I love the pool! I love being in the water! I think, whenever I'm not in the water, I want to be in the water, and it's very difficult for me to take breaks.
Katie Ledecky learned to swim at her community pool in Bethesda, Maryland. Her mother — a former freestyler at the University of New Mexico — started her off with simple games. Both she and her brother took to swimming immediately. Although she was never pressured to compete, by the time Katie was six years old, she was racing for a team, the Palisades Porpoises. Katie swam well and enjoyed setting ambitious goals, but it was not yet apparent that she would end up an Olympian, let alone one of swimming’s all-time greats.
Even as she led a normal, engaged life outside of the sport, Katie continued to compete in swimming. Before she entered high school, she was waking at 4 a.m. for practice at the Nation’s Capital Swim Club in Washington, D.C. By 14, it was clear – at least to her and her coach Yuri Suguiyama – that Katie could become a world-class swimmer. At a goal-setting meeting before an Olympic qualifying event – her first national competition at the adult level – Suguiyama pushed her to say what the ideal outcome would be. She whispered, and he had to ask her to speak up, but saying it aloud made the possibility real for her: to make it to the Olympics.
Nine months later, the now-15-year-old high schooler had not just made it – she won gold in the 800-meter freestyle in the 2012 London Games. She was the youngest American competitor in the entire Games and shocked the world by achieving the second-fastest score in the event’s history: 8:14.63. No one, not even her parents, had thought it was possible. Although Katie quietly hoped for victory, she also remained level-headed. “I believed if I finished last, I would be okay,” she said. “I was at my very first Olympics, and there was another one in four years. It was all just a learning experience.” This calm self-mastery would come to make the rest of her career possible.
Although Ledecky didn’t expect the success to continue, she kept up the ambitious goal-setting that Suguiyama had taught her. In the process, she transformed distance swimming. At the 2015 World Championships in Kazan, she swept the 400m, 800m, and 1500m events, setting world records in each. By her own telling, this wasn’t entirely on purpose – swimmers are supposed to conserve their energy during preliminary rounds. But as she swam at what felt like an easy pace, she glanced at the clock and realized she was maintaining a record-breaking pace. So she continued, finished at historic times, and reassured her coach she wasn’t risking exhaustion.
Despite her unprecedented prowess and growing international fame, Ledecky was determined to remain a normal high school student. “I never wanted school to take a back seat to swimming,” she says. Her sophomore year began after the summer she burst onto the scene in London. While her classmates and teachers knew what she’d accomplished, they didn’t treat her any differently.
Still, during those formative high school years, Ledecky practiced a self-discipline that set her apart from her peers: homework had to be done well in advance so she could compete, and the late nights and careless diets of other teenagers were, by her resolution, off-limits – she had records to break. She credits this fortitude to the example of her older brother, Michael, a fellow athlete who showed her how to take academic performance seriously while still excelling in a demanding sport. “I learned a lot of those things probably ahead of some of my peers,” she says.
She stayed ahead of her peers in other ways: Rio 2016 confirmed her dominance in international swimming, with world-record-setting gold medals in the 200- and 800-meter freestyles, as well as two more golds in the 400-meter freestyle and the 200-meter freestyle relay, and a silver in the 100-meter relay. Now a student at Stanford University, Ledecky maintained the commitment to education that she learned in high school. Throughout a now-unsurprisingly successful college athletic career, she earned a degree in psychology with a minor in political science. She maintained a nearly perfect GPA while winning nine NCAA titles.
Ledecky’s nearly perfect GPA didn’t get in the way of an eventual nine NCAA titles won, as usual, in record time. In 2017, her freshman year, she broke the American record for the 500-meter freestyle, then defended her victory the following year. Over those two championships, she dominated both individually in events like the grueling 1,650-meter and in team relays. Not long after the 2018 Championship, she was named Collegiate Woman Athlete of the Year and became the second freshman and first swimmer in 14 years to receive the Honda Cup.
In 2018, Ledecky announced that she had concluded her college swimming career. She’d continue as a student at Stanford, but swim professionally. She signed a deal with TYR, which the swim gear company called “the most lucrative partnership in swim history,” and continued to prepare for her third Olympic Games.
