A great headline by FiveThirtyEight.
If you don’t know who she is, she won the 2012 Olympic gold medal for 800m freestyle swimming. At 15. And it wasn’t close.
She recently broke a world record in a qualifying heat. Meaning when she wasn’t really trying.
In April she swam a 400m freestyle heat in 4:02:67 (off her record pace). Michael Phelps swam it in the same time that day.
And FiveThirtyEight.com just took it a little further:
In other words, it’s not just that she can play with the boys. If you took Katie Ledecky in a (backward) time machine to some point before August 1961, she would quite likely be the fastest human being in water in the history of the Earth — over any distance.
She’s 18.
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