.”
A few hours later, she didn’t seem much happier about her performance. As she spoke to a room full of reporters, she called her race “a little sloppy” and admitted she had been “expecting to go a lot faster.”
“I know I have a lot more in me than the end result today,” Ledecky said.
She was simply stating the facts when she said she could have been faster. Her time at trials was more than 17 seconds slower than the world-record pace (15:20.48) she set in 2018, and she knows exactly what she’s capable of. Her opponents do, too. It’s what has made her the literal gold standard in the sport for over a decade. Since her Olympic debut as a teenager in London in 2012, Ledecky has won just about everything, including 10 Olympic medals, seven of which are gold.
Now as she enters the fourth Olympics of her career as one of the most recognizable athletes in the world, Ledecky looks to make even more history, and she continues to be driven by the idea of turning what seems impossible into something achievable.
One more gold medal will tie Ledecky with Jenny Thompson for the most by a female swimmer. With three more medals of any kind, she will become the most decorated female American Olympian. And many believe those records would just be a formality for her legacy.
“She’s the stud, she’s the GOAT,” Michael Phelps, the legendary swimmer and most decorated Olympian in history, said during the Tokyo Olympics. “She’s the best female swimmer in the world.”
WHAT LEDECKY HAS accomplished in her career can only be described as staggering. Unimaginable, almost. Comparable only to Phelps.
In addition to her 10 Olympic medals — the first coming as a 15-year-old in the 800-meter freestyle in 2012 — she has won 21 world championship titles across four different individual races (the 200, 400, 800 and 1,500-meter free) and two relays (4×100 and 4×200 free). After winning the 800 at the 2023 worlds, she became the only swimmer to win six world titles in the same event, and broke Phelps’ record for the most individual world swimming titles in history.
Ledecky has swum the fastest time in history 14 times throughout her career. She owns world-record times in the 800- and 1,500-meter freestyle races. And while she has the top 19 times in the 1,500, she’s somehow even more dominant in the 800, where she holds the top 29 times in history. It’s somehow both astonishing and unsurprising that she’s never lost a race in a major competition in either of those distances.
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Her dominance has even inspired her opponents and closest rivals.
“She kind of laid out a footprint for me … The way she was racing I aspired to be like that,” Ariarne Titmus said on a Code Sports podcast earlier this year. The 23-year-old Australian swimmer defeated Ledecky for gold in the 400 freestyle in Tokyo and finished behind her in the 800. “She was the first woman that really showed the world what you could do when you race fearlessly and take a race out hard. If I didn’t have her to chase, there’s no way I would be the athlete that I am because I was wanting to break barriers like she was.”
As a relative unknown on the global stage, Ledecky showed that fearless spirit in her Olympic debut in 2012. She had surprised even herself when she won the 800-meter free and made the Olympic team during her first senior national competition at trials. She was the youngest of the 530-member American contingent for the Games, and earned the third-fastest time in the qualifying heats in London.
But even then she was fueled by self-belief. In her memoir “Just Add Water: My Swimming Life,” released in June, Ledecky said she had tried to envision all of the possible scenarios for the race before the final, but simply couldn’t picture anything but herself winning.
“Given my record of success in the 800, I was convinced the odds were in my favor to win this race,” Ledecky wrote. “Anything good or bad could happen — and wasn’t that the beauty of a competition day?
“From my room in the Olympic village, I sent an email to my parents that quietly shared that confidence. I reminded them again that if you win a medal, the family can come down to the swimmers-only section and throw flowers or take photos. My parents told me after the fact that when I wrote them this, they thought I’d lost my mind.”
In the final, Ledecky took an early lead, leaving broadcast commentators to doubt her ability to pace herself, and ultimately won the gold medal by more than four seconds.
It was the second-fastest time ever in the race at that point.
SINCE THAT AUSPICIOUS introduction to the global audience, Ledecky has become Katie Ledecky, known by sports fans the world over. In addition to the medals and records, it’s her ability to consistently perform at the highest level that sets her apart. In a sport where 27 is considered old — the average age of Olympic swimmers in Tokyo was 21 — Ledecky continues to push herself and the boundaries of what’s possible.
