Katie Ledecky won her eighth Olympic Gold Medal earlier today as she finished first in the finals for the women’s 1,500-meter freestyle, ESPN reports. She beat her own Olympic record, set in Tokyo in 2021 when this event was first included in the Olympics. She touched in today at 15:30.02.
No female swimmer had won at least one gold medal at four Olympics until Ledecky did it here. And she did it in an event in which she has swum the 20 fastest times in world history, the 1,500m freestyle. She is the favorite in the upcoming 800m freestyle as well.
“Each [gold medal] means a lot, and each one is challenging in its own way, and I try not to really dwell on history or the magnitude of things again; I’ll just let you guys do that,” the sports network quoted her as saying.
“But yeah, I mean those women that I’m up there with now, they’re people that I’ve looked up to for so many years. I consider many of them friends, supporters, people that I was watching swim when I was just starting out in the sport, so that’s very special to me to share that with them, and they definitely inspired me. So I hope that some little girl out there is watching and will come along and get up there with all of us someday, too.”
The Olympics have long inspired future generations, who try with all due effort to meet the goals of the many athletes who have come before them. One such athlete from the past is the great Jesse Owens, who started at East Tech High School in Cleveland, went to Ohio State, and stood up to Nazi Germany to take home four Gold Medals in men’s track in the 1936 Games in Berlin.
East Tech is trying to revive the boys’ track program that Owens made so great — a run of more than 20 conference titles between the 1930s and 1960s was followed by a sharp decline, and the Covid-19 pandemic all but ended the program, along with all sports programs districtwide, NPR reports.
“I was like, where the boys at?” the network quoted Michael Hardaway, the boys’ track coach now, as saying. “They’re like, we don’t have a boys’ team. The coach — he coached for, like, a couple of weeks, then he quit. I said, at the home of Jesse Owens, that’s unacceptable.”
But although the roster is still bare and equipment is in short supply in the impoverished neighborhood school, the spirit of revival has been given a new birth, with the inspiring men’s events in Paris underway in the next few days and the silhouette of Owens on their jerseys. “Certain things are going to stump you for a minute, but you got to get back on your horse, and you got to keep going. I preach that all the time,” Hardaway told NPR.
“It’s just amazing ’cause, like, he was here. He started from here and ended up there,” the network quoted one boys’ track team member saying about Owens. “So now I got to start from here and end up where he was at — try to just improve on what he did and make another legacy behind his.”
I wish East Tech well, and I’m 100 percent sure if I’m still writing, I’ll be writing a similar storyline about Ledecky one day.