Does the world’s greatest female athlete live in water?

Truly great things last a long while. Poetry. The Godfather. Blue whales. Trees. And Katie Ledecky in a pool.

You’re a sports fan, so you know her, right? This woman who’s arguably the greatest female athlete of the past decade from a sport which doesn’t get the regular respect it’s owed. Not everyone swims but you don’t need to dance to admire Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Ledecky does stuff that is other-worldly and we’re not just talking about swimming a lap with a glass of chocolate milk on her head and not spilling a drop. Even Quah Ting Wen shakes her head. The champion Singapore freestyler knows that 50m of backstroke, with the glass balanced on the forehead, is one thing. But in freestyle, on the back of the head?

“Very difficult,” says Quah.

When Ledecky did that swim years ago she posted a winking caption: “Possibly one of the best swims of my career!” In truth, trying to find her best swim is like sorting through Daniel Day-Lewis’ film repertoire for a favourite.

Her first Olympic victory in the 800m as a 15-year-old in 2012? Or her 1,500m gold at the 2024 Olympics by over 10 seconds? Or her latest world record last week in the 800m freestyle at 28? We all rightfully went gaga over Usain Bolt, but she does stuff in water that no one has ever done on land.

Longevity, says Quah, is the Ledecky superpower. So is range. She’s won Olympic gold in the 200m, 400m, 800m and 1,500m and once, at the 2015 world championship, just for the heck of it, won all four in the same meet. She hasn’t merely dominated, she’s stretched that word, repackaged it and redefined it. In the 1,500m, for instance, she holds the 22 best times.

When Michael Jordan was in his rampaging prime, Scott Turow, author of Presumed Innocent, poetically said, “(He) plays basketball better than anyone else in the world does anything else.” In 2016, the Washington Post offered their headline version of this for the swimmer: How Katie Ledecky Became Better At Swimming Than Anyone Is At Anything. And yet, in 26 years of the Laureus Sportswoman of the Year awards, she hasn’t won once (10 times track and field athletes, seven times tennis players).

But then in the hierarchy of sport, swimming has always battled the tides. It has no sturdy, rich worldwide league and no weekly place on our TV screens. We don’t hang out with Ledecky as often as we do with tennis’ Aryna Sabalenka, or frequently examine her form as we might with golf’s Lydia Ko.

There’s also something literally opaque to swimming, for half of the athlete’s body is obscured by water. It’s a pity for they’re doing a sort of magic where they “catch” the water, and pull it, and we can’t really see this but only their bodies which are being propelled at a pace which suggests the Jaws theme should be playing.

And so we tend to reduce Ledecky’s art to numbers, her skill to timings but, my god, what numbers they are. The all-time list of Summer Olympic gold medallists is skewed towards swimmers and gymnasts (six of the top 10 places), as they have multiple chances every Games to ascend the podium. Still, there Ledecky is, in first place among women with nine golds, tied with Larisa Latynina, a gymnast from the 1950s and 1960s.

Ledecky won gold in Paris and has returned to resetting records. Any world record is astonishing, for it is to win a chase against the planet and force the self past a known limit.

But Ledecky’s recent 800m world record felt particularly miraculous. Because of its speed (her first 200m split was faster than the Singapore women’s 200m freestyle record) and because it came nine years after her last record in that event. Who finds their best after such a gap? How far can talent stretch? Even as her years add up, she’s subtracting seconds.

“It’s been so many years in the making,” Ledecky said of her world record and only swimmers know the ache of their labour. As a teenager she did 135,000 laps a year and as Quah says “the amount of work that goes into what she does gets a little bit overlooked”.

Distance racing, Ledecky wrote in her autobiography, “is fully masochistic. You’re going to feel pain in a unique and terrible way”. Hard questions arrive as the body interrogates the brain: “Seriously, how long are you going to make me keep doing this?”

For over a decade she has answered well.

In July, she will likely dazzle again in Singapore at the World Aquatics Championships. To witness her performance will be to experience something truly extraordinary. Perhaps up close, we might check if she possesses gills. After all, her memoir is titled Just Add Water – reminiscent of the children’s television show where a magical transformation occurs when certain humans come in contact with water.

They turn into mermaids.