LEDECKY LEAVES ALL IN HER WAKE
U.S. swimmer, 18, one to watch for Rio
MESA, ARIZ. At age 6, Katie Ledecky wasn’t yet Katie Ledecky.
It wasn’t obvious that she’d shatter world records in multiple distance events by the time she finished high school. It wasn’t obvious that she would be, a year from the 2016 Summer Olympics, the most dominant swimmer on the planet.
Back then, Ledecky was just a 6-year-old falling in love with swimming.
When she went to watch a national championship meet at the University of Maryland, she stayed afterward and nabbed a few autographs. One of the swimmers she found at that meet — and tracked down for his signature — was Michael Phelps. “He’s always been a role model,” Ledecky says.
Phelps, understandably, has signed thousands of autographs and doesn’t remember signing one for that particular 6-year-old. (“I guess I am the old man in the sport now,” he says, smiling.)
Since the London Olympics — where then-15-year-old Ledecky won gold in the 800-meter freestyle, besting the field by more than four seconds — she has been utterly unbeatable.
Ledecky, 18, is the world recordholder in the three longest distance events — the 400-, 800and 1,500-meter freestyles — and she’s contending to be one of the USA’s best in the 200, too.
Wednesday in the Arena Pro Swim Series event, she cruised to victory in the 1,500 (not an Olympic event), beating the second-place finisher by nearly 50 meters.
In the 2014 Pan Pacific Championships she broke her 1,500 world record by six seconds.
Though Ledecky focuses on her lane and her time, she acknowledges, with a smile, that she sometimes can tell how large her lead is when she comes up for air. “Watching her swim last summer, it brought back so many memories being her age doing the same thing. I couldn’t be happier for her,” says Phelps, an 18-time Olympic gold medalist.
Phelps garnered most of the headlines in London on the men’s side, and Missy Franklin got most of them on the women’s side. But it’s now becoming clearer and clearer Ledecky will be the one to watch in Rio de Janeiro.
If Ledecky makes the 2016 U.S. national team in the 100, 200, 400 and 800 freestyle, she could swim seven events in Rio (including relays). No female swimmer has won seven medals in an Olympics.
That’s not something Ledecky or her coach, Bruce Gemmell, think about. They’re working on helping Ledecky improve on a daily basis — a terrifying thought for any future competitors.
There’s one final piece to this, too, something that drives Ledecky as she continues to rewrite record books. She doesn’t want to be labeled as simply a distance swimmer.
“I’m a freestyler,” she says, here, at an event in which she’s entered to swim in every freestyle race from the 100 to the 1,500.
“I think there’s a lot of pride there,” Gemmell says. “With freestyle, she’s very fortunate that there’s a whole range of events. She embraces all of them.”
And they embrace her right back.