Michael Phelps Earns 19th Olympic Gold, Katie Ledecky Smashes World Record To Win Gold

Michael Phelps won his 19th Olympic gold medal as a member of Team USA after capturing the 4×100 relay in Rio on Sunday.

France, Team USA’s traditional rival in the event, finished second, and Australia placed third. The gold was Phelps’ 23rd medal (19 golds, 2 silvers and 2 bronzes). His final time was 3:09.92.

The veteran 31-year-old swimmer–competing in his fifth Olympics — wasn’t added to the relay team until race day, and swam the second leg for the Americans, taking over from Caeleb Dressel in second place behind France and gaining the lead. His split time was 47.12, which his coach Bob Bowman said was one of his all-time fastest. He overtook his French counterpart Fabien Gilot after a turn that Bowman described as “probably the best turn that might have ever been done.”

The U.S.’s Ryan Held and Nathan Adrian also finished for the delegation. Adrian’s split was an even better 46.97.

Phelps retired following the London 2012 Games but decided to return, partly due to disappointment with how the American male swimmers performed in the 4×100 relay at the 2013 world championships, which they lost to France.

France and the United States split the last two Olympic gold medals, with Yannick Agnel of France battling Ryan Lochte in the anchor leg to win four years ago. Phelps was on both of those American teams.

Meanwhile, 19-year-old U.S. swimming star Katie Ledecky not only won the gold medal in the women’s 400-meter freestyle on Sunday, she shattered the world record she set two years ago.

The Bethesda, Maryland sensation won her first Olympic gold medal, finishing with an incredible time of 3:56.46 to win by nearly five seconds over Britain’s Jazz Carlin. U.S. teammate Leah Smith won the bronze. Ledecky ended the race with an emphatic fist-pump and a big smile.

“We set our goals for the week,” Ledecky said, “and to finally hit one of them feels really good. Everyone wants to swim their best at the Olympics. I was just trying to set a [personal] best time, and for me that just happens to be a world record.”

With the 12th long-course world record swim of her career, Ledecky finally beat her 2014 mark of 3:58.37. Ledecky clocked a 3:58.71 in the afternoon preliminary heats.

Though she paced the qualifying by more than four seconds, a “lackadaisical” — her word — final stroke may have cost her the record.

“That’s the easiest it’s felt going under four minutes,” Ledecky said after that swim. “So that bodes well for tonight.”

Ledecky swam strong from the beginning Sunday night. Her opening lap of 27.73 was more than a half-second faster than her afternoon split, and her first 100 was more than a full second faster. Halfway through the race, she was already two body-lengths ahead of the field. She swam her first 200 in 1:57.11, a time that would have given her fifth place in the 200 free at the U.S. Olympic trials.

“I’ve been training with her for the last month and watching her doing amazing things,” Smith said of Ledecky. “I knew this was coming. It was just a matter of when and how fast she was going to go.”

In the final 100 meters of the race, Ledecky kicked furious and used her arms with vigor to traverse that distance in 58.84 seconds. No other swimmer in the field was under a minute. Neither, for that matter, was the 17-year-old Ledecky in the world-record swim from 2014.

Of Ledecky’s three world records, the one in the 400 had stood the longest by far. She broke it twice within a span of two weeks in August 2014 — the second coming at the Pan Pacific Championships in Australia — but she had not improved it in the two years since despite 20 or more attempts at smashing it. In that same span, she has broken her records in the 800 and 1,500 (the latter of which is not contested for women in the Olympics) a total of five times — most recently six months and one year ago, respectively.

Her performance on Sunday, added to her 800 free gold in 2012, already makes her the sixth American woman to win individual swimming golds at two different Olympics. She joins Martha Norelius (1924 and 1928), Janet Evans (1988, 1992), Brooke Bennett (1996, 2000), Natalie Coughlin (2004, 2008) and Rebecca Soni (2008, 2012).

Ledecky still has the opportunity to win gold in the 200 free, 800 free and 4×200 free relay. If she wins them all, she would become only the third American woman, after Amy Van Dyken (1996) and Missy Franklin (2012), to win four golds in a single Olympics. Only Franklin has won four golds plus an additional medal (a bronze).

Next up for Ledecky: the 200 free, with heats Monday afternoon, semifinals Monday night and final Tuesday night.

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – AUGUST 07: Gold medalists Caeleb Dressell and Michael Phelps of the United States embrace during the medal ceremony for the Final of the Men’s 4 x 100m Freestyle Relay on Day 2 of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games at the Olympic Aquatics Stadium on August 7, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Photo by Adam Pretty/Getty Images)

Article by Pablo Mena