Olympian Katie Ledecky swimming faster and looking to Paris Games

WASHINGTON — Katie Ledecky was standing where she has stood twice before over the past 10 years, at the White House, at a Team USA ceremony, a few feet from the President. The greatest female swimmer of all-time was back Wednesday to celebrate another Olympics, last year’s Tokyo Summer Games, in which she won two gold medals and two silvers.

Even though she recently turned 25, and even though she has been at the very top of her sport for a full decade, it’s very likely that she will not be the last time she’s at the White House being honored as an Olympian.

The Paris Summer Games, after all, are little more than two years away. Who’s counting? Katie Ledecky, that’s who.

with a new training site at the University of Florida and the unprecedented challenge of practicing every day with some of the world’s top male distance swimmers, Ledecky is in a most unusual position: the Olympic legend who certainly could have retired but instead moved across the country from Stanford to experiment with training with the guys, and is now swimming faster than she has in some time.

“It’s not an experiment because it’s the real thing,” Ledecky said with a laugh on the South Lawn after the Tokyo and Beijing Olympians and Paralympians were honored by President Biden. “It’s something that I knew would help me in my career at this point, training with some of the top male distance swimmers in the world and being in that environment.