Katie Ledecky

Origins and early life

Katie Ledecky was born in Washington on 17 March 1997, and her connection to this directory runs through her paternal grandmother Berta Ruth Greenwald, an Ashkenazi Jewish woman of Brooklyn who married Jaromír Ledecký, a Czech immigrant who reached New York in 1947, in 1956. Ledecky was raised in her mother's Catholic faith, and this fiche says so plainly; she has also spoken publicly about the Jewish side of her family, took her brother to visit the family graves in a Jewish cemetery, and the American Jewish press has followed her career closely on that basis.

Work and career

She began swimming at six with the Palisades club, and at fifteen, at the London Olympics of 2012, she won the 800 metres freestyle as an unknown high-school swimmer. At Rio in 2016 she won four golds and a silver and broke the world record in the 400 and the 800; at Tokyo in 2021 she won the first Olympic 1500 metres freestyle ever held for women; at Paris in 2024 she won the 800 and the 1500 again, becoming the first woman to win the same individual Olympic event four times in a row and the most decorated American female Olympian with fourteen medals.

She holds the world records in the 800 and 1500 metres freestyle, has been world champion twenty-one times, and has swum the twenty-one fastest 1500-metre times in history. She swam for Stanford, where she won fifteen NCAA titles, and has given her prize money to charity, including to the swimming programme of a Washington school. What made her exceptional was less speed over one lap than the ability to hold, for fifteen minutes, a pace that no other woman could sustain.