When Ledecky first started working with her current coach, he checked her overall fitness and found she could not “ do three unassisted pull-ups or run a nine-minute mile. Her uncle is a partial owner of the New York Islanders hockey team.) She’s six feet tall but looks smaller, with birdlike features unlike Phelps, whose body was freakishly designed for swimming, she appears to have normal physical attributes. She has been taking classes at Georgetown University in Chinese history and politics and will attend Stanford in the fall. suburbs, has opted to stay an amateur, foregoing endorsements and their attendant distractions. (Katie actually goes by Katie Gen, short for Genevieve.) Ledecky, who grew up in the Washington, D.C. After successfully swimming the length of the pool for the first time-in a race she insisted on participating in despite an ear infection-her mother, Mary Gen Ledecky suggested they go to Panera for hot chocolate, thus establishing Ledecky’s suburban bona fides. When she first started swimming, at age 6, she couldn’t make it through one lap without hanging on to the lane lines. Here are some cute things you will likely learn about Katie Ledecky as NBC does its best to make her a star. At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Hammond called gymnastics in addition to track and field. He has served as the network’s track and field play-by-play announcer since the 1992 Barcelona Games, where he also called diving. Swimmers are most memorable before they race-when they stand stoically by the pool, shaking out their enormous muscles, slamming on their goggles like some water mammal attending to a bit of tiresome business on land-and after they hit the wall, grip the lane line, take off their goggles, squint for their times, and smile or frown, breathing deeply. Hammond made his Olympic debut at the 1988 Seoul Games as the men’s and women’s basketball play-by-play commentator. You will never see a swimmer sweat, no matter how many underwater cameras NBC installs. Swimmers’ exertions take place in the pool, where the beauty and the power of their strokes is lost in the spray, as is their strain. Runners and sprinters do their thing out in the open, where you can see their form and their effort, their heaving chests, their pumping legs. There is always a bit of mystery about how world-class athletes do what they do, and the swimming pool exacerbates it: It douses their fire with a splash. She’s a maniac in the pool, but the girl next door on the pool deck. She makes waves in the water, but slides smoothly into the parameters we have set for female athletes. In her Olympic debut, Ledecky announced herself authoritatively both as a rare athlete and an unassuming one.
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