Olympics Rio 2016: Katie Ledecky leaves male team-mates nursing bruised egos

Published 09/08/2016 at 12:45 GMT

One of Katie Ledecky's team-mates on the USA swimming squad was stunned when he trained alongside her in preparation for the Olympics.

Katie Ledecky celebrates setting a new world record in the 400m freestyle final

Image credit: Reuters

The swimming phenomenon is by some sizeable distance the quickest woman in the world, demonstrated neatly by her five-second margin of victory over Jazz Carlin in the 400m freestyle.

Katie Ledecky poses with her gold medal

Image credit: Reuters

But for some reason that seems to have taken one of her colleagues by surprise.

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The New York Times quotes London 2012 4x200m relay gold medallist Conor Dwyer talking about the male swimmers fretting about being "broken" - ie "beaten" - by Ledecky in training.

She is no easy task to beat in practice, even as a male...I saw her break a lot of guys in practice...Your morale goes down pretty quickly when you get broken by a female in practice. I saw a couple of guys have to get yanked out of workout because they got beat by her."

Even one of her regular training partners Matthew Hirschberger is a bit antsy about it.

I’m not gonna lie, it can be annoying when she beats you...You’re just not used to getting beat by a girl."

It's a bit sad that Ledecky's colleagues can't simply celebrate her achievements and rejoice that they're on the same team with the best swimmer in the world, but find themselves worrying about being "beaten by a girl".

The crowning glory of this entire tale is Ledecky's response. When she was asked about these incidents in which she destroyed her team-mates' self-worth simply by being brilliant at swimming, she didn't know what the journalist was talking about.

Ledecky wasn't even trying to beat them.

"I was probably just concentrating on doing my own work," she said.

That's how you get to be the best in the world.

Rio 2016