It’s difficult to say who is (was) the greatest athlete ever, but I am going to make the case for Katie Ledecky.
Katie is only 19 years old turning 20 at the 2016 Rio summer Olympics and already a multiple gold medal winner in swimming. At the London Olympics she was 15 turning 16. She is probably a once in a lifetime phenomenon.
Science and maths have made sport much more objective than it was in the past. Today we can measure and predict performance over time via VO2max, blood work and male vs female. What we struggle to predict is what a gifted human being can do as opposed to a talented human being. One includes a mental component.
Back to Katie Ledecky.
Katie Ledecky.
Katie.
Where to start.
Why is she so dominant?
By most reports she is a gifted person with a high self-awareness and an incredible drive to be the best.
As Ledecky prepares to launch herself into the U.S. Olympic trials in Omaha, with the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics looming just six weeks in the distance, she already may be the most dominant athlete in sports, as measured by the gap between her and everyone else in her discipline. At the 2015 worlds, against the best competition the globe could offer, she won the 1,500 freestyle by more than 14 seconds and the 800 free by more than 10. When she set the most recent of her 11 world records, in the 800 free at a meet in Austin in January, her margin of victory was 17.81 seconds.
Usain Bolt is occasionally beaten. Serena Williams doesn’t win every Grand Slam title. Stephen Curry goes 5 for 20 now and again. But Ledecky has swum in 12 individual finals at major international meets, and has never lost.
“She’s the greatest athlete in the world today by far,” said Michael J. Joyner, an anesthesiologist and researcher for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., specializing in human performance and physiology. “She’s dominating by the widest margin in international sport, winning by 1 or 2 percent. If [a runner] won the 10,000 meters by that wide a margin, they’d win by 100 meters. One or 2 percent in the Tour de France, over about 80 hours of racing, would be 30 or 40 minutes. It’s just absolutely remarkable.”
“We’re fortunate to be living in this age in our sport, the Ledecky era,” said Chuck Wielgus, executive director of USA Swimming. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen anybody like Katie before. And I think in the future we’re going to look back, and the sport’s history will be divided into pre-Katie and post-Katie. She’ll be this iconic figure by which all future distance and middle-distance swimmers will be measured.”
Out of the pool, though, there is nothing outwardly obvious about Ledecky that would suggest she is among the best athletes on the planet. At 5 feet 11, 150 pounds, she is tall for the general populace but only slightly above average for elite swimmers. She towers over some U.S. teammates, but looks up to Missy Franklin (6-2), Allison Schmitt (6-1½) and Dana Vollmer (6-1), among others. She lacks Phelps’s famously extreme physiology — the enormous wingspan, long torso and double-jointedness.
How does she do it? Her coach Gemmell says “She’ll do anything to be the best. She’s tough as nails. Any questions?”
Someone during the Rio Olympics will say that she is doping.
“I would stake my life that she’s not doping,” said Rowdy Gaines, a three-time Olympic gold medal winner and now a commentator for NBC. “There’s no way. It’s not in her vocabulary. She just has a gift.”
Ledecky’s career trajectory shows none of the telltale jumps that might indicate PED use. According to Mario J. Costa, a professor of sports sciences who studies the biophysics of swimming at the Polytechnic Institute of Guarda in Portugal, Ledecky’s annual improvement in the 800 free between ages 11 and 16 — the age when she first started swimming distance events through the age when she set her first world records — averaged about three percent, except for a spike of 9.94 percent between 12 and 13, explained by the onset of puberty.
In this era of specialization, where freestylers are generally either distance swimmers or sprinters, but not both, Ledecky’s performance within the sport is staggering.
Do what she does 48 weeks out of the year, and do that six to 10 times a week, and do that 20 to 40 times a practice, and it’s going to be realistic in the last 15 meters of an Olympics.
There was a Twitter thread recently reported “40 Must Do Katie Ledecky Training Secrets.” Coach Gemmell couldn’t let that go by unchallenged.
“Tip #41,” he tweeted in reply. “Just do the damn work.”
Don’t miss this young women this summer!!
Dr. Kevin Purcell, DC. Dedicated to serving others …