Those Games came later than expected – the COVID-19 pandemic not only pushed Tokyo 2020 into 2021 but also moved her graduation online, and – perhaps most importantly – made it impossible for Ledecky to train properly. Still, when the postponed Games came around, she earned yet two more freestyle golds (setting a record with her 1500-meter debut) and two silvers in solo and relay freestyle events.
Although Ledecky appears to perform effortlessly in competition, she has had to manage medical challenges. In 2015, she was diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a blood-pressure condition that can lead to fainting.
Ledecky disclosed this news only in her 2024 memoir, Just Add Water – but although she needs to pay special attention to hydration and salt intake, her struggle with the disease has seemed as effortless as her seemingly endless victories. It also has helped that staying horizontal, as swimming requires, is an effective safeguard against POTS symptoms.
In Fukuoka 2023, she collected her sixth straight world title in the 800 and her 16th individual world crown overall, surpassing Michael Phelps for the most in history.
Paris 2024 brought more milestones: gold in the 1500m, a record-setting fourth consecutive Olympic gold in the 800m, silver in the relay, and bronze in the 400m. With a total of 14 Olympic medals – nine of which were gold – she had become the most decorated female swimmer and most decorated American woman in the history of the competition.
In May 2024, Joe Biden awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, for her being “a symbol of perseverance and strength, with a heart of gold, that shines for the nation and the world.” She was the first swimmer to be recognized.
Ledecky likes to be good. Her “Dive into STEM” curriculum, created with Panasonic, has reached classrooms nationwide, and Athletes for Hope honored her as its 2022 Community Hero. The non-profit, which helps high-profile athletes pursue philanthropic projects, now counts her as one of its four members on the Athletic Leadership Council.
Now, as her fifth Olympics approach, Katie Ledecky continues her preparations, readying herself to remake the sport of swimming yet again.
Katie Ledecky rules the lanes. She began swimming competitively at the age of six and hasn’t stopped since, accumulating years of unmatched discipline and game-changing technique. At fifteen, she made her debut at the 2012 London Olympics, winning gold in the 800-meter freestyle, shocking the world and coming close to the record before anyone had even heard of her. Greatness awaited her, which she pursued alongside her life as a typical Maryland high schooler.
Many records would soon be broken. She swept the 400, 800, and 1,500 meters at the 2015 World Championships, achieving record times almost by accident. At the 2016 Rio Olympics, she lowered the world records in the 400 and 800 meters while winning four gold medals. Despite a blood pressure disorder that can make exertion difficult, Ledecky seems unconstrained by her body. Time similarly appears to have little power over her: while dominating the NCAA and then the world circuit as a college student, she maintained a nearly perfect GPA. More than a decade after her first Olympic appearance, she still holds her place as the reigning queen of the sport.
After winning four medals at the 2024 Paris Games, Ledecky became the most decorated female swimmer in history, with more Olympic titles than any other American woman. Continuing this excellence at the 2028 Games will surpass what has ever been achieved in competitive swimming. Then again, Katie Ledecky has never been restricted by precedent.
Does your body crave the pool?
Katie Ledecky: Yes, I love the pool! I love being in the water! I think, whenever I’m not in the water, I want to be in the water, and it’s very difficult for me to take breaks. So, even after a big Olympics where I know that I need to take a little bit of a break afterwards and reset after all that hard training, I start to get the itch to get back in the water, probably within about a week. And yeah, the water calls me back.
Have you found it difficult to take time off for recovery when a coach has advised it?
Katie Ledecky: I know it’s good to take breaks, but I also know how difficult it is to get back in shape and get your feel back for the water. So, even just a month off or three weeks off, you basically have to start from zero in the sport of swimming, I think that’s something that separates our sports, our sport from a lot of other sports. Just that feel for the water, the rhythm that you have with your stroke, your technique, all of those things you have to regain after a break. So, that’s why I don’t like taking long breaks, because it takes even longer to get back to the level I like to be at.
What is your first memory of being in the water?
