It wasn’t even close.
With a record-setting performance in the 1,500-meter freestyle on Wednesday, Katie Ledecky captured her first gold medal of the 2024 Summer Olympics and tied Jenny Thompson with eight career gold medals, most ever by an American woman in any Olympic sport.
It was Ledecky’s 12th career Olympic medal, also tying Thompson, Natalie Coughlin and Dara Torres for most career medals by any American woman.
“I’m just so honored to represent our country,” Ledecky said on the NBC broadcast afterwards. “Those women who have set the standard for so many years have inspired me. They inspired me when I first started swimming. Thank you to them and to everyone who has supported me all these years.”
Ledecky was in front from start to finish, lapping all of her opponents and finishing 10 seconds ahead of France’s Anastasiia Kirpichnikova, who took silver.
Ledecky’s time of 15:30.02 broke her own Olympic record by five seconds. In the 1,500-meter freestyle, also known as “the mile,” Ledecky owns the 20 fastest times ever recorded and hasn’t lost a race in 14 years.
“I’m proud of the time,” she said on NBC. “I really wanted to swim a time I could feel really proud of and be happy with.”
Thompson, who swam at Stanford in the 90s, and Coughlin, a Cal standout in the early 2000s, were both in attendance for the race.
“I can’t wait until she joins the 12-medal club,” Coughlin said on the broadcast.
“I’m just in awe of being here and watching Katie swim,” Thompson said. “She’s at a level far above me in my mind. It’s a dream to see her swim the mile here and be here for her.”
Ledecky is the favorite to win another gold medal in the 800-meter freestyle, which begins on Friday. She’s won the last three gold medals in that event.
A ninth gold medal would tie her with Larisa Latynina of the U.S.S.R. for most gold medals ever won by a woman at the Olympics.
Ledecky also won a bronze medal in the 400-meter freestyle last week.
During her race on Thursday, NBC charted her career as a swimmer and calculated that she’s swam more than 23,000 miles, nearly the circumference of the earth.
The 27-year-old has also talked about competing at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Huske on top of the Olympic leaderboard
She was the first American to win an individual gold medal at the Paris Olympics, and now Torri Huske is leading the Olympics in medals.
Huske, a junior at Stanford who is taking a gap year to focus on swimming, stunned the swimming world on Thursday when she picked up a silver medal in the 100-meter freestyle.
It was her third medal of these Games, making her the first athlete at the 2024 Olympics to capture three medals. She also has a gold in the 100-meter butterfly and a silver with the 4×100-meter freestyle relay.
Thursday’s race featured two of the best 100-meter freestyle swimmers ever, with Huske up against a field that included world record holder Sarah Sjöström of Sweden and Hong Kong’s Siobhan Bernadette Haughey, who owns the third-fastest time ever recorded in the race.
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But it was Huske who held the lead for 90 meters. She had a great jump and an even better turn as she surged ahead into the final quarter of the race, but her pace slowed in the final 20 meters and Sjöström turned on the jets.
Sjöström caught her at the finish line, with her outstretched hand touching the wall a fraction of a second before Huske’s, finishing at 52.16 in front of Huske’s 52.29. Haughey finished at 52.33 for the bronze.
For Huske to come so close to beating her was particularly impressive given she was swimming in the outside lane, which makes it more difficult to avoid waves that bounce off the side walls and slow swimmers down.
Sjöström, 30, hadn’t won a gold medal since Rio in 2016.
“I did not think I could win,” she told the NBC broadcast afterwards. “I’ve done many things in my career but I never surprised myself the way I did here.”
She said she hasn’t raced in the 100-meter freestyle in several years until she began training for it a few weeks ago.
After the race, she looked up at the board to see the results and looked shocked. She started slapping the water in disbelief.
“I came here for 50-meter,” she said on the broadcast. “I did my work. I never thought a 30 year old could win this. I thought you had to be 20 or something.”
