In 2008, Katie Ledecky had watched Rebecca Adlington win the women’s 400 and 800m freestyle golds at the Beijing Olympics as an 11-year-old in a small town north of Washington, D.C.
She could not have imagined that only four years later she’d be at the Olympics herself, on the same team as Michael Phelps, whose autograph she had sought as a kid.
Or that she’d be swimming in the lane next to Adlington’s in the women’s 800m freestyle in London. Or that she’d be comfortably in the lead after the first 400. Or that at 15, she’d become Olympic champion.
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Ledecky is now head and shoulders above the rest of the planet. In January, she smashed the 800m freestyle world record in Austin, doing 8:06.68. No one has ever come within seven seconds of it. At the U.S. trials, her 8:10.91 in the heats was the third fastest of all time. Ledecky now owns the 10 fastest 800m freestyle times in history. She is only 19.
At last year’s World championships, Ledecky won the 200, 400, 800 and 1500m freestyles.
There is no women’s 1500 at the Olympics, but Ledecky is still poised to perform a magnificent freestyle treble in Rio. It has only ever been done once, by Debbie Meyer at the 1968 Games.
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It is not just Ledecky’s margins of victory that are astonishing. It is impossible to think of another swimmer — athlete even — so dominant over such varying distances as the 200 and the 1500. She is, it would seem, both a sprinter and a long-distance swimmer. It is hard to find any parallels in elite sport.
“In the 800, nobody is going to get near her; unless she breaks a leg, she’ll win,” says Clive Rushton, who has previously coached the Great Britain, New Zealand, and Greece National swimming teams, and is now Technical Director at the Glenmark Academy in Mumbai.
“So the gold is not the topic of discussion here. She will probably go close to the eight-minute mark. But my bet is she’ll go under eight minutes and that is in the realms of the unbelievable.”
Watching Ledecky, though, requires a suspension of disbelief.