NANTERRE, France — Katie Ledecky doesn’t care about every single record she breaks. After all, there are so many it’d be impossible to even track them all.
But there was one streak she started back on Aug. 3, 2012, and she didn’t want it to end here Saturday night. Because that was the day she won her very first Olympic gold medal. She was 15 years old, the youngest swimmer on the U.S. team. So quiet. Kind of awkward. Very shy.
But that day, when she touched the wall to win the women’s 800-meter freestyle final, she got to be the best and fastest swimmer in the world. She touched a lot of walls and won a lot of races in the years after that. And now, most everyone will tell you she’s the greatest female swimmer in the sport’s history. Because she is.
On Aug. 3, 2024, exactly 12 years to the day of her first Olympic gold medal, Ledecky captured her ninth. It’s more than any American woman has ever won in any Olympic career. Michael Phelps is the only Olympian who has ever won more.
He was also the only swimmer who has won the same event four times in a row. He did it with the 200-meter individual medley from 2004 through 2016. On Saturday, Ledecky joined him, the only other swimmer to win the same event in four consecutive games — and she did it in her beloved 800 free.
“I didn’t want Aug. 3 to be a day I didn’t like moving forward,” Ledecky said, smiling. Asked how she knew this was the anniversary of the gold medal that changed her life, she said it’s a date that’s imprinted on her mind. “It’s almost like your birthday.”
She put pressure on herself on this day, this year. She really wanted to match Phelps. He’d been such an inspiration to her as a kid, just like she is to so many young kids now.
“Given that Michael is the only one that’s ever done that, I think that just shows how difficult that is to do — and especially an 800,” Ledecky said. “It’s just a lot of miles year after year, trying to put in the work to make it happen.
“I definitely wouldn’t have pictured this in 2012, being able to come back Olympics after the Olympics and be able to get the job done. I knew today was going to be really hard.”
Hard it was, mostly because Ledecky herself has changed the way everyone else swims this event. She’s changed distance swimming forever by being so dominant and by forcing competitors to get creative. In her memoir, she explained how some mid-distances (like the 400 freestyle) are viewed “almost as a sprint.” She continued, “When I was young, I would take that race out like lightning, and now a lot of other swimmers follow that pattern.”
Rival Ariarne Titmus (right) gave Katie Ledecky a push Saturday in the 800-meter freestyle, but the American extended her reign in the event. (Xavier Laine / Getty Images)
The 400 is an event that may be hard for Ledecky to recapture. Her primary rival, Australian Ariarne Titmus, owns that race now. The world record, two consecutive Olympic gold medals, all of it. That was an event Ledecky owned at her peak; she won gold in it in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Here, she took bronze.
Titmus took a similar approach to the 800 free final on Saturday. She went out fast and was neck-and-neck with Ledecky for the first 450 meters before eventually finishing 1.25 seconds behind her for silver. But Titmus was proud of herself for challenging Ledecky at all. “I made it a great race,” Titmus said, accurately. “I gave it everything.”
“I know how hard it is to defend a title,” Titmus said. “It’s so much harder to win it a second time, and to be on top for over 12 years is unbelievable. I said to her after the race that she’s made me a better athlete. I totally respect what she has done in this sport — more than anyone else. She’s been winning this race since I was 11 years old, and I turn 24 next month. That is just remarkable. She’s unreal.”
Saturday’s final was Ledecky’s last race of these Paris Games. She heads home with two gold medals, one silver and one bronze. She has now won 14 total Olympic medals across four Games. She said later that it was a loss to teenage sensation Summer McIntosh back in February in the 800 free — an event she hadn’t lost in 13 years — that helped prepare her for what it took to win here on Saturday. “It sparked something in me,” Ledecky said. “I had some of my best distance sets right after.”
Ledecky is hoping she can keep doing all of this. She’s 27 years old now, and she’d be 31 if she can swim the 800 in Los Angeles for the 2028 Olympics. It’s not that old, really — and Ledecky has said for years now that she planned to be there. But it’s kind of old for an elite athlete. Asked if she wanted to try for a fifth consecutive Olympic title in the 800, Ledecky said she’d love to.
“But it’s not easy,” she said. “I’ll take it year by year and give it everything I’ve got for as long as I have left in me.”
At the same time, Ledecky seems to have so much left in the tank. It’s hard to imagine her not wanting to train, not wanting to grind. That’s her favorite part. She admitted Saturday night she’s “kind of been dreading” the break from the pool she’ll be forced to take after the Paris Games.
“Sometimes, you just want to get in the pool,” Ledecky said. “I’m sure I’ll find my way back to the pool pretty soon.”
Katie Ledecky now has nine Olympic gold medals. Only Michael Phelps has won more in any sport in Olympic history. (Xavier Laine / Getty Images)
As retired Olympian Cullen Jones put it, “For me, swimming became a job. For her, swimming is a lifestyle.”
Ryan Murphy, part of this U.S. team at age 29, said he’s struggled to answer some of the questions Ledecky does on a daily basis. “What’s it like to climb the mountain and then stay atop that mountain?” Murphy asked, rhetorically. “Katie’s been that for over a decade now. It would have been way easier for her to be like, ‘You know what, I’ve already won (gold medals at) three Olympics in a row, and I can get complacent now,’ but she doesn’t do that.”
That idea is anathema to everything that makes Ledecky who she is. She’d never cut corners. She’d never cheat the sport like that.
Or herself. Even when she’s not supposed to train, she finds herself in the pool. In Gainesville, Fla., she takes Sundays as a day that’s just hers. She swims as much or as little as she wants to. By herself, nothing timed.
“I remind myself: there are no rules,” Ledecky wrote in her memoir. “I don’t need to do a certain amount. I don’t need to go a certain speed. I can just be in the pool and play. No pressure. Just me and my connection to water, exactly as it started when I was young, when I submerged my face beneath the surface for the first time and couldn’t wait to do it again.
“For me, the pool will always be a sanctuary, a place to quiet the mind, to return to the water we all come from. A place to dive in and feel transformed. And that, as much as anything else, is why I continue to swim.”
Sometimes, the simplest explanation is the truest one. Ledecky is driven to keep going with nothing left to prove in some of swimming’s most brutal events because she can’t imagine being anywhere else. She’s happiest in water.
So, that’s where she’ll be later this summer and probably all fall. Even though she’s supposed to be taking a break. She can’t.
GO DEEPER
Katie Ledecky sets Olympic record in 1500m freestyle
(Top photo of Katie Ledecky celebrating Saturday’s win: Eurasia Sport Images / Getty Images)
