NANTERRE, France — The 1,500-meter freestyle is the most grueling event in swimming, 30 muscle-burning, lung-busting laps of a 50-meter pool that tests an athlete’s physical stamina and mental toughness.
And no one has ever done it better than Katie Ledecky, who Wednesday cemented her legacy as the greatest women’s distance swimmer of all time with another dominant victory at the Paris Olympics.
Ledecky led from the start, winning by more than 10 seconds in 15 minutes, 30.02 seconds, shattering her Olympic record and collecting her first gold medal at these Games. It was her eighth gold medal and 12th Olympic medal overall, matching Jenny Thompson for the most ever by a female swimmer.
Yet Ledecky, 27, who won her first Olympic title as an unheralded 15-year-old in London, said the task doesn’t get any easier with age and experience.
“The first one was totally unexpected by the outside world. I had no expectations to do that,” she said. “Coming into tonight, I expected it of myself. A lot of other people expected it of me and that doesn’t make it easy.
“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 in the end.”
She has a chance to become the most decorated female swimmer in Olympic history Thursday if she competes in the 4×200-meter freestyle relay. She’ll also swim Saturday in the 800-meter freestyle, where she also holds the world and Olympic records.
While Ledecky was establishing herself as one of the best swimmers in history, Leon Marchand of France was proving to be the best swimmer in Paris, pulling off a difficult double by winning the 200-meter butterfly and 200-meter breaststroke about two hours apart, giving him three gold medals at these Olympics. As a country, only Australia, with four, has won more.
Marchand, who was born in France, swam at Arizona State and trains in Austin, Texas, won the 400-meter individual medley Sunday and has a chance at a fourth gold medal Friday in the 200-meter individual medley.
Ledecky, who has never lost a world championship or Olympic final at 800 or 1,500 meters, also gave a command performance Wednesday, racing out to a body-length lead at 400 meters and adding to that advantage with each stroke. With 250 meters to go, she was a full lap ahead of Germany’s Leonie Maertens, one of the eight best 1,500-meter swimmers in the world, and she finished nearly 20 meters ahead of silver medalist Anastasiya Kirpichnikova of France.
It was as if the rest of the field was competing in a different race. And they were: Ledecky’s time was the eighth-fastest in history; no swimmer other than Ledecky has a time that ranks in the top 20.
“I just wanted to swim a time that I could be really happy with,” she said. “And that was one.”
For Ledecky, whose medal collection also includes 26 from the world championships — 21 of them gold — and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the road to Paris and her fourth Olympics has been an exhausting one. She swam her first race at 6 and at the peak of her training for Paris, she was swimming more than 35 miles a week, turning endless repetitions in the University of Florida pool where she trains with the men’s team.
On Wednesday, she said those training partners helped her through the most difficult parts of her race.
“Three years ago in Tokyo, I was repeating my grandmother’s name in my head a lot. Today, I kind of settled on like the boys’ names at Florida,” she said. “I was just kind of repeating their names in my head, just thinking of all the practices that we’ve done, and all the confidence that I get from training, from being next to them and racing them.”
As for the history she can make in Paris by winning another medal, Ledecky, who trails only Michael Phelps for most Olympic swimming medals all time, said she’s not really keeping count.
“I try not to think about history very much,” she said. “I know those names, those people that I’m up with. They’re swimmers that I looked up to when I first started swimming, so it’s an honor just to be named among them. And I’m grateful for them inspiring me and so many U.S. swimmers over the years.”
In the final race of the night, China’s Pan Zhanle shaved four-tenths of second off his world record in the 100-meter freestyle, winning in 46.80.
Torri Huske was the only American besides Ledecky to reach the podium Wednesday, claiming her third medal of the Games by finishing second in the women’s 100-meter freestyle in 52.29, 0.13 seconds back of Sweden’s Sarah Sjoestroem. Hong Kong’s Siobhan Bernadette Haughey was third, winning her second bronze medal of these Games.
Huske also won the 100-meter butterfly and swam a leg on the 4×100-meter relay team, which earned a silver.