Katie Ledecky: My first memories of being in the water are with my mom. She taught my brother and me how to feel comfortable in the water. We would play a lot of games like Marco Polo or just blowing bubbles and kind of playing water tag, I guess, just swimming in between each other, things like that. So, those are my first memories. And then soon after that, I joined a summer league swim team with my brother, the Palisades Porpoises in Maryland, so in the Montgomery County Swim League. So that was when I first started learning the strokes and competing for a team.
I started swimming for Palisades when I was six, and started competing when I was six for the summer league team. And after that first summer of swimming, my brother and I, we both loved it so much that we wanted to start swimming year-round, and we started with a year-round team that fall after the summer. And played other sports as well, but probably by the age of 11 or 12, I started choosing swim practice over basketball and soccer, and all my other activities, and swimming became my main extracurricular activity.
I don’t think either of my parents really recognized that I had special skills in the water. I think they recognized that I loved the sport, and that I was passionate about the sport, and that I enjoyed setting goals for myself within swimming. And I mean, they probably did see me winning races and, you know, being faster than some of my teammates or competitors, but I don’t think at that age they saw me ever making it to the Olympics. I think we still saw that as such a far-fetched thing and something that was so hard to reach that there’s no way that that should even be something we discuss. They did a very good job of not pushing me in the sport, not forcing me to swim, even though my mom swam in college, she didn’t push the sport on my brother or me. We found our own love of it.
We’re very goal-oriented and enjoyed I think the individual nature of the sport, having personal control over your results, your work that you put in, you don’t have to rely on your teammate catching the ball or something like that, and so we enjoyed that. But then at the same time, we also enjoyed the team atmosphere of swimming, the training with teammates, pushing each other, having fun with each other on the pool deck or in practice at swim meets. So, I think we both loved those two aspects of the sport and that’s what drew us to continue for so many years.
Was it challenging to balance swimming, school, and your other interests?
Katie Ledecky: I definitely learned how to balance swimming in school and I never wanted school to take a backseat to swimming. I think sometimes you see athletes at a young age just focus on the sport, and maybe they stop going to school or turn professional at a young age or something like that, but it’s just always been such an important value in our family, education, and pursuing learning and pursuing your passions in school. So, I had such a great role model for that with my older brother Michael, and he really just set a great example in terms of how to work hard in school, and you could still work hard at practice. And yes, you’re going to be tired sometimes, but you can put in the work. You can manage things. You can balance things. You can look ahead on what work you have coming up. And so, I kind of followed his lead and learned a lot of those things, probably ahead of some of my peers, some of my classmates, some of my teammates, because I had such a great example in my, in my older brother. So, I’m grateful for that. And I think I have learned so much through the sport of swimming, but also so much through that balancing act of balancing swimming and school and all of my other interests on the side as well.
So, growing up, I played basketball, I played soccer, I did Irish dancing for a little bit. I did — I sang in the school choir from, I think, 4th grade to 7th or 8th grade. I was very involved in my high school with some service activities and other things. So, it was never solely swimming in school growing up. I wanted to be fully involved in my communities and I felt like that was important to my swimming success and something that I wanted to do. I wanted to do these other activities with my classmates, with my teammates, and be involved in as much as I, as much as I could, while still being able to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish. Four in the morning, I would have to get up for swim practice and swim from 5:00 or 4:45 to 6:30, and then go to school, then go right from school to afternoon practice often times. And I say that, but it wasn’t just me that was doing that. It was my parents, they had to come up with a schedule that worked for them in terms of driving, driving us around to our practices. By the time we were in high school, my brother and I were going to different high schools and we were swimming in different pools, so there was, there was a big juggling act there in terms of getting us to the right locations at the right time on time. And so you know, my parents have played such a big role in my journey.
Your book discusses the inspiration you’ve drawn from your grandparents. How have they influenced you?
