BUDAPEST — As Yogi Berra once famously said, it ain’t over til it’s over, and while the swimming part of these 19th FINA championships is just now half over, and for a great chunk of the world these championships perhaps have an are-they-really-happening vibe, up close there are threads that clearly deserve pulling:
— Caeleb Dressel, the top American guy, went home abruptly. USA Swimming wouldn’t say what’s wrong, citing medical privacy laws.
Let’s deconstruct.
BUDAPEST — Some cars go from zero to 60 really fast. Not a 1975 AMC Pacer. It requires a touch over 14 seconds.
Got the picture in your mind of that wide-as-it-as-long, weirdo-bubble-glass, frog-like thing belching, lumbering, wheezing toward 60? Take out your cellphone, go to the stopwatch function, click start and watch it go tick, tick, tick. And keep on ticking. One Mississippi, two …
Fourteen-plus is a lot of seconds. Usain Bolt is already in the midst of a second 100-meter dash.
In the women’s 1500 freestyle at these 2022 FINA world championships, 14-plus is how much time winner Katie Ledecky put between her and runner-up Katie Grimes, a 16-year-old from Las Vegas.
BUDAPEST — If you need to read about golfers yelling at each other or journalists yelling at golfers or something like that, please click elsewhere.
Katie Ledecky was back racing Saturday night, which means we can all feel good about, well, everything. Especially about the notion of endless possibilities. And what it means to genuinely be an inspiration seemingly everywhere in our fractious and chaotic world, and especially to women and girls — some of whom make posters for you and still others who make posters and then grow up to, you know, race you.
OMAHA, Neb. — Every four (or perchance, five) years, the U.S. Trials, swim and track, make plain one of the inexorable truths of our lives. Time is what we make of it. Destinies are written in hundredths of a second.
At the Trials, there is no getting around this truth.
There is only the making of an easy peace. An understanding that, for a glimmer, one can stretch the boundaries of what might be possible.
This is what Katie Ledecky is — has been since 2012 — doing, and what she affirmed Wednesday in winning both the 200 freestyle and, about an hour later, the 1500 free. Earlier this meet, she won the 400 free. The 800 free awaits.
This, too, is what 31-year-old Allison Schmitt, the 200 free gold medalist in London in 2012, achieved Wednesday night. In a feel-good comeback, she finished just back of Ledecky in the 200 free, earning a fourth trip to the Olympics. If she wins a medal in Tokyo, most likely in the relays, she would join Dara Torres (five) and Jenny Thompson (four) in an exclusive club: medals at four-plus Games. Schmitt already has medals from 2016, 2012 and 2008.
GWANGJU, South Korea — If ever there was an event that suffered from an Olympic hangover, these 18th FINA world aquatics championships would be right up there on the list of leading candidates. Indeed, a longtime FINA official said, these were the championsihps from the twilight zone.
Some 18 months after the hugely successful — and bitterly cold — PyeongChang Olympics over in South Korea’s northeastern mountains, the action shifted to this nation’s southwest, and Gwangju, into the heat and humidity and, as it turned out, virtually non-stop rain. Strike that. These championships went down to the percussive beat of seemingly endless thunderstorms. There was lightning, too, as immediately before the women’s water polo final, won by the United States over Spain.
They tried to sell this event as a peacemaker: “Dive into Peace,” read the white-on-turquoise slogans plastered all over the venues and, indeed, around town, a nod not just to events on the peninsula but, as virtually everyone in South Korea knows, the events of May 1980, when a democracy uprising climaxed in a bloody battle between the military and locals, the victims now honored in an expansive national cemetery near town.
Instead of peace, however, a balcony in a packed nightclub near the athletes village collapsed early on the morning of July 27, killing two Koreans and injuring at least nine athletes, including four American water polo players.
Meanwhile, inside the venues, athletes from Australia and Britain staged medals-stand protests, purportedly over doping matters tied to the Chinese swimmer Sun Yang. Attendance proved spotty at best; it would be charitable to say there were even hundreds of people on some days at the diving events that opened the meet’s 17-day run. Even the internet — and South Korea is known for its robust internet — didn’t work, and why?
It was thus left to Katie Ledecky, on the meet’s next-to-last night, to provide the emotional rescue — the stuff, the inspiration — that, truly, makes Olympic sport different from everything else.
Essentially, Ledecky all but saved these championships.
GWANGJU, South Korea — Over the course of her brilliant career, Katie Ledecky has had all manner of memorable swims.
There was the race in London in 2012 when she announced herself to the world by winning gold in the 800 freestyle as a 15-year-old. The 1500 free at the world championships in Barcelona in 2013 that made for 15 minutes of thrilling theater. The 14 world records in the 400, 800 and 1500. And on and on.
Maybe no race, however, tested Katie Ledecky like the 800 free here Saturday night.
Typically, Ledecky goes out hard and fast puts the race away. Not this time. She had been sick all week. She was vulnerable. She knew it. Everyone knew it. Incredibly, she fell behind in the middle of the race. Even so, she somehow summoned the heart, the soul, the will of the great champion that she is — one of the great athletes of this or any time — to come back late and win, in 8:13.58.
BUDAPEST — In the land before time, when there were no cellphones, those of us of a certain generation were sent out of the house by exasperated mothers who didn’t know the first thing about bicycle helmets and, truth be told, didn’t much care. They just wanted us out until it was dark.
So off we went, baseball cards in our spokes. It was a very exciting day when the new edition of certain magazines would show up in the racks at the Ben Franklin five-and-dime store. It was super-exciting when Mad magazine would show up, with stupid Alfred E. Neuman on the cover, grinning, “What, me worry?”
Now that these 2017 FINA world championships are in the history books, can we finally acknowledge Alfred E. Neuman as Team USA’s unofficial spokesdude?
No Michael Phelps, no Ryan Lochte, no Missy Franklin. No worries.
BUDAPEST — Did you know, my 18-year-old daughter said to me over FaceTime, she in California, me here in Budapest at the FINA world swim championships, that Michael Phelps raced a shark?
Did you also know, she went on, that it wasn’t really a real shark? And Michael had a monofin? And Michael went 38.1 seconds and the shark 36.1 seconds? He was close!
So, I said to the darling daughter, now that you have told me everything about Michael and, as it were, the ultimate example of jumping the shark, what can you tell me about what’s going on here? Because, I said, this is a great meet.
To switch animal gears, or something, here was her response: crickets.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the existential dilemma of Olympic sport in 2017.
BUDAPEST — If you listen closely, very closely, to Katie Ledecky this week at the 2017 FINA world championships, you can hear — appropriately — a college sophomore-to-be.
Someone who sees that there is a big world out there beyond swimming, that swimming is just a piece of a long and meaningful life as part of a loving and supportive family. Who also sees that many of the big stars on the American team who have come before her in recent years have wrestled with some big issues and maybe — probably — could have benefitted from some quality time between Olympic Games.
If you were Katie Ledecky and you had done pretty much everything there is to do at the highest levels, and now, after Wednesday, in the women’s 200-meter freestyle, you were proven human after all, which in its way is the lifting of an incredible burden, might you be inclined to maybe think of 2018, or at least some portion of it after the college swim season, as, well, me time?
As a constructive and positive stroke all around?
