Katie Ledecky is a star swimmer, but she wouldn’t be where she is now without her parents. The Maryland native knows she can make them proud with her wits and swimming abilities.
Ledecky joined the Olympic National Team at 15 during the 2012 London Summer Olympics and won her first gold medal in the 800 m race. Fast forward to now and she’s won 10 Olympics medals—seven of which are gold. She’s currently the most decorated woman swimmer of all time and one of the faces of Team USA. She’s splashing into her fourth Olympics after Tokyo 2020 at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics and we know she’s going do amazing.
Well, it also seems that Katie Ledecky’s parents also had a hand and a kick in the sport. Read more about her biggest supporters below.
Mary Gen Ledecky
Mary Gen Ledecky (née Hagan) is Katie Ledecky’s mother. Like her daughter, she was a collegiate swimmer at the University of New Mexico and qualified for nationals three times. She was a health administrator. Mary Gen’s father had the Williston town pool named after him, which Katie swam the first lap.
Before she competed in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics, Mary Gen gushed that they wouldn’t contain their excitement. “She’s calm. And that’s great. I think it’s a helpful attribute,” Mary Gen Ledecky told NBC4. “We’re not serene. We’re yelling and screaming, cheering.”
She also noted that she’s pretty comfortable in competing where “there’s nothing a mom or dad needs to do. “We just want her to be happy,” she continued. “She’s been so focused and so goal-oriented; we hope that she’ll find something that she can be very happy doing and find a passion” in addition to the pool.
David Ledecky
David Ledecky is Katie Ledecky’s father. He’s an attorney who graduated from Harvard and Yale. As well as supporting her sports endeavors, David is very supportive of her education when she attended Stanford and majored in . “The way our parents believe in education, it was a no-brainer Katie wasn’t going to turn professional,” he told ESPN.
He also thinks that Katie is sure of herself when it comes to swimming, “She doesn’t think in those terms of being the biggest thing in the sport. I don’t get the sense of her feeling any pressure at all.” He continued, “I guess even we haven’t wrapped our heads around who she is now.”
