Katie Ledecky Is Chasing Her Own Greatness at the Paris Olympics

The rest of the swimming world has gotten faster, but that isn’t slowing the 27-year-old down.

With a victory in the 800-meter freestyle, Ledecky can become the first woman to win four straight Olympic gold medals in the same event. / Grace Hollars/IndyStar / USA TODAY

After the last World Championships in July 2023, I was advised to take one full week off from exercise, no running, no dryland, no weight training, no swimming. My coaches knew this would be a tough pill to swallow. I miss the water after even just one day off. 

- Katie Ledecky, Just Add Water

Katie Ledecky can’t stop, won’t stop. If you want to distill 12 years of unparalleled greatness to its essence, that’s it. Even at the advanced swimming age of 27, she always wants to train, always wants to keep pushing, always is ready to grab the cap and goggles and do it again.

Even a single week off, after an unbroken year of some of the hardest aerobic work possible, made her uncomfortable. It certainly wasn’t voluntary when she did it last year, despite all she had accomplished. A lot of athletes say they have no “off” switch; Ledecky legitimately lives that way. She's even added a solo Sunday swim to her routine, making her a seven-day-a-week swimmer.

Is that commitment to the grind a sign of compulsion or devotion? Perhaps some of both. But Ledecky’s affection for swimming is real, as her new memoir makes clear. In a sport rife with burnout, she is the eternal flame.

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“I can tell you, she wants to swim forever,” says her coach at Gator Swim Club, Anthony Nesty. “Because she enjoys it so much.”

She enjoys it enough to have built her entire lifestyle around it. Early to bed, early to rise, a healthy eater, a non-partier, a limited romantic life, immune to social drama—all of it requires an unusual level of focus, but Ledecky has never seen that as a sacrifice. It’s simply who she is and what it takes for her to do her best in what she loves most. 

What she does is incredibly hard, but why she succeeds is also incredibly simple. She puts in the work, in every facet of her life. And she puts in the work because she loves it.

The Paris Olympics will be Ledecky’s fourth Summer Games. She wants to shoot for a fifth, on home soil (in home water?), in Los Angeles four years from now. That would equal Michael Phelps’s five, and although she’ll never match his 23 gold medals and 28 overall medals, she could do him one better by winning a medal in all five of her Olympics. (Phelps did not win one at his first Summer Games in 2000.)

Ledecky has won gold as an anonymous teen in London, gold as an unbeatable giant in Rio de Janeiro and gold as a 24-year-old facing greater competition in Tokyo. She’s won seven Olympic gold medals total—and she will win more in Paris. She’s the prohibitive favorite in the 1,500-meter freestyle and a solid favorite in the 800, not to mention a strong medal threat in the 400 and the 4X200 freestyle relay. 

The Paris Olympics will be Ledecky’s fourth Summer Games, but she’s hoping to compete in Los Angeles four years from now. / Grace Hollars/IndyStar / USA TODAY

A host of new milestones for long-term excellence are within reach. Two more golds would break American Jenny Thompson’s record for the most by a female swimmer and tie the record for most by a female Olympian (Russian gymnast Larisa Latynina). Three more medals of any kind would give her 13, breaking the American female record of 12 held by Thompson and Dara Torres. With a victory in the 800-meter freestyle, she can become the first woman to win four straight Olympic gold medals in the same event.

So many big moments have already been achieved, with more to come. And yet it’s the smaller, daily moments that create her satisfaction.

Everyone who knows Ledecky will say she relishes practice more than the competitions. That’s despite the fact that swim practice is a grueling, largely solitary endeavor. Spending hours face-down, staring at a black line, communication coming only with gasping breaths between efforts—it’s not terribly social. This is not like a full-court scrimmage in basketball or seven-on-seven drills in football. It takes a different mindset to view those practices as not just survivable, but enjoyable.

Megan Byrnes, who swam on the same club team with Ledecky in Washington, D.C., growing up and then with her in the distance group at Stanford, recalls doing weekly extra Tuesday workouts in college with members of the men’s team—largely in order to give Ledecky tougher competition and additional yardage. She said those workouts sometimes involved arduous 800-meter freestyle sets.

“I’d say, ‘This is going to be horrible,’” Byrnes recalls. “And Katie would say, ‘No, this is going to be fun.’ She will tackle the craziest sets and just go get it. She’s so mentally tough. I don’t think there’s anybody that works as hard as she has for so long.”

The extra workouts date back to before anyone knew who Ledecky was, prior to bursting on the scene by winning gold in London at age 15. She started doing a Sunday workout back then with coach Yuri Suguiyama, upping her weekly training distance to about 40 miles. Pain was part of the package, but the pool was her happy place.

From that point on, doing extra and finding faster (male) training partners became routine. She chased Olympian Andrew Gemmell for thousands of meters in preparation for Rio in 2016, and in 2022 her move to Florida was largely based on the opportunity to throw down freestyle training sets with Olympians Bobby Finke and Kieran Smith. 

On Friday afternoons in Gainesville, Fla., Finke and Ledecky often battle in brutally difficult workouts. An example: three 2,000-meter swims in roughly an hour, with just a couple of minutes rest between them. These are quite literally the premier distance workouts in the sport, a showdown between the two reigning Olympic champions in the 800 and 1,500-meter freestyles. And they are not a time or place for half-hearted effort.

“Katie is a beast in practice,” Finke says. “We have some Friday afternoon sets where she is just hammering away and I’m trying to chase her down, and it never works. It’s been scary, amazing. She’s a really big competitor and she doesn’t like losing, and I don’t like losing.

“If I’m doing good, it’s like, ‘OK, how far ahead am I of Katie? She might catch me on the last one.’”

