8th gold makes Katie Ledecky best female swimmer ever, but next generation catches up | News, scores, highlights, stats and rumors

PARIS — It’s a mixed bag when young people are called the “next” version of you. It means you’re a poster child for success, but it also means others are coming up from behind.

Such is the case with Katie Ledecky. The 12-time Olympic medalist, now in her fourth Olympics, won the 1,500-meter freestyle in 15:30:02, an Olympic record, and 10 seconds ahead of surprise silver medalist Anastasiia Kirpichnikova of France.

The scene was familiar to those who had seen Ledecky race before: she was known for her steadfastness and consistency, her stroke so powerful it seemed as if her legs were not propelling her forward but were simply participating. Ledecky took the lead from the start and by the end of the race had extended it to a third of the length of the pool.

When she looked at the time at the end of the race, Ledecky hit the water to celebrate. “I was happy with the time and happy with how it felt,” she said at a post-race press conference. “It just comes out. The happiness and the joy, it just comes out.”

There was another reason to celebrate: This medal cements her place as the greatest female swimmer of all time. But with the next generation coming up, this may be the last major event where she is considered untouchable.

Ledecky has long been dominant in the 1,500-meter freestyle. New York Times As reported this week, Ledecky hasn’t lost this race since she was in high school. Since then, she’s won it at five world championships and now two Olympics. And she’s known for winning it with plenty of time to spare: At the last world championships, she hit the wall 17 seconds ahead of the next finisher.

There has been a lot of fuss about the fact that the cameras don’t get any other competitors in the picture; it’s like she’s alone in the pool. It’s something other swimmers have come to expect. They know they’re swimming for second place.

It should be noted that her gold medal count in this event should be higher. The women’s 1500 meters was kept out of the Olympics until 2020, something Karen Crouse wrote in the New York Times in 2014: “The shame of excluding the best female milers from the sport’s most important event has grown since the London Olympics with the rise of Katie Ledecky’s magic trick of making world records disappear.” She attributes the omission to sexism, as well as the event being dismissed as “too boring” (the event has been held at the World Swimming Championships since 2001).

Ledecky’s success, of course, extends far beyond the longest race at the Games. With the gold, Ledecky became the first female swimmer to win gold at four Olympic Games. She now ties with Jenny Thompson, Dara Torres and Natalie Coughlin for the most Olympic medals among female swimmers; she is tied with Thompson for the most gold medals. If she wins a medal in the 800-meter final on Saturday, she will be the most decorated female swimmer at the Olympics.

She’s showing signs of slowing down, though you wouldn’t know it from her performance Wednesday. As the 27-year-old gets older, Ledecky no longer tops the podium in the shorter events. At London 2012, a 15-year-old Ledecky won a surprise gold in the 800 meters by more than four seconds. Four years later, she won four golds and a silver in Rio. If there was a moment in her Olympic career that was her “peak,” it was that.

At the next Olympics, she won four medals, including silver in the 400 meters, an event she had previously dominated. This year, she settled for bronze, and in February, she lost an 800-meter race for the first time since that same junior high school meet.

But Ledecky doesn’t seem to be bothered by the passage of time. Instead, her focus is on training and technique. She doesn’t even set goals for medals, she told the New York Times last week. Far from hating on the next generation of athletes, she relishes the chance to mentor younger swimmers like Erin Gemmell, a 19-year-old who made her first Olympic team this year, competing in the 200-meter freestyle.

“I hope there’s a little girl watching,” she said of today’s race.

Other swimmers say she inspired them when they were younger and watched her on their own screens. Canadian swimming phenom Summer McIntosh had a poster of Ledecky on her wall as a child; now she competes against her. “To be able to compete against her now and keep up with her is honestly just an honor,” she told Olympics.com, adding that “every time I race against her, I learn so much about swimming and racing.”

Ledecky has no plans to retire and plans to compete in Los Angeles in 2028. It’s clear she’s in this for the long haul. As the Associated Press wrote in a profile earlier this month, “she just keeps going.”

For what it’s worth, “chugging along” seems to be the key to Ledecky’s success in this event, where she outlasts her competitors in a particularly grueling race. But one day, the camera won’t have to zoom out so far to see her competitors; maybe someone will beat her. Maybe it’ll be someone she helped get to that point. Knowing Ledecky, she’ll probably take it with a grain of salt.