Katie Ledecky: All four of my grandparents have inspired me throughout my life. I feel very lucky that I have had so many years with all of my grandparents. With my grandmothers, I’ve had more years than I did with my grandfathers. But all have very inspirational stories, and I felt like they were such an important part of my story, and that’s why I included them in the book, because I think they each have contributed values that I hold dearly in my life. They’ve all set such great examples for you know, hard work, dedication, building community, being involved in your community, serving your country, serving your family, serving your community. So, those are the things that I try to bring to my daily life. And whenever I do that, I think of my grandparents and I have strong connections with many of the people that they were friends with. And just through the sport of swimming, I feel like I have formed these new connections with them even though I only have one grandmother still alive. It’s been very special to share so many of these special moments in my life with my four grandparents.
I think there have been so many races at the Olympics or at World Championships that I’ve thought about my grandparents, even within the races. I swim the distance races, and so I do have a lot of time to think, and sometimes that’s something that is kind of a tool or a trick that I use, I think of my loved ones and for me, I feel like that just gives me such strength because my grandparents were, are, you know, they’re some of the strongest people that I know and I’m so close with. And so, just thinking of them, then I start thinking of my parents, I think of my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, all the people that I’ve had in my life supporting me, setting good examples, such strong people, strong individuals, and that really gives me strength and kind of lifts me up during my races, especially the hard ones.
What did coach Yuri Suguiyama mean to you in your early career?
Katie Ledecky: Yuri was my coach leading up to the London 2012 Olympics, and I was only 15 years old in London. So, if you go back, you know, he was coaching me from about age 11, 10 or 11 until 15. And when I was 14 years old, I really was starting to rise in the national rankings. I qualified for Olympic trials.
I think going into that first Olympic year that, that 2011-2012 season, I was maybe ranked 3rd or 4th in my top events and you have to be top two in the country at the trials to make the Olympic team. So, he sat me down at a goal setting meeting and we were talking through what we wanted to work on in training and he said to me, “Now Katie, what would be the ultimate goal at Olympic trials?” And I kind of was like, “Oh, I don’t know. I mean, what do you, what do you want? Like, I don’t know.” And he said, “Katie, what would be the ultimate goal at Olympic trials?” And I said [mumbles] kind of quietly, “Make the Olympic team?” He said, “OK, say it again.” And I said, “Make the Olympic team.” And he said, “OK, that’s, that’s the goal. We don’t have to talk about it with anyone else. It’s just between us and we don’t have to talk about it the rest of the year, but that’s what we’re working toward.”
And he basically was telling me that he believed in me. He believed that I could achieve that, that I was capable of that. And looking back on that, I think that gave me such confidence, such belief. That planted the seed for making the Olympic team and then ultimately winning the gold medal in London. We never talked about winning the gold medal, but I think once I got past that first hurdle of making the Olympic team, it was very easy for me to visualize myself winning the gold medal because I had built all this confidence up through Yuri’s belief in me, through all the hard work that we had both put into that year, and he just helped me believe that I belonged at that level, even as a young quiet, at times, 15-year-old who was competing at the international level for the very first time.
How did Yuri’s supervision of your training help you avoid injury?
Katie Ledecky: Yuri and really, all of my coaches have done such a great job of making sure that everything I do complements what I’m doing in the pool, supports what I’m doing in the pool in terms of staying healthy, both physically, mentally, emotionally, all those things. And definitely at a young age when Yuri was coaching me, he definitely made it a priority to make sure that I was swimming with proper technique, doing things out of the water in terms of dry land training that would keep my shoulders healthy, keep all of my muscles and body, you know, healthy and all of that. Because I think sometimes you see coaches pushing these really good young athletes too hard and to the point where they’re not able to have very long careers because of injury or illness or things like that. So, I’m very grateful for that and grateful that he didn’t push too hard. He knew exactly what I needed at that age. And he had the vision that I could have a long career, that I could achieve great things. And so, he didn’t say that to me, but he did things the right way that would allow for that to happen long term.
What strategies or exercises have you used to protect and strengthen your shoulders throughout your career?
