AN AMERICAN TREASURE WILL KEEP SWIMMING, WITH THE MOST MEDALS OF ALL
Katie Ledecky has been true to her sport for most of her life, and at 27, having won 13 overall and eight gold, she is quite comfortable in her skin as the most accomplished of U.S. female Olympians
She was on the cover of a magazine, National Geographic. She uses water colors and plays chess at home. Her uncle owns the New York Islanders, her favorite hockey team. She drinks chocolate milk and often balances a glass on her head, as she did this week in the pool. During races, she lets her “mind wander.” I am not sure what else to say about Katie Ledecky beyond this truth: She isn’t dating Stephen Nedoroscik.
He wears Clark Kent glasses and won a bronze medal on the pommel horse. She is respectful of the gymnast and all Olympians, but this is not the time to mess while her medal total has increased to 13, including eight colored gold. As she told the New York Times, “I think none of that has been a deliberate choice of like, ‘Oh, I can’t date right now because I’m training,’ or, ‘I don’t want to,’ or ‘I have no interest in you.’ None of that. It’s just a natural thing, and whether it’s coming from me or from other people being intimidated, I don’t know. I’m a friendly person at heart!”
There is that, and otherwise, she is the most accomplished American woman in the history of the Games. She swims. She will keep swimming, to the next summer event in Los Angeles, after which she will continue to swim. Her sequence, at 27, is to escape within the chlorine. “I embrace routine. I lean into the regularity,” she wrote in a recent memoir. “The endless laps become a kind of meditation. It’s a bit like walking through those spiraling Zen gardens, a way to calm the noise of the world and let the consistency and predictability of swimming back and forth wash over you.”
So it should surprise no one that she wasn’t reeling through time Thursday. When she won a silver in the 4x200-meter freestyle relay, Ledecky was focusing on her next race, the 800-meter freestyle, which probably will result in a convincing victory as she showed in breaking her own record in the 1,500 meters. Swimming is a sport filled with angst, including the crossfire between the Americans and Australians. She is too busy to preen.
“Each medal means a lot and each one is challenging in its own way and I try not to really dwell on history or the magnitude of things. I'll just let you guys do that,” she said. “But yeah, I mean those women that I'm up there with now, they're people that I've looked up to for so many years. I consider many of them friends, supporters, people that I was watching swim when I was just starting out in the sport, so that's very special to me to share that with them and they definitely inspired me. So I hope some little girl out there is watching — and will come along and get up there with all of us someday, too.”
For now, she’ll listen to her disciples. One was Erin Gemmell, her relay partner, who revealed what she did at age 8. She dressed up like Ledecky on Halloween. “It’s crazy now that I can use this medal in a costume for her,” she said, at 19.
Said Claire Weinstein, all of 17: “It’s even more special that we could be part of Katie’s journey.”
Winning races haunts her. She thought she would win the 1,500. “But a lot of other people expected it of me and that doesn’t make it easy,” she said. “It’s not easy to always follow through and get the job done. There are moments of doubt. There’s moments of hard days in training where you doubt yourself and you just have to push through and trust in your training, trust that everything will come together.”
She was an American treasure in London, a dozen years ago. This time, she fell to phenoms Ariarne Titmus and Summer McIntosh in the 400-meter race Saturday. Her country has new blood, such as breaststroke champion Kate Douglass, but the U.S. team has been disappointing. Only four of 20 medals have been gold, while Ledecky deals with doping Chinese swimmers who won two bronze medals Thursday.
“I hope everyone here is competing clean this week. That really matters. It also matters (if they) were training clean,” she said. “Everyone has heard what athletes think. They want transparency. They want answers to questions that still remain. We are here to race, and we will race whoever is in the lane next to us. So we hope that people follow their own rules — that applies to now and into the future. We want to see some change in the future so you don’t have to ask us that question.”
She is cleaner than the chocolate milk and her favorite candy, peanut butter cups. She waits for another Olympic decoration this weekend. She is beloved in her sport and can start a new career doing anything she wants.
Instead, she’ll just swim and showcase chocolate milk.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.