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Ledecky customarily downplays the days when she can beat Finke. “Ninety-nine percent of the time Bobby is killing me,” she says. “I find that one percent every now and then and have a good day where I can sneak ahead of him.”

The move to Florida was a business decision, one designed to keep her ahead of the world in the longest events and to help her catch up to the young guns who have swam faster in the 400—Australia’s Ariarne Titmus and Canada’s Summer McIntosh in recent years have swapped the world record that once belonged to Ledecky. The presence of one of her old Stanford teammates, Nicole Stafford, in Gainesville helped ease the transition outside of the pool.

Stafford, who was working on her PhD in mechanical engineering at Florida, ate meals and watched sports with Ledecky. She’s seen her former teammate grow from painful shyness to someone more comfortable in her internationally famous skin.

“I’ve seen her open up a lot more,” Stafford says. “When she came in at Stanford, sometimes talking to her felt like you were interviewing her. Over the years, I’ve seen her personality shine through. She’s put trust in people and she’s sharing herself with people. She’s actually pretty funny, and she cares a lot about people.”

Case in point: When the two went out for brunch not long ago, Ledecky insisted on picking up the tab to celebrate Stafford’s successful defense of her PhD thesis. Meanwhile, Ledecky had just been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Ledecky always has been genuinely happy for her teammates when they do well, at whatever level that might be. While she’s chasing world records and gold medals, she can summon plenty of excitement for a friend who simply makes the U.S. national team or swims a personal-best time. A fan and student of the sport, she remembers what those achievements are like, and how much they meant to her on her journey to the top.

It’s also easier for her to talk about everyone other than herself.

“I am perhaps naturally guarded,” she wrote in her pleasantly endearing and revealing memoir. “Not in a defensive way. More in an I-prefer-to-be-private sort of way.”

She let the guard down a little in Just Add Water, which can be considered a love letter to the sport that has made her a national hero. The book is, like the author, bereft of controversy. It is also, like the author, gracious to everyone who has helped her get to where she is. It is rife with affectionate observations about family members, coaches and fellow swimmers.

Ledecky is the prohibitive favorite in the 1,500-meter freestyle and a solid favorite in the 800, not to mention a strong medal threat in the 400 and the 4X200 freestyle relay. / Grace Hollars/IndyStar / USA TODAY

The recitation of her favorite pools around the world is like reading a famous chef’s list of favorite restaurants. The chapters on her grandparents dive into the family history of unstinting effort and generosity. The chapters on her mom and dad reveal parents who encouraged their kids without excessive pushing. She describes them as “whatever is the opposite of stage parents.” (The chapter on her father, Dave, included the revelation that he still drives a 2008 Toyota Sienna, the CD player loaded with Bruce Springsteen discs.)

And the chapter on her older brother, Michael, with whom she is very close, has a Revenge of the Nerds undertone to it. Ledecky reflects on each of them growing up without being “the coolest kid in our class.” The energy Ledecky never expended on teenage drama and popularity was productively channeled into the pool.

“He made me feel like it was O.K. to be a little different, or nerdy, or quirky,” Ledecky wrote. “I found that perspective empowering in my own awkward girlhood years. I followed Michael’s example and didn’t spend much energy on what people thought of my wet hair and off-trend fashion choices as I juggled practices and school.”

She’s had a different coach for each Olympic cycle and remains on great terms with all of them—which is not uniformly true in the sport. There are a lot of bad breakups between swimmers and coaches, but none for Ledecky.

She credits Suguiyama, her first national-level coach, with getting her to say out loud that she wanted to be an Olympian, and for developing her distinctive galloping freestyle stroke. She salutes Bruce Gemmell at Nation’s Capital Aquatics with charting the path to worldwide domination, highlighted by four gold medals in Rio. She praises Greg Meehan at Stanford for helping guide her into adulthood and professional swimming (she set her most recent world record, in the 1,500 freestyle in 2018 during her first pro meet), and surviving the pandemic. She appreciates that Nesty connected on a personal level and dared to fine-tune her stroke—which he described as “choppy” and “inefficient”—in an attempt to make the greatest distance swimmer better.

Mostly, though, Ledecky writes bouquets to the sport itself. It’s impossible to do what she has done at the highest level for 12 years—to swim some of the hardest events, which require the most grueling practices—without deriving joy from it.

“To be doing it at this level for that long, it takes a special person,” Nesty says.

Heading into Paris, she’s the oldest female swimmer with a top-10 world time in 2024 in each of her three individual events—the 400, 800 and 1,500. She’s seeded first in the 800 and 1,500, and second in the 400, ready to take on the young guns nipping at her heels.

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Swimming is a young person’s game, especially on the female side. But Ledecky has evolved from phenom to terminator to elder stateswoman (and U.S. team captain) without losing much at all. She’s one of the few star swimmers who has never had an existential crisis that threatened to drive her from the sport.

How many medals Ledecky wins in Paris, and what kind, is unknown as of now. The only guarantees are these: She will try her hardest, and she will shed tears when it’s over.

Ledecky cried at the end of her Rio Olympics. She cried at the end of her Tokyo Olympics. She did the same after the 2023 World Championships. A year’s worth of work gets emptied into a pool at the end of a season, and then the emotions come forth.

“I sometimes feel depleted after end-of-season meets,” Ledecky writes in her book. “I have so much tension built inside of me. When the meet ends, I take my first deep breath in months. There’s this emotional release after being laser-focused and locked down for such a long period of time. I can’t control it. I deflate like a balloon. I get in my feelings."

It cannot be easy chasing her own greatness, trying to replicate world records set years ago. It’s especially challenging when the rest of the world has gotten faster, trying to clear the bar Ledecky raised so high. But out of respect for swimming and love of the water, she’s still giving it everything she has, every single day.

Without a doctor or coach’s orders, Katie Ledecky can’t stop and won’t stop.

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