Katie Ledecky Shares What’s on Her Mind While Swimming

Photo: Agência Brasil Fotografias via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

At just 28 years old, Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky is already one of the greatest athletes of all time. With 14 Olympic medals, featuring nine golds, she is the most decorated American woman in Olympic history, and is tied as the most decorated female swimmer ever. With such an established legacy, people have wondered how she keeps herself grounded and focused. During a commencement speech at Stanford University, the swimmer shared what is on her mind when she's in the pool.

Ledecky, who graduated from Stanford in 2020, spoke to graduates at the school’s 134th commencement ceremony. There, she shared that one of the questions she gets asked the most is what she thinks about when she's swimming. As the top athlete that she is, Ledecky always counts the laps, of course, but she also revealed that her favorite races are the ones where she thinks about people she loves.

“I think of my Grandpa Jerry immigrating from Czechoslovakia to study at an American university,” Ledecky confesses in her speech. “I think about my Grandpa Hagan serving as a Navy surgeon in World War II.”

The Olympian recalls how she had two medal races at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics that were about 70 minutes apart. During the first one—the 200-meter freestyle—she felt off despite it being her 36th international race, and she came in fifth place. Clouded with doubt, she had under an hour to get ready for her next final, the tougher 1,500-meter freestyle. “I kept telling myself to relax, to shake things off and focus,” she says. “That's when I started to think about my grandparents.”

Ledecky then envisioned both her grandmothers watching her on TV back home. “I pictured them cheering for me, and [I decided] if I were to dwell on anything in those difficult moments, it was going to be toughness and warmth of my grandmothers.”

The swimmer says that for nearly every stroke of that 30-lap race, she repeated their names in her head. “Grandma Hagan, Grandma Berta,” she says as she mimics her arm motions. “And it worked. I swam with a sense of strength and freedom. I feel like my grandparents lifted me up to gold that day.”

With that, the Washington, D.C., swimmer won her first gold medal at Tokyo 2020 with a final time of 15:37.34, just short of the Olympic record she had set during the preliminary rounds. She would later win another gold medal, this time at the 800-meter freestyle. At the following Olympics, Paris 2024, she repeated her feat, winning two golds—the 800-meter freestyle and the 1,500-meter freestyle.

Drawing from her experience, Ledecky gave graduates a final piece of advice: keep your loved ones close. “Point being: you can’t go the distance alone. Continue to surround yourself with people who will challenge you, support you, and make you laugh,” she advises. “Make sure you spend time with the people who matter to you.”

With three years to go until Los Angeles 2028, Ledecky is still going strong. On May 3, she broke her own world record in the women's 800-meter freestyle at the TYR Swim Pro Series in Florida.

To stay up to date with the Olympic swimmer, follow Katie Ledecky on Instagram.