And part of that comes from a willingness to change in order to challenge herself. She has worked with a different coach during every Olympic cycle — no matter the success she’s achieved.
Following her four-medal performance in Tokyo, Ledecky announced she would be leaving Stanford, where she had been an eight-time NCAA champion, to join the Gator Swim Club at the University of Florida. The move allowed her to train under head coach Anthony Nesty and alongside some of the best swimmers in the country, including Bobby Finke, the reigning men’s Olympic gold medalist in the 800 and 1,500 freestyle, and Caeleb Dressel, the seven-time Olympic gold medalist.
With little competition in the women’s distance races, and even less so during her practice sessions at Stanford, getting to work daily next to someone like Finke has made her better. According to Nesty, who is also the U.S. men’s Olympic head coach, she has thrived in the environment.
“I think she enjoys the day-to-day more than she does competing,” Nesty said during a news conference from Olympic training camp earlier this month. “That’s why her career has been steady from day one, where she broke out for the first time. I can tell you she wants to swim forever because she enjoys it so much, and to be doing it at this level for that long, it takes a special person.”
In an interview with CBS News’ “Sunday Morning” last month, Nesty added that training with the men gave her an extra incentive. “She may not express it, but when she beats the boys, I think it makes her happy,” he said.
Whatever the motivation, Ledecky’s training has continued to put her in a league of her own. In addition to her win in the 1,500, Ledecky also convincingly won the 200, 400 and 800 distances at trials. She has opted out of competing in the 200 meters in Paris as an individual to focus on the longer distances, but will be competing in the relay. Ledecky said she was thrilled simply to have made her fourth Olympic team — something she never could have believed as a kid — when speaking to reporters in Indianapolis.
When asked if it was hard to remain focused on her goals or to stay excited about the process this many years into her swimming career, Ledecky didn’t hesitate.
“I actually don’t think it is. I think it’s kind of the opposite for me,” Ledecky said. “I feel like I enjoy this more and more each year. I think it’s a testament to the people that I have around me, the people that I’ve had around me my whole career in [her hometown of] Bethesda, Maryland, and out at Stanford, now in Florida, just really great communities that keep me excited about the sport, great teammates that push me every day, great coaches that believe in me and push me to continue to reach for bigger and bigger goals.”
Ledecky is now just days away from potentially etching her name more times in the record books. If she were to win the 800, she would become just the second woman in Olympic history, and the first in the pool, to earn an individual-event gold medal in four consecutive Olympic Games.
She has four opportunities to medal and could pass former Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina for the most gold medals won by any female Olympian if she were to win three golds. She would then also become just the second Olympian to have earned 10 or more gold medals — joining only Phelps.
But it won’t be easy. Titmus, the reigning gold medalist in the 200 and 400, remains her most formidable foe. Titmus could challenge Ledecky in both the 400 and the 800, and has the second fastest time in the world in the 800 this season behind Ledecky. And while Ledecky remains the overwhelming favorite in the two longer distances, others such as Li Bingjie and Simona Quadarella could surprise.
Katie Ledecky doing what Katie Ledecky does. She cruises to victory in the women’s 200m freestyle final! NBC & @peacock | #SwimTrials24 pic.twitter.com/zUprToT38B
But Ledecky has never been one to back down. In fact, it’s what’s gotten her here. Back in Indianapolis, she swam in the 200-meter freestyle, despite few expecting her to actually compete in the individual race at the Games.
Tied for the lead with Clare Weinstein at the 150-meter mark, Ledecky found another gear down the stretch. As she’s done countless times before, she surged to the wall, winning over Weinstein by a full second.
This time, when she looked up at the jumbotron after the race, she couldn’t help but smile.
“The more far-fetched an objective appears when I come up with it, the better,” Ledecky wrote in her book. “If, when I say my goals out loud to my coaches, they sound unfeasible — that’s when I know I’m on the right track.
“The impossible is what motivates me every day to go to the pool. It’s so satisfying, so epically rewarding, when you start chipping away at those idealistic goals. Nothing has made me more committed to my training than choosing a scary goal and taking the steps to go after it.”