2025 World Championships
The GOAT of women’s swimming remained GOAT’ed on Saturday in Singapore. 28-year-old American swimmer Katie Ledecky, who earlier this year set a surprise World Record in the 800 meter free, won her 7th straight full-World Championship title in the event (excluding the odd 2024 event), holding off both the prodigy Summer McIntosh of Canada and an absolutely gutsy swim from Australian Lani Pallister.
Racing her signature event, Ledecky hasn’t lost a significant international race in this 800 free since bursting onto the scene at 15 at the 2012 Olympic Games.
While the 18-year-old McIntosh rightly has the current strongest claim to ‘best in the world,’ conversations have already begun about what she might need to do to supplant Katie Ledecky as the best female swimmer of all-time.
While McIntosh has had one of the best three-year runs in swimming history, while her breadth of events is incredible, and while her scare of the 200 fly World Record earlier this week was breathtaking, Ledecky still has two things that McIntosh can’t match. One is the length of dominance, spanning now 14 years of Ledecky sitting atop her throne.
The other is this head-to-head win. This was the Jordan-Kobe moment, harkening back to the late 90s basketball era when the basketball GOAT Michael Jordan was at the end of his career. While Bryant won 5 of the 8 head-to-head matchups between the two, Jordan averaged more points in those games (24.5 vs. 22.8) – though the first tow of those were before Kobe really became ‘full Kobe.’
This was that moment for Ledecky, and while McIntosh beat her earlier in the meet in the 400 free, this was the race that all eyeballs were on to see where this paper debate really stood. One of McIntosh’s coaches, Fred Vergnoux, thinks that she can break 8 minutes.
It has been a long, gross meet for swimmers around the world. The food poisoning and various gastrointestinal illnesses has marred the first six-and-a-half days of competition, but that obscures the fact that this was the race that everyone was waiting for coming into the meet.
The presence of the Australian Pallister, who charged out with the two leaders and found enough ‘stuff’ late to pull by McIntosh in the best final 50 you will ever see in an 800 free, just made the meet all the better. She’s a swimmer with a big story too, the daughter of an Olympian who had her first Olympic run to Tokyo disrupted by heart surgery.
Ledecky’s time will soon come to an end. Whether that’s in LA, or some time after that. “Competitiveness” isn’t really an archetype that’s generally associated with Ledecky, because for most of her career she’s been so far ahead of the field that it hasn’t felt that competitive. But the thing about the Greats of All-Time, the Jordans, the Phelpses, the Bradys, the Serena Williamses, is that even when they get to the tail end of their careers, you can never count them out. They have a deep internal knowledge of greatness, and while the repeatability of that ultimate greatness may become more difficult, it is always there bubbling beneath the surface, waiting to remind the world of who they are.
