In the 1,500, there’s Katie Ledecky and then there’s everyone else

Katie Ledecky (USA) in the women’s 400-meter freestyle medal ceremony during the Paris Summer Olympic Games on Saturday at Paris La Défense Arena. (Rob Schumacher/USA TODAY)

Katie Ledecky (USA) in the women’s 400-meter freestyle final during the Paris Summer Olympic Games on Saturday at Paris La Défense Arena. (Rob Schumacher/USA TODAY)

NANTERRE, France — The last time that Katie Ledecky was beaten in a 1,500-meter freestyle event was a regional swim meet in Maryland 14 years ago.

Ledecky was in junior high school. The swimmer who finished more than 5 seconds ahead of her, Kaitlin Pawlowicz, was going into her senior year of high school.

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“There’s not, like, a ton of details that I can recall,” Pawlowicz said recently. “It was just a midsummer gauge type of meet to see where you’re at. Nothing special or crazy about it.”

The mile, as the 1,500 freestyle is colloquially known, is generally considered the sport’s most grueling event. Competing in it requires physical and mental stamina, training blocks that at their most intense can push 12 miles per day and to ignore the body’s normal cues that it is experiencing excruciating pain. Even Ledecky, 27, who loves distance racing and has built a career around it, called it “fully masochistic” in her recently published memoir.

For nearly every other competitor, it might be the single worst event in the Olympic program: a lung-busting, muscle-burning, 15-plus-minute torture test in which they hit the water knowing that they’re essentially swimming for second place.

“You can’t even be upset,” said Jillian Cox, 19, an American distance swimmer who has competed against Ledecky. “On the first 50, you are body lengths behind. It’s just amazing.”

This week in Nanterre, France, Ledecky will race the 1,500 freestyle at the 36th long-course meet since she was last beaten in the event. During that time, she has set a world record in the event six times; won it at five world championships and in the inaugural Olympic race, in 2021; and has recorded the 19 fastest times in history.

Ledecky, who is likely to become the most decorated female swimmer in history at these Games, decided not to swim the 200 at the Paris Olympics and has already earned bronze in the 400. The 800, which she’ll try to win for a fourth straight Games, was the event that launched her career, but the 1,500 is where her dominance in the pool is most observable.

At the world championships last summer, when Ledecky won the event by 17 seconds, television cameras struggled to capture her and her competitors in the same shot over the final laps, except when she met them while swimming the opposite direction.

For younger distance swimmers coming up in the sport, being lapped by Ledecky, or close to it, is something of a rite of passage. It happened to Kayla Han, 16, the U.S. junior national champion, during the preliminaries of the U.S. Olympic trials last month.

Aurora Roghair, who finished fifth at the U.S. trials, said she remembered being both nervous and excited to swim in the same heat as Ledecky at a meet in early 2020. Ledecky swam what was then the fifth-fastest time in history in the race, lapping Roghair before the 1,100-meter mark.

“I didn’t know that was possible in the long course,” said Roghair, who will be a senior at Stanford University this year. She added: “But it was OK. It was Katie Ledecky.”

Cox recalled finishing 53 seconds behind Ledecky in the 1,500 at a meet in early 2023 and thinking “this is the best race that I’ve ever had” because she didn’t get lapped. For Kate Hurst, ending her race about 85 meters behind Ledecky at a meet in 2022 remains something of an achievement. That was the first time Hurst, 18, swam in the same heat as Ledecky, a champion whom she had written essays about in grade school.

“To be even in the same pool as her is such an honor,” said Hurst, the fourth-place finisher in the 1,500 at the U.S. trials.

During Ledecky’s dominant run, which has now encompassed four Olympics and gold medals in freestyle distances from 200 meters up through 1,500, there has been no shortage of attempts to capture her greatness. The achievement that her training partner at the University of Florida, Bobby Finke, says hasn’t gotten enough attention is that Ledecky has reigned over the distance freestyle events for half her life.

Finke understands perhaps better than anyone the work required to maintain that kind of dominance. When Ledecky joined the pro group at Florida run by coach Anthony Nesty after the Tokyo Olympics, she began hitting distance totals in practice that she’d never hit before. During one stretch of the typically brutal Christmas training period, Ledecky said the group hit 10,000 meters in each of four practices over two days. The distance swimmers do an extra practice of the week on Fridays in which the set is some variation of 4 miles with two minutes’ rest in between each interval. The goal is to go as fast as possible, and Finke, an Olympic gold medalist, says there are times when Ledecky has beaten him.

Until February, when rising Canadian star Summer McIntosh touched the wall several seconds ahead of Ledecky at a meet in Orlando, Florida, Ledecky’s unbeaten run in the 800 freestyle was as long as her streak in the 1,500. (Ledecky’s last loss in the 800 had previously been a third-place finish behind Pawlowicz and another swimmer at that same 2010 meet in Maryland, according to race records located by SwimSwam, a swimming news website.)

“This isn’t even just like the best meets,” said Finke, who won the men’s 800 and 1,500 races at the Tokyo Games. “This is also local meets where you’re beat up and run down and there could be someone who’s rested.”

“That alone,” he added, “is one of the biggest achievements that I don’t think people really realize has happened in this sport.”

Pawlowicz, who went on to swim for the University of Texas and later spent six years working for USA Swimming, had no idea about the significance of that 2010 meet until she heard it brought up on a broadcast several years ago. She hadn’t thought much about it since, until a colleague called her after McIntosh’s win to tell Pawlowicz that her name was in the news again.

Ledecky keeps her goals close to the vest, sometimes not even disclosing them to her parents and her older brother, Michael, to whom she is very close. But at the end of this year’s U.S. trials, she shared that her goals are based on times, race splits and her technique, not things like milestones or streaks. It’s no surprise, then, that she calls her run in the 1,500 “just something that’s kind of happened.”

“I just, again, take it one race at a time and put my best foot forward,” she said.

For as long as Ledecky continues to do that, the goals of her competitors in the 1,500 will be relative. Swim your own race, “knowing that she’s going to be out fast and out really far in front,” said Mariah Denigan, an American open-water swimming Olympian who finished eighth in the 1,500 at the trials.

Or, as Roghair said, “Try to get as close as you can to her.” In this race, after all, silver can feel a lot like victory.

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