Katie Ledecky: My first memories of being in the water are with my mom. She taught my brother and me how to feel comfortable in the water. We would play a lot of games like Marco Polo or just blowing bubbles and kind of playing water tag, I guess, just swimming in between each other, things like that. So, those are my first memories. And then soon after that, I joined a summer league swim team with my brother, the Palisades Porpoises in Maryland, so in the Montgomery County Swim League. So that was when I first started learning the strokes and competing for a team.
I started swimming for Palisades when I was six, and started competing when I was six for the summer league team. And after that first summer of swimming, my brother and I, we both loved it so much that we wanted to start swimming year-round, and we started with a year-round team that fall after the summer. And played other sports as well, but probably by the age of 11 or 12, I started choosing swim practice over basketball and soccer, and all my other activities, and swimming became my main extracurricular activity.
I don’t think either of my parents really recognized that I had special skills in the water. I think they recognized that I loved the sport, and that I was passionate about the sport, and that I enjoyed setting goals for myself within swimming. And I mean, they probably did see me winning races and, you know, being faster than some of my teammates or competitors, but I don’t think at that age they saw me ever making it to the Olympics. I think we still saw that as such a far-fetched thing and something that was so hard to reach that there’s no way that that should even be something we discuss. They did a very good job of not pushing me in the sport, not forcing me to swim, even though my mom swam in college, she didn’t push the sport on my brother or me. We found our own love of it.
We’re very goal-oriented and enjoyed I think the individual nature of the sport, having personal control over your results, your work that you put in, you don’t have to rely on your teammate catching the ball or something like that, and so we enjoyed that. But then at the same time, we also enjoyed the team atmosphere of swimming, the training with teammates, pushing each other, having fun with each other on the pool deck or in practice at swim meets. So, I think we both loved those two aspects of the sport and that’s what drew us to continue for so many years.