Katie Ledecky sat at a table overlooking the Stanford aquatic facilities last May, two months away from the Tokyo Olympics and five years into her time as a student and athlete at the school. She was talking about her progression from training as a teenager in Washington, D.C., through the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, then moving to the West Coast.
“I think each [Olympic] cycle feels different,” she said then. “Different circumstances, different approach. I kind of like it that way, though. You don’t want to go eight or nine years with everything the same.”
Hearing that, it wasn’t hard to do the math and suspect that the greatest women’s swimmer in history would be on the move after Tokyo.