In the 1,500, There’s Katie Ledecky and Then There’s Everyone Else

The last time that Katie Ledecky was beaten in a 1,500-meter freestyle event was a regional swim meet in Maryland 14 years ago.

Ledecky was in junior high school. The swimmer who finished more than five seconds ahead of her, Kaitlin Pawlowicz, was going into her senior year of high school.

“There’s not, like, a ton of details that I can recall,” Pawlowicz said recently. “It was just a midsummer gauge type of meet to see where you’re at. Nothing special or crazy about it.”

The mile, as the 1,500 freestyle is colloquially known, is generally considered the sport’s most grueling event. Competing in it requires physical and mental stamina, training blocks that at their most intense can push 12 miles per day and to ignore the body’s normal cues that it is experiencing excruciating pain. Even Ledecky, 27, who loves distance racing and has built a career around it, called it “fully masochistic” in her recently published memoir.

For nearly every other competitor, it might be the single worst event in the Olympic program: a lung-busting, muscle-burning, 15-plus-minute torture test in which they hit the water knowing that they’re essentially swimming for second place.

“You can’t even be upset,” said Jillian Cox, 19, an American distance swimmer who has competed against Ledecky. “On the first 50, you are body lengths behind. It’s just amazing.”