Golden Olympian Ledecky finds Stanford college life ‘very normal’
After winning five Olympic medals (four gold) this summer in Rio de Janeiro, Katie Ledecky faced her next great challenge: riding a bicycle. Seriously. “I wasn’t a very good biker,” Ledecky, 19, said, laughing, before Monday night’s Golden Goggles award ceremony. “I had to practice. I had three weeks off before I got to Stanford, and I was biking at the park and the end of our street to practice.”
She had no need to bike around the Maryland suburbs. But she was headed to Stanford and its beautiful, sprawling campus. Biking is the preferred transportation. So like pretty much everything Ledecky has set her mind to do, she got better at it.
It’s how she’s approached other typical college freshman challenges this fall. She studied her campus map before heading out so she wouldn’t get lost (at first). She tried to improve her memorization skills as she met hundreds of students and potential friends ( but this didn’t always work).
“The biggest challenge for me was that people would know my name before or remember it,” Ledecky said. “I would try to remember theirs and I would always feel really embarrassed when I couldn’t remember theirs, but they could remember mine. That’s like the one thing.
“Apart from that, it’s been very normal.”
It helps that the most dominant swimmer on the planet is surrounded by other students uber-talented in a variety of fields at Stanford. The campus gives Ledecky an anonymity she finds comfort in and appreciates.
“We wanted to give her a sense of some normalcy in her life again, after the run of the last couple of years and the pressure build-up to Rio and the overwhelming success there,” Stanford women’s swimming coach Greg Meehan said. “It was really important that we let her be a normal college student with a normal college life. Stanford is one of those neat places where you can do that.”
Said Ledecky: “No selfies, no autographs. Nothing that you would probably expect.”
From an athletic standpoint, the transition to college is going quite, well, swimmingly. She has broken three NCAA records. This week she set an NCAA record in the 1,650-yard freestyle, breaking the collegiate record by 20 seconds and her own American record by 10 seconds. Her margin of victory was more than a minute.
“I’m not surprised, because I see what she does in practice every day,” Meehan said. “She’s just spectacular, a really good trainer. She gets into a really good rhythm. She’s just one of those once-in-a-lifetime athletes.”
Ledecky is willing to do whatever she can to help the Stanford team. She expects Meehan will have her occasionally swim individual medleys to mix up her training, but in terms of international competition, her focus is on the freestyle, her specialty.
Ledecky swept the women’s 200, 400 and 800 freestyles in Rio, the first woman since Debbie Meyer in 1968 to win three individual freestyle gold medals in the same Games. Ledecky’s fourth gold came in the 4x200 free relay, and her lone silver in the 4x100 free relay.
Monday night, Ledecky was named USA Swimming’s Female Athlete of the Year.
Meehan was one of the assistant coaches for the U.S. women’s team; he had multiple gold medalists under his tutelage in Rio, including Maya DiRado and Simone Manuel.
DiRado said she expects Ledecky’s partnership with Meehan to be wildly productive.
“He’s phenomenal, and I think she thinks the same way I do,” DiRado said. “She’s really methodical about her swimming. ... We’re already seeing how incredible it’s going to be.”