Written by Kavitha A. Davidson at ESPN W.com
Katie Ledecky’s Olympic Games are off to a flying start: The 19-year-old swimmer took gold in her first individual event Sunday night. And she didn’t just win — she blew her competition out of the water, finishing with a nearly 5-second lead and breaking her own world record in the 400-meter freestyle.
By holding world records in the 400, 800 and 1500 freestyle, Ledecky’s dominance continues to be astounding. During Sunday night’s broadcast, as Ledecky quickly pulled ahead of the pack, NBC’s Rowdy Gaines proclaimed: “A lot of people say she swims like a man. She doesn’t swim like a man — she swims like Katie Ledecky.”
Indeed, the tendency to compare women athletes to men seems to arise no matter what, in an attempt to contextualize female athletic achievement in the male terms we understand as default.
“This girl is doing respectable times for guys,” 11-time Olympic medalist Ryan Lochte told USA Today. Olympic silver medalist Connor Jaeger took the comparison beyond her impressive times. “Her stroke is like a man’s stroke,” he told the Washington Post. “I mean that in a positive way. She swims like a man.”
Lochte, Jaeger and most people comparing Ledecky to male swimmers are trying to be nothing but praiseworthy. And the idea that she has “a man’s stroke” isn’t entirely hyperbolic. As espnW’s Philip Hersh explains, her coach tweaked her mechanics to employ techniques rarely used by female swimmers:
The result was a stroke with a “hitch” or “gallop,” where the left arm glides slightly longer atop the water than the right, a motion that [Michael] Phelps and others say looks like a man’s stroke. It worked because Ledecky had a sense of timing so refined she knew how much longer to keep her left arm gliding and when to move her hips to get the full stroke and to avoid drag after finishing the breathing phase.
And yet, it’s easy to see why many on social media reacted strongly to the idea of comparing Ledecky to a man in the first place. Ledecky uses a stroke traditionally ascribed to men, but there’s nothing about the skills required to employ that stroke that are uniquely male. Strength and timing can be acquired, and history has shown us that both improved training and increased access to sports helps close the gap between men and women athletes.
This is demonstrably true in swimming. In 2012, the Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer found that women’s world-record times in the 100 free have improved at a greater pace than the men’s times since 1905. Interestingly, he also compared men’s and women’s world records across events and found that women come closest to men in longer races, particularly the 1500.
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