KAZAN, Russia — Her hair dry, her feet in sneakers, her face free of the red outlines of goggle eyes, and her schedule finally free of racing, Katie Ledecky bopped around Kazan Arena on Sunday afternoon as if land were her natural habitat. It had been a full 22 hours since she was last in the water, but as heads turned everywhere she went, it was clear that minds were still being transported back to those astonishing last 50 meters in Saturday night’s 800-meter freestyle, when Ledecky finally and completely turned it loose.
Ledecky, the 18-year-old Olympic champion from Bethesda, had given the people of Kazan and the assembled members of the global swimming community a performance of the ages over the previous week at the FINA World Swimming Championships. Five gold medals, three world records. Six thousand two hundred meters, 124 laps, some 63 minutes of race time in which to witness the best in the sport at the top of her game.
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“I’m just glad I’m alive to see that thing,” said Frank Busch, USA Swimming’s national team director. “Her feats are — you know, you just don’t come here and win events by 10 seconds, [and] smash world records.”
If Saturday night’s closing statement — a stunning time of 8 minutes 7.39 seconds in the 800 free, enough to obliterate her own world record and leave her nearest opponent 10 seconds and half a pool behind — represented as close to an ideal race as Ledecky has ever swum, her entire meet also represented a new standard for the sport.
No female swimmer had ever claimed four individual gold medals in a single world championships. No swimmer, male or female, had ever swept the 200, 400, 800 and 1,500 freestyles in a single worlds, a feat now known as the Ledecky Slam. No one had ever pulled off a “double” quite like the one she did Tuesday night, when she set a world record in the 1,500 freestyle final, then with 29 minutes in between, swam a tough, hard-closing 200-meter semifinal and narrowly qualified for the finals — which she went on to win the next night.
“You’re always striving to improve. Yes, that was about as good a week as I could’ve had, for this given week,” Ledecky said on Sunday. “But hopefully there’s another given week in the future that’s better than this.”
It isn’t difficult to figure out which given week she meant.
In 2007 in Melbourne, Michael Phelps won seven gold medals, including five individual ones, at the World Championships, the springboard for his historic, eight-gold-medal showing at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, still considered the single greatest performance in the sport’s history.
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But when Ledecky heads to Rio de Janeiro a year from now for the 2016 Olympics, there will be no Ledecky Slam to gun for. There will be no dramatic 1,500/200 double. And if you judge only by medal counts, she won’t come close to matching what Phelps did in Beijing. Because there will be no 1,500-meter freestyle event — one fewer chance at gold, one fewer chance at history.
The Olympics swimming program includes neither a 1,500 free for women nor an 800 free for men. The odd arrangement is a relic of an outdated era, when women may have been considered too frail to swim the “metric mile.” At one time, there was no women’s marathon in the Olympics either, but the governing body for track and field pushed to have it added, and it has been in every Olympics since 1984.
Asked earlier in the week whether FINA would ever push to have the women’s 1,500 free added to the Olympics program, Julio Maglione, president of the sport’s governing body, indicated he would sooner see 50-meter breaststroke, backstroke and butterfly added before another distance event.
“It is more important, 50 meters,” Maglione said during a brief interview with reporters, “because [now] we have 50 meters only in freestyle, and we need it in all the styles.”
Unwinnable battle
No doubt, the International Olympic Committee and its television partners, in the eternal struggle to remain relevant, would rather see more sprints — or perhaps the newfangled, TV-friendly mixed relays that FINA debuted at worlds this week, with two men and two women from each country racing — than a 15-minutes-and-change women’s distance race that is nowhere near as visually compelling on TV.
But at the same time, one could argue, how would it hurt the bottom line to have an additional event at the Olympics for the dominant figure in the sport at this moment?
As for the notion women can’t handle the longer distance, Ledecky’s 1,500 qualifying time here would have put her near the middle of the pack in the men’s qualifying at the same distance. Her current world record time of 15:25.48 is better than the national men’s record of some 50 countries, including Turkey, Uruguay, India and the Philippines — and is more than 24 seconds below the time requirement for U.S. men to qualify for the Olympic Trials.
“The 1,500 was my best and favorite event,” said Janet Evans, the great American distance swimmer, who won four gold medals in 1988 and 1992 but never got to race a 1,500 at an Olympics. “It was always a huge disappointment to me that I could not swim this event at the Olympic Games, and I know others, including Katie, must feel this way as well. But I always looked on the bright side and appreciated the fact that FINA allowed us to swim the event at worlds.”
Indeed, there is an air of resigned acceptance over the 1,500 freestyle’s exclusion on the part of Ledecky and her coaches, who have little will to fight a battle that appears unwinnable. The problem is a numbers game. Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, has mandated that no more than 10,500 athletes compete in any Olympics, and it is already maxed out. Simply put, adding one event means eliminating another.
“I just can’t imagine swimming getting more events,” Busch said. “Why would you want to redefine and reinvent our sport when it’s the number one draw in the Olympics right now, with the events we have? [The women’s 1,500 freestyle] is a world championships event, and they’re good with it. The athletes understand it going in. [You won’t] hear them complain about it.”
Ledecky essentially made Busch’s point for him, saying of the lack of a 1,500 free in the Olympics, “I’ll swim whatever they have. I’ll train for whatever they have. I don’t think I have much of a say.”
Sprinter speed
The lack of a 1,500 in the Olympics is one of the factors that has pushed Ledecky to master shorter distances. The 200 free only because a serious part of her program a year ago — around the time she and Coach Bruce Gemmell made a list of their goals for the two-year period culminating with Rio — and her win here Wednesday was the biggest at that distance in her career, establishing herself as one of the top gold medal hopes in the world in the 200 in 2016.
Ledecky’s final lap at this meet — a blistering time of 28.41 for the final 50 meters of her record-breaking 800 free swim — was an eye-opening moment, even for coaches and teammates who have been watching her swim for years. Was it a statement — that she may be ready over the coming months to challenge for a spot on a 4×100 freestyle relay for Rio?
“I think in the back of her mind she’d like to have that chance. She’d love to have the chance at a 4×100 relay,” Busch said. “. . . Her 100 freestyle could be pretty scary.”
Ledecky will depart Kazan with her teammates Monday morning with her perfect record at major international meets still intact — 15 starts at Pan Pacific Championships, Olympic Games and World Championships, and 15 gold medals. She will depart with the trophy for female swimmer of the meet, awarded to her Sunday night.
Back home, she will take a week and a half off — “If I can stay out of the water that long,” she said Sunday — during which she will have her wisdom teeth extracted. She’ll get herself registered for the two classes she will take this fall at Georgetown University, credits that will transfer to Stanford, which she plans to attend following Rio.
And then it will be back to work, back to the pool, back to the grind. By October, she figures she will be back up to her standard workload — 6,000 to 8,000 meters, nine times a week. On an Olympian’s internal, quadrennial calendar, it will already be year four, an Olympic year.
Bruce Gemmell, Ledecky’s coach, is a man of few words and even fewer tweets. He tweeted only once during the entire meet, a photo of the Kazan Arena practice pool, late at night following Thursday’s evening session. The pool was completely empty except for a lone figure, barely distinguishable in the distance in Lane 4. It was Ledecky, warming down.
“The process,” Gemmell wrote, “never ends.”