Katie Ledecky: The rise of an Olympic great

US swimming superstar Katie Ledecky knocks on the door of eternity as she heads to Paris for more Olympic glory. CNN takes a look at the all-time great.

Michael Ledecky remembers the day he was first beaten by his younger sister Katie in the pool, wrenching his goggles from his head and breaking them in two, an odd mixture of pride and anger enveloping him on that August evening. Time hasn’t faded the memory. The race, a 200m freestyle duel which he had instigated, was such a significant moment in his teenage life that he wrote about it for an English high school project. “How Katie managed to surpass me in my primary sport baffled me,” he wrote. “Why can’t I beat my younger sister?” He was a high-achieving teenager; a freshman selected for his high school championship swimming team, a perfect-grade student who had hopes of representing an Ivy League swimming team. And he was as dedicated to the sport as his sister; waking up at 4:15 a.m. for practice, swimming morning after morning, looking down at nothing but the black line at the bottom of the pool before school. Yet he came to realize on that summer’s night that his sister, whom he would compete against at almost anything – from pancake eating contests to board games – was the more talented swimmer. What he didn’t recognize at the time, and no one in the family did – not even when she reached her first Olympic final – was that Katie Ledecky would become one of the greatest swimmers in history. “She would typically beat my times from the year prior despite being three years younger and eventually she got me around the time I was a freshman and sophomore in high school,” Michael Ledecky tells CNN Sport. “But even then, I was exceptionally proud of what Katie was doing.”