We witnessed one of the ultimate examples of long-haul perseverance in sport on August 2 last year. When Katie Ledecky stopped the clock a short swing of an arm ahead of Lani Pallister, Summer McIntosh hurtling home to give the world its first women's 800m free championship final with not only two but three swimmers inside 8mins 10.

Indeed, the Singapore Sling of 2025 World titles had even greater depth than that: it was the fastest 800m race in history, three women under 8:08; one, Simona Quadarella, on 8:12 for a European record, another 8:15, an 8:18, an 8:20.

Ledecky's margin of victory was the smallest of her 13-year Olympic and championship career: at 0.36ec it was the only race out of 13 senior international 800m free titles (4 Olympic, 7 World, 2 Pan Pac - with three of her six World records in the event set on this big occasions) won by less than a second. The speed of McIntosh's bronze also made the podium spread tighter than all but three of those 13 victories in Stars and Stripes.

Here's the race of 2025 and, from my perspective the greatest women's 800 free race in history and one of the greatest distance battles all the way back to the moment in 1896 when grease-covered Hungarian Alfréd Hajós declared that his "will to live completely overcame my desire to win" after emerging from the Bay of Zea and its chilly, rough Olympic waters of 12°C to 14°C - the waves reported to have been as high as 3.5 metres - a pioneering champion:

W800 Free - Empress Of Endurance Ledecky Leads The Greatest Women’s Distance Race In History To Triumph

Gold: 8:05.62 Katie Ledecky (USA); Silver: 8:05.98 Lani Pallister (AUS); Bronze: Summer McIntosh, 8:07.29. “I don’t feel like I have too much to lose ... just knowing what a fast field this was, I knew that if I put my best foot forward, I could be proud of the swim/the season that I’ve had.”

State Of Swimming +Craig Lord

A year before the Singapore 2025 fight, the average pace of all three Olympic podium swims in the 800m final in Paris - topped by Ledecky's 8:11 as founder member of the women's Quad club (same title won at four Games) - was just shy of 0.73sec slower per 100m than the race we were graced with in Singapore at the helm of the swiftest top 7 ever in one 800 battle. Last home, an 8:26, from Japan's Ichika Kajimoto, was not the swiftest 8th place ever, but she needs no forgiveness: she raced the week after becoming the champion of the 3km knockout in Open Water out at Sentosa.

Since Ledecky won her first Olympic 800m title, aged 15 at London 2012, she has amassed the following treasure for her pantheon of pantheons as one of the all-time greats of her sport:

Olympic Games
Gold 2012 London 8:14.63 AM (4.14)
Gold 2016 Rio 8:04.79 WR (11.38)
Gold 2020 Tokyo 8:12.57 (1.26)
Gold 2024 Paris 8:11.04 (1.25)
World Championships (LC)
Gold 2013 Barcelona 8:13.86 WR (2.46)
Gold 2015 8:07.39 WR (10.26)
Gold 2017 Budapest 8:12.68 (2.78)
Gold 2019 Gwangju 8:13.58 (1.41)
Gold 2022 Budapest 8:08.04 (10.73)
Gold 2023 Fukuoka 8:08.87 (4.44)
Gold 2025 Singapore 8:05.62 (0.36 ... podium spread - 1.67)
Pan Pacific Championships
Gold 2014 Gold Coast 8:11.35 CR (7.52)
Gold 2018 Tokyo 8:09.13 (7.94)

Assuming all goes to goal, by the time Ledecky lines up at U.S. Olympic trials for a home Games in Los Angeles, her score of sustained excellence will have stretched to 16 years, the same span of five Olympic Games that marked the career of her former teammate and the most decorated Olympian of all time, Michael Phelps.

Extraordinary. Sustained. Excellence.

And Perseverance ... meaning, persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.

Delay Ledecky has rarely known. Difficulty comes with the territory of excellence in high-performance sport, regardless of how easy the athlete makes it look.

As 2025 came to a close, we reported the following words, among others, from the growing book of Bob Bowman wisdom:

Most people think elite performance is about peaking.

It isn’t.

Peaking is easy to engineer. Sustaining excellence is not.

Over time, I’ve learned that the biggest threat to high performers - athletes, coaches, leaders - isn’t lack of motivation or talent. It’s instability. Inconsistent standards. Reactive decision-making. Short-term fixes disguised as innovation.

Great systems don’t chase highs.
They reduce variance.

Read Bowman's post in full and the intriguing pledge that came with it:

Bowman On The Critical Art of Sustaining Excellence

“Excellence isn’t fragile—but it does require protection” - Bob Bowman, who has pledged to share some of the principles he’s learned “about building environments where performance can last”

State Of Swimming +Craig Lord

Singapore gave us a glimpse of the consistent discipline that underpins sustained excellence in an athlete who has worked with Yuri Suguiyama (London 2012 cycle) Bruce Gemmell (Rio 2016) - both Nation's Capital, Washington; Greg Meehan (Tokyo 2020ne), Stanford; and Anthony Nesty (Paris 2024), Florida Gators.

Peaks were chased, of course, but is there evidence that 'reduced variance' played its part? Yes, in abundance. At the surface: a lack of instability, the presence of consistent standards, the ability of athlete and those she works with to make wise, informed choices and shifts at the right time for reasons that stretch beyond swimming but keep swimming core and centre; no great tectonic shifts in approach, no panic under pressure. And there's this: apart from the bug that hit her at Gwangju 2019 (her 800m free win there one of the greatest races of her career, regardless of where the clock stopped), Ledecky has navigated the sick bay like a stream flowing over and around rocks. No stone unturned.

That love affair with choice, consistency, discipline, determination and dedication led Ledecky to what was arguably the toughest pressure-cooker challenge of her career in Singapore, momentum holding hands with McIntosh and Pallister on the way to and then at the World Championships.

Ledecky was one of four women in Singapore whose major international podium careers date back more than a decade, her's with golden fireworks at the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Here are the other three who were making big podiums in their juniors years, alongside a note on their Singapore podiums and another on where it all began in national colours. Beyond them, we then look at the eight big hitters who will make the decade-plus, big-podium club on the way to LA2028: