Katie Ledecky Explains That Chocolate Milk Video, and Why She's Not Sweating the Olympics Delay

From Esquire

The week Katie Ledecky was supposed to be racking up gold medals, calling Good Morning America to tell Michael Strahan how she broke her own world record, and reminding the other 195 countries in the Summer Olympics that sorry, she is one of the most dominant athletes we’ll ever see in our lifetimes, fans, talking heads—and even Tik Tok—were all buzzing about a single, eight-ounce, glass of chocolate milk.

The way Ledecky tells it, you would’ve thought it was as easy as you or me plopping our asses in one of those flamingo water floaties and trickling down a lazy river—beer, shades, naptime. If you missed it, earlier this month, Ledecky posted a video of herself swimming, freestyle, the length of a pool with a glass of chocolate milk on her head. Olympians are used to reminding the world every four years that they’re living Marvel heroes, but the stunt—which she pulled off on the first try, by the way—seemed so doesn't-obey-laws-of-physics that it went far beyond the downpour of Twitter hearts, becoming a legitimate talking point in sports-talk shows that week.

“I had to really brace my core,” Ledecky says. “And, I was trying to obviously not let it fall into the water. And then I was also trying to do really smooth strokes so that I wouldn't get any of the chlorinated water into my chocolate milk, because I was going to drink my chocolate milk afterwards.”

If that sounds like, I don’t know, someone talking about the Labours of Hercules as if it was all just a day of Sunday chores, then that’s Ledecky. The 23-year-old is so even-keeled—and, frankly, so damn chill—that it’s hard to believe this is the same person who annihilates the dreams of her fellow Olympic hopefuls every four years. Since the Washington, D.C. native won the 800 m freestyle in the 2012 Olympics out of nowhere (at just 15 years old), she’s won four more gold medals and is a 14-time world-record-breaker, becoming arguably the greatest swimmer of her generation. Next to Simone Biles, Ledecky was supposed to be America’s number-one Olympian of Interest heading into the Tokyo 2020 Games. There, Ledecky was expected to cement her GOATdom, a la Michael Phelps in 2016.

Now, with the pandemic rolling the Summer Games to 2021, Ledecky is trying to pass her final exams at Stanford. But nobody will stop talking about chocolate milk.

“Stanford's on the quarter system, so I'm taking another four classes this summer,” Ledecky says during one of the rare minutes she isn’t studying. Or training—which ends up at about 10 swims and three lifting sessions per week. “I have one more week left of the quarter. So I think I have three finals, two papers, and two major assignments between now and next Friday.”

Quarantine has been one, big mess of dissociation and canned-food meals for everyone and your cat, and it’s no different with Ledecky. Aside from, you know, a year-long rain check on the thing she’s devoted just about her entire life to, she misses her parents—this is the longest period of time she hasn't seen them, though they're always Zooming. Plus, there’s trying to figure out how to stay in shape. Kind of hard when pools aren’t exactly the most sanitary places on the planet. Up until June, the world’s greatest swimmer was whirling around in a backyard pool. (“It's a very nice backyard pool,” Ledecky clarifies, in case you were thinking she was swimming in a Fisher Price inflatable.) Other than that, box jumps on her Ottoman, accidentally banging her head into a door-frame pull-up bar, back to work. Not much time to think when you have to clinch both your psychology degree and another handful of gold medals.

“I was able to shift my mindset pretty quickly to the fact that it's another year out,” she says about the Olympics delay. “We all [know the future is] going to look different… We're not going to have as many meets, maybe. If it's with spectators or no spectators, or how big the meets are? So, we're just trying to be creative. Yeah, a lot of people are kind of thinking, Oh, we would be in Tokyo right now, but I haven't thought of that too much. I really have just been looking ahead to this next year and thinking about trying to be in Tokyo next year.”

It makes sense. You have to be equipped with nerves of steel if you want to be as successful as Ledecky, able to go from state-of-the-art pools to the neighbors’ backyard in a week flat. (Beats what some of her teammates are working with—lakes, moss tugging at their heels.) For the smallest idea of how insane the gap between Ledecky and her competitors is, take it from the pre-Rio Olympics look at the swimmer from The Washington Post—where a Mayo Clinic researcher calculated, at the time, that she was winning by the widest margin in international sports, as if a racer won the Tour de France by over a half hour. Obviously, it’s a little bit of a fickle game, trying to conjure up the familiar faces—LeBron, Usain, Serena, Brady, Phelps—to see where she compares. You can probably guess where Ledecky stands on that one.

"I don't really think about it very much," she says. "I'm very humbled by it and really appreciate it. But I think it's not always a good thing to think about your legacy or where you stand among swimmers or athletes in general. I think there's just so many great athletes in the world in all different sports, and of course, hard to compare all of them. I'm just trying to do the best that I can. The best version of myself that I can be."

The best version of Katie Ledecky? Well, the best version of Katie Ledecky, right now, is the one that can swim 150-some feet with a glass of chocolate milk on her head. Because the normal metric for measuring swimming greatness—you know, the Olympics, est. 776 B.C.—isn't a thing right now. Feats of chocolate milk heroism will have to do. We're back to talking about the video, which has since made a full tour of virality: the PTI guys bickering about whether or not Ledecky glued the glass to her head, swimming teams across the country adopting the stunt as a legitimate training drill, legions of adoring Tik-Tokkers risking a milk-contaminated pool just to pull off the challenge.

According to Ledecky, the stunt was as simple as this: the “Got Milk?” campaign (most recently seen in that poster in your local middle school’s cafeteria) asked if she could pull off something, anything, in the pool with the drink. Apparently, doing the feat via backstroke is a common swimming drill (wow), so Ledecky figured she’d take a shot at it freestyle. Then… first try. First try! She nails it. After Ledecky tells the story—again, with the casual, NBD tone you’d recite your Starbucks order with—she starts railing off the nutritional benefits of the drink, and why, exactly, she hearts it so much that she pulled off what was likely an all-time human feat of hand-eye coordination. It's not totally clear whether Ledecky is trolling with some sick, meta riff on the script that chocolate milk-sponsored GOATs such as herself are surely asked to read from, or she honestly, truly, deeply from the bottom of her heart... loves chocolate milk that much.

“I've been drinking chocolate milk since I was about 13 as my recovery drink after practice, after meets,” she says. “It has proteins, carbs, and electrolytes—and I just love the taste. So yeah, I didn't want to ruin it. With my swim, I really had to earn that chocolate milk!”

Well, if anyone's got milk? Eh. No. Will save you that bit. You get it.

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