Katie Ledecky's mastery of the 1500-meter women's freestyle is well-established. Never mind that she won the inaugural gold medal at the event three years ago in Tokyo; Ledecky hasn't lost a 1500-meter race since TWO THOUSAND AND TEN. Now 27 and one of the oldest American swimmers, Ledecky entered Tuesday's preliminary heats for the 1500 not just the favorite to win the gold for the second consecutive Olympics, but to win by such a margin that the other swimmers might as well have been in a different pool. The reality of both her heat and (spoiler!) the final was, despite all of the expectations, even more dominant than anyone could have conceived.
Let's start with that prelim, though, because it was in what felt like a casual swim for Ledecky—but in actuality turned out to be a win by 18 seconds over the other swimmers in her heat—that I realized the best marker for her dominance. Not the cavalcade of stats that NBC's production crew threw at the audience, or the consistency of Ledecky's lengths of the pool, or even how she was already more than a body length ahead after the first 50 meters; instead, it was the fact that the cameras could not keep Ledecky in the same frame as any other swimmers.
At around the four-and-a-half minute mark, pictured above, the rest of the field was fighting for their lives to stay within splashing distance. That fight soon turned into farce: The only time Ledecky was in the same frame as the other swimmers was when she was going in the opposite direction.
Still, though, it was a prelim, and all swimmers knew they were competing against the times in other heats, not Ledecky. It is logical, then, that the final, with the seven other best swimmers at the world, would be closer than Heat 3, right?
To be fair to the rest of the field, and especially to eventual silver medalist, France's Anastasiya Kirpichnikova, the race was closer than Heat 3: Kirpichnikova finished with a new French record of 15:40.35, a mere 10.33 seconds behind Ledecky. That's where my fairness ends. Because Ledecky was so dominant as she tied the American record for most gold medals for a female athlete that NBC had to invent new ways to keep contextualizing her mastery of this event: In a bit of silly showmanship, the channel took time, around the 1000-meter mark, to show how far Ledecky had swum in her career, and then loop that length around the equator of the Earth.
The production crew needn't have bothered with such fancy graphics, because every lap provided enough entertainment and context to power the whole race. There's something funny and almost disrespectful about counting how long it takes the other swimmers to pass her, again in the opposite direction, after she executes a turn.
My favorite moments were when Ledecky was the one out of the frame, as the camera focused on the trio fighting for silver and bronze (Isabel Gose of Germany took the bronze, while Italy's Simona Quadarella faltered a bit at the end for fourth place); you can just barely see the end of the word "LEADER" zipping off the screen as the also-rans start their last length.
A bit earlier in the race, the cameras had actually adjusted in order to put Ledecky's lead into context. Just before the 1300-meter mark, the camera zoomed to show how far back everyone else was, with Kirpichnikova at 12.8 meters back and Quadarella at a 16.2-meter deficit:
At that point, Ledecky was more than a quarter of the pool ahead, and she would extend that lead even farther in the last 200. (NBC's broadcast pointed out that most of her middle lengths of the pool were shockingly consistent, hovering around the 31.3-second mark, so it was probably more due to her competitors faltering.)
When she pulled up in victory, Ledecky still had to wait those 10.33 seconds for Kirpichnikova to finish, and a whopping 42.55 seconds before the last competitor touched the wall. Getting smoked by Ledecky, even at the pinnacle of the sport, appears to be a rite of passage for elite swimmers. Prior to the start of the swimming events in Paris, the New York Times' Jenny Vrentas talked to a few swimmers who had been unlucky enough to exist at the same time as Ledecky. Jillian Cox, a 19-year-old American distance swimmer, put it best: "You can’t even be upset. On the first 50 [meters], you are body lengths behind. It’s just amazing." Cox went on to say that competing in a meet in 2023, against Ledecky, was among her proudest accomplishments, saying "this is the best race that I’ve ever had" because she avoided getting lapped.
There is no risk of lapping at the Olympics, of course; these are the best of the rest, and Ledecky wasn't even at her absolute fastest here, either. While she did notch a new Olympic record—her 15:30.02 beat her own 15:35.35 from the prelims in Tokyo—she was still about 10 seconds slower than the world record, also held by Ledecky. (The most-repeated stat I heard watching these two races was that Ledecky owns all 20 of the 20 fastest times in the 1500. She's ridiculous.) Swimmers have stated this is a "slow" pool—it's shallower than previous Olympic pools, which in theory creates more turbulence; this has been disputed—so that could account for Ledecky's relatively slower time. Or maybe, the lack of true competition has some form of psychological effect. It could have just been an off-day.
The problem, and I mean this in the "Jimmy Butler is a PROBLEM" sense, is that even Ledecky's off-days are golden, and comfortably so. She's really just competing against her previous selves, and maybe her future ones too; at points during her gold medal swim, NBC pondered whether she would be back at the Los Angeles Olympics in four years. I would be shocked if she didn't at least come back for the 1500 on her home stage; even a Ledecky who's reaching the end of her career should be more than enough to torture competitors and camera operators in equal measure.
For now, though, she has a few more events in Paris—the team 4x200 relay, and the 800-meter freestyle—and while those shorter lengths might not provide the visual treat of seeing Ledecky swim off into the lonesome distance, the 1500 showed pretty definitively that no one is on Ledecky's level, or even in the picture.
