Katie Ledecky is just trying to keep calm and swim on at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
While the 27-year-old has cemented her place in history—her most recent gold-medal winning time in the 1,500-meter freestyle set a new Olympic record—Katie isn’t looking to get bogged down in the statistics.
“I try not to think about history very much or any of that,” she told the Washington Post in an interview published July 31, following her eighth gold medal win. “But I know those names, those people that I’m up with. They’re swimmers that I looked up to when I first started swimming. It’s an honor to just be named among them.”
The names in question include fellow American Jenny Thompson—who Katie has now tied with for the most gold medals won by a female swimmer—as well as Americans Dara Torres and Natalie Coughlin and Australian Emma McKeon who, like Jenny and now Katie, all earned 12 Olympic medals throughout their careers.
But despite the fact the Stanford alum makes her races look effortless, she says there’s more that goes into it than meets the eye.