Katie Ledecky: From a young age, it was just band exercises and just getting a little bit stronger in general because, you know, I think I was kind of lanky and I’m pretty tall, and I was pretty tall for my age, 13, 14 years old. I was still growing into my body really, so I think you just wanted to make sure that I was strong enough to handle the kind of training load that I was doing in the pool, what I was trying to accomplish. And so, yeah, I think just the little things like that. And then he didn’t want to add too much dry land or weight training too young, and so that really was great because that gave me areas to improve over the years, adding in some of those strength exercises after London, you know, to the point where I’m doing, you know, lifting, and then you kind of take that to the next level when you get to college and then professionally. So, really, he just laid the groundwork for me to improve in that area.
A new technique
Katie Ledecky: When I was 14, gearing up for the London Olympics or the Olympic Trials, we were trying to perfect my technique. And one day, when I was doing a swimming set, I started swimming with slightly different technique, and it kind of was sort of modeled after what Michael Phelps did with his freestyle stroke. And I started swimming with this different stroke, and when I did that, Yuri said, “That! That’s the stroke. Keep swimming like that.” And so we developed that, stuck with it. And really, I think it was it, it doesn’t look pretty all the time, and you know it, it just was very different I think than how a lot of other female distance swimmers were swimming at the time, and I think that definitely was a contributor to my early, early success and my ability to reach that next level in that Olympic year.
At first, I think people saw my technique and were just kind of surprised by it because they had never seen a female freestyler use that technique. And so, it often was compared to Michael Phelps’s technique or other male swimmers technique. So, it was kind of strange to me at first, but then I also recognized that they were, I think trying to just compliment me and compliment my stroke and how different it was and how unique it was, and so I didn’t take too much offense to it, but I did write in the book how, you know, some of those things are kind of strange to me at times.
And I think now in our sport, you know, I’d like for people to not use those comparisons because I think there’s so many great female swimmers right now. I have such great competition. And I’d like to think that I’ve shown how to swim differently and that other swimmers are using some of those technical strategies, those pacing strategies, kind of how I swim, some of my races. More of my competitors have tried to use some of those techniques. And so that has definitely pushed me and made them better and made our sport better I think.
Katie Ledecky: So, I used to kind of swing, I can’t even remember now because it was so long ago, it was either my right arm or my left arm. And basically, he was concerned that my shoulder could hurt down the road from this technique. It’s not a good technique to swim with a straight arm, especially in the distance races that I swim. So, he really hammered at home that I’ve got to bend my elbow in my stroke. And one day, he said to me like, “Katie,” like, “don’t come crying to me in 10 years if your shoulder is ruined. And I know that, like, I remember that so vividly thinking, “Oh, geez, like, I better, I better fix this,” because I don’t want to have to tell, tell Yuri that my shoulder hurts. And again, I think that was another way of him subtly conveying to me that he believes that I can have a long career, he believes that in 10 years I can still be swimming, can still be swimming at a high level. So yeah, just looking back on it now, I think there was a lot of messaging then that I think inspired me and helped me make the necessary changes in my stroke, in my approach to the sport, and my belief in myself.
Keeping a journal
Katie Ledecky: I started keeping a journal in early 2012. Yuri got frustrated that I wasn’t communicating with him as well as he would have liked in terms of how I was feeling in the water, just my day-to-day feeling of how training was going, things like that. I would kind of give him one-word answers sometimes. So, he gave me the journal, wanted me to start journaling my practices and how I was feeling, and I would have to give the notebook back to him at the end of each week, and he would write a page of notes back to me. So, that was a way of improving communication.
And then after that first year, I really enjoyed doing it and felt like it was beneficial to my swimming, to my training, to my improvement. And so, I’ve continued it all these years. I don’t share those journals with my coaches anymore. I only did that the first year. Now, it’s something for myself. It’s something to help me keep track of my progress, help me build confidence going into big meets, and ultimately, it became such a great resource for me for writing the book. I got to look back at all these journals and take bits and pieces from them, from over the years, and bring back some memories and write about them.
Before my big competitions, I look back at my training from the year and I, you know, I kind of try to star or mark which practices were really great and I can look back at those and it helps me build my confidence going into the big races knowing and you know, reminding myself that I’ve put in all this hard work, I’ve made this progress. I’ve done these great things in training, and I’m ready. I’m ready to perform. I’m ready to do what I’ve worked hard to, to be able to do.
