Saturday afternoon, Katie Ledecky opened the notes app on her phone in her hotel room and typed a one-word subject line: “Believe.” It had to start there, because how else can you accomplish the unbelievable?
Beneath that header, Ledecky plotted out some goal splits for the 800-meter freestyle she would swim a few hours later in the Tyr Pro Series swim meet in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. This was not a vague estimate. She broke the race down by 50-meter increments, and typed out her splits to the tenth of a second. This is something she’s done on occasion dating back to her youth (“doodles,” she calls it), writing out potential split times in various events on the back of a notebook when her childhood friends might have been drawing a rainbow or a puppy.
She has always been built differently.
The first time through this process Saturday, Ledecky added up the splits and came to a time of 8 minutes, 5.4 seconds. That’s less than a second off the world record of 8:04.79 she set in the event at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016. That’s so close, Ledecky thought to herself. Why not go for it?
“So I went back through and ended up shaving a few tenths,” Ledecky tells Sports Illustrated.
The new goal time was a history-making 8:04.6. Then she went out and swam it into existence—only faster. In one of the greatest feats in swimming history, Ledecky broke her nine-year-old record with a time of 8:04.12, dropping .67 off what had been an untouchable standard set at the peak of her unparalleled powers.
Sunday morning she opened the notes app, looked at her split predictions and thought, “Oh my gosh, this is pretty spot-on.”
This is how greatness happens—the big-picture mindset (“Believe”) and then the details of what it would take to achieve it, down to the tenth of a second.
How well does the greatest female swimmer in history know herself, and her craft? To the elemental degree that she can drill down on 16 50-meter splits and come within half a second of predicting her time.
Ledecky went out slightly faster than she expected, predicting a 27.9-second first 50 and a 29.9-second 50. The actual times: 27.59 and 29.98, putting her three-tenths ahead of goal pace. The second 100 was dead on: she expected 1:00.8 and went 1:00.81.The third and fourth 100s were just a tick slower than anticipated, both 1:01.7 compared to her predicted 1:01.4. Then it was right back on track through the fifth, sixth and seventh 100s: 1:01.21, then 1:01.28, then 1:01.10. All as preordained.
The final 100—specifically the last 50—was bonkers. Ledecky predicted a 59.8, broken down to 30.3 in the first 50 and 29.5 in the second. The reality was a 58.75, with a 30.29 and 28.46 charge to the finish. With a large crowd at the Fort Lauderdale Aquatic Center actively losing its collective mind, the final surge produced a world record.
“It would not have been possible without them,” Ledecky says of the fans whose roars spurred her on. “I actually thought to myself, ‘Don’t let these cheers go to waste.’ So I did a few extra dolphin kicks off the wall and came home a little harder.”
The result appears to be without precedent—a nine-year span between the same person breaking a long-course meters world record has never happened before. There have been several gaps of seven and eight years, but not nine. It marks the sixth time Ledecky has broken the 800 world record across a span of 12 years, dating back to when she was 16 years old in 2013.
The 800 capped an emphatic reminder that Katie Ledecky isn’t going away anytime soon. She should win a bunch of medals at the World Championships in Singapore this summer, and it will take something unforeseen to keep her from a fifth Olympic Games and more medals in 2028 in Los Angeles. Ledecky immediately announced that this May meet—part of the pro circuit, but basically just a preamble to the U.S. Championships next month—was going to be something big by dropping the second-fastest 1,500-meter freestyle in history on opening night. Then she backed it up with her fastest 400 freestyle since Rio in 2016.
Those swims energized the entire meet. Fellow American Gretchen Walsh then broke her own world record in the 100 butterfly twice Saturday. Between Walsh’s record swims, Ledecky got out her phone and sketched out her plan.
The outcome to that one was emotional. Ledecky slammed her hands down in the water as the crowd erupted, and tears followed shortly thereafter. She looked in the stands to see her mom, Mary Gen; the first person to hug her when she exited the pool was Stanford assistant coach Kim Williams, a teammate of Ledecky’s with the Cardinal starting in 2016. Back then, nearly a decade ago, it might have seemed like the world records would just keep falling, but the sport doesn’t work that way.
Ledecky has continued to build her incomparable resume, winning nine Olympic gold medals and 14 overall medals across four Summer Games. But it’s so incredibly hard to recreate perfection, and somehow make it a smidge better.
“You’re chasing after a ghost,” she says. “Chasing your past, a version of your teenage self.”
Arguably the most impressive thing about Ledecky is that she has never been discouraged by that ghost chase, never stopped believing she could do it. Berating the competition by half a 50-meter pool length has continued unabated—and continues to be one of the most remarkable visuals in sports—but she wasn't just trying to beat those in the pool with her at the time. She was trying to beat the Ledecky of years gone by.
As she said in 2021 at the Tokyo Olympics: “I am always striving to be my best and be better than I’ve ever been. That’s not easy when your times are world records in some events. I approach every single race with the attitude that anything can happen, and I can break world records this race. I’m going to step up and throw down.”
I wrote last summer that having that attitude requires swimmers lying to themselves about what is possible as they age and move further past their best times. Saturday night, Ledecky proved she wasn’t lying. She was telling the truth. She can, at age 28, be better than ever.
“I think there’s always been this myth in the sport that distance swimmers are better when they’re younger,” she says. “I’ve always questioned that, and had glimmers of potential to go best times.
“I care, right? I just love the process, love the training more than the racing, and it’s that way even more now. I’m bumping up against some of those [world-record] times again, feeling that thrill again.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Even After Unparalleled Success, Katie Ledecky Is Still Chasing History.