Michael Ledecky recalls the day his younger sister Katie beat him in the pool, ripping his goggles off his head and shattering them in two. That August evening, he experienced an odd mix of pride and rage. Time hasn’t faded the memory.
The race, a 200-meter freestyle duel that he had organised, was such an essential event in his adolescent life that he wrote about it for an English high school project. “How Katie surpassed me in my primary sport baffled me,” he wrote. “Why can’t I beat my younger sister?”
According to CNN, he was a high-achieving teenager, a freshman chosen for his high school’s championship swimming team, and a perfect-grade student who aspired to swim for an Ivy League team. He was as dedicated to the sport as his sister, waking up at 4:15 a.m. for practice, swimming morning after morning, and looking down at nothing but the black line at the bottom of the pool before school.
Yet he realised on that summer’s night that his sister, whom he would compete against at almost anything—from pancake-eating contests to board games—was the more talented swimmer.
What he didn’t recognise at the time, and no one in the family did—not even when she reached her first Olympic final—was that Katie Ledecky would become one of the most excellent swimmers in history.
“She would typically beat my times from the year prior despite being three years younger, and eventually, she got me around the time I was a freshman and sophomore in high school,” Michael Ledecky tells CNN Sport. “But even then, I was exceptionally proud of what Katie was doing.”
The following fall, she secured her first national age group record. “A very old record from the 1970s,” her brother recalls. “That showed us she could swim well beyond the local competitions she was winning.”
She would go on to break more records and win far more significant races: seven Olympic golds, a record 26 world championship medals, 16 of the fastest 800m freestyle times ever swum by a woman, and set 19 of the fastest 1500m freestyle times in history.
An Olympic great and still aged just 27, how did a thoughtful child who went to a private girls’ school in Bethesda, Maryland—a “truly mediocre swimmer,” as she describes her six-year-old self—become a history-making, groundbreaking athlete with preternatural calm in the high noon moments of competition?
Katie: Teenager who achieved the unthinkable
In the dining hall of London’s Olympic Village, a few hours before her first Olympic final, Ledecky eats her own lunch. The 15-year-old appears calm and unruffled to onlookers, characteristics that would become her hallmark over the next decade or so of competition.
“She was just sitting by herself,” Russell Mark, USA Swimming’s high-performance consultant at the time, tells CNN Sport. “Me and my colleague, George, thought, ‘Wow, she is so calm.’
“I recalled that story with her in the last few years, and she remembers that lunch being so nervous, but that’s not how I remembered it at the time,” he added, laughing.
That evening, at the London Aquatics Centre, Prince William and his wife Catherine attended to cheer home favourite, world record holder, and defending champion Rebecca Adlington in a race regarded as a head-to-head between the Briton and rising star Lotte Friis.
Little attention is given to Ledecky, competing in her first international event. “Invisibility would be my superpower,” she writes of that race in her memoir, “Just Add Water.”
When Adlington walks out onto the arena, the roars are loud enough to uproot trees. Ledecky tells herself the fans are singing “Ledecky” rather than “Becky” and channels their energy as she aims for the unthinkable.
No one thinks she can topple the double Olympic champion in the most anticipated pool race of the Games, not even when, ignoring her coach’s advice, she sets off hard and fast. However, she does heed one piece of guidance from him, which Ledecky says in her book “changed everything,” which is to breathe more to her right side.
At 150m, the teenager is leading at a world-record pace. By the halfway mark, she is still ahead.
“I couldn’t believe what I was watching,” says Michael, who was somewhere high in the rafters, “cheering my head off.”
As the race approaches the final 100m, Ledecky has a handsome lead, but the world record is still within sight. With 50m to go, victory is assured, and the battle is now between her and the clock. Her rivals are left to race among themselves. Commentators are aghast.
In one of the most extraordinary performances in Olympic history, Ledecky touches home in eight minutes, 14.63 seconds, the second-fastest women’s 800m freestyle in history.
In her autobiography, she writes about her parents musing over how they would soothe their daughter’s post-race disappointment after she had called them in the lead-up and talked about winning a medal. With hindsight, her brother realised his sister’s mindset was different.
“She was advising us where we could stand for the medal ceremony if she got a medal. She was probably using the language, ‘If I get a medal,’ but she was saying it almost confidently, ‘When I get a medal,’” he says.
The high school student hadn’t told anyone other than her coach that her goal for the London Games was to make the US team the youngest Olympic gold medallist in her event’s history.