Positive bias
Katie Ledecky: I’m a very positive person. I’m a very optimistic person, happy person. And, you know, I try to maintain that attitude through all things. And of course, I have bad days and I have bad practices. I have, I’ve had bad tests in school. I mean, everyone does. And so, I think it’s been a learning experience. Of course, whenever I’ve had those bad days and again, for me, I’ve had such a good community around me at all times that I have people that uplift me on the hard days and remind me to turn the page or move on, and that’s allowed me to be better the next day and not let one day ruin my week or ruin my competition or anything like that.
High pain tolerance
Katie Ledecky: I think I have a pretty high, high pain tolerance, or so I’ve been told. I think you kind of have to for distance swimming and probably for swimming in general, especially if you’ve done it for as many years as I’ve done it. I experience pain in practice. I experience pain in races. And really, to me, at this point in my career, since I have been doing it for so long, I think the pain is really just a sign that I’m doing things correctly. I’m pushing myself, I’m pushing my limits. If I’m not experiencing pain at a certain point in a distance race, then I’m probably not pushing the pace hard enough early on. So, you have to find the balance so that you don’t feel pain too early and you can get through the races, but you also don’t want to get through the race and feel like you have a lot left in the tank. You want to get to the point where you’re hurting and you’re really feeling like you pushed yourself to the edge, you pushed yourself to your max.
Long-distance races
Katie Ledecky: When I first started swimming, freestyle was my favorite stroke, and so it always has been. And because freestyle is my favorite stroke, there were so many different events that I got to try out from a young age and I just gradually started trying the longer events. So, I swam the 500, probably for the first time when I was maybe nine years old, and then the thousand, and then the mile, or the 800, and 1500. And I think the first time I swam the 1000 short course yard freestyle event, I remember walking away from it and thinking, “Oh, that wasn’t so bad. That was actually kind of fun. I kind of enjoyed that.” And I recognized that that was very different than a lot of my teammates were feeling about those races. They were dreading them or we’re walking away from them saying, “Oh, that was so hard. And that was so bor- or that was so boring. That was not, not very fun.” So, I recognized that. And so, I kept trying those events and I really enjoyed, and I still enjoy training so much that I think I was drawn to doing the hard events, doing the long events, and continuing to learn from racing experience in those events. So I just kept doing it more and more, those longer events, and found that I had a knack for them and just, you know, started qualifying for bigger and bigger meets in the distance events.
I still dabble in the shorter events as well. I’ve gotten to be on a lot of relays, 4×200 freestyle relay, 4×100 freestyle relay. I won gold in the 200 freestyle in Rio. So, I think of myself as a freestyler, first and foremost, and a distant swimmer second, I would say, and then a sprinter third, or a mid-distance swimmer third. So, I like being able to do a wide range of events and train for a wide range of events. But yes, I found my love of distance swimming once I started trying them out pretty, pretty immediately. I think it’s important to stay mentally engaged for those long-distance races. But then at the same time, I’ve also learned different tricks to get your mind off of the pain or not think too much, again, it’s a balance. You have to stay mentally engaged so that you can focus on your pacing and your, your rhythm of your stroke. It’s a very rhythmic thing, distance swimming, if you want to maintain your pace throughout a race. But at the same time, you don’t want to think too much. You don’t want to think too much about the pain. You don’t want to think too much about how long of a swim it is, how intimidating it can be at times. So for me, it’s all about balance.
Making Team USA
Katie Ledecky: I think making the Olympic team in the US, especially, is so difficult because of how deep USA Swimming is and how strong of a swimming country we are. So, you could place 3rd or 4th at Olympic Trials, and swim a time at the trials that might medal at the Olympics because of how strong we are at swimming. So, it’s pretty tough. But then I think that’s also what makes our, our team so tough, once we get to, get to the Olympics. Because we swim at the trials and then a month later, we’re a team. We’re competing with each other. We’re supporting each other. Even though we’re racing hard against each other at the trials, we quickly turn the page and are representing Team USA, and how special is that? So, that’s, that’s what makes our team so tough to beat because we are able to make each other better through the trials, through all the meets leading up to it, and then we’re able to come together so quickly.