Katie Ledecky Regains Full Top 25 All-Time Swims in 800 Free

American swimmer Katie Ledecky’s 8:11.83 was notable for a number of reasons. For one, it was faster than her gold medal time at the Tokyo Olympics, showing that her Florida training is, in a two-dimensional matrix at least, working.

For two, she negative-split the race, showing some signs of that back-half speed that fellow Olympic champion and Florida distance trainee Bobby Finke showed at the Olympics.

But more esoterically, it re-establishes Ledecky as owning the 25 fastest times in the history of this event. She bumped Australian Ariarne Titmus, who swam 8:13.83 en route to an Olympic silver medal in the event, is the second-fastest ever, and that time is now the 26th-fastest ever.

Ledecky has the only active top-25-times in any long course event. There are other dominant swimmers who hold a lot of the top times in an event – Katinka Hosszu has 22 out of the 25 best 200 IMs, and Adam Peaty has 21 out of the 25 best 100 breaststrokes, for example.

But Ledecky’s ability to not only dominate, but to swim among the all-time fastest results in local club meets that are designed primarily for good high school swimmers, is unparalleled in the modern generation, especially in the 800 and 1500 freestyles.

Below, we’ve dug out the swimmer with the most and second-most times that rank in the top 25 performances ever in each event.

A few observations:

• I expect that in the newly-minted Olympic men’s 800 free, we’ll start to see more swimmers take “multiple spots” in the top 25. Right now, that’s among the most diverse events without a real dominant force, but that makes sense because it hasn’t historically been raced at most big taper meets.
• These lists will always have a recency bias, because swimming always gets faster. Any swimmer who is over the age of 30 who is still on the table below is really impressive.
• There are a surprising number of occasions where the World Record holder doesn’t have the most top 25 swims. Singular greatness doesn’t always imply the same thing as sustained greatness.
• I expected that there would be more lopsidedness in single swimmer dominance in 100 meter events because there are more opportunities to swim those races at taper meets by the transcendent stars. Sarah Sjostrom has swum more tapered 100 flys than she has tapered 50 flies, and than Katinka Hosszu has swum tapered 400 IMs. There’s not very strong evidence of this in the results – so there must be other factors that matter more.
• There are a few swimmers who I expected to appear on more of these lists, like Daiya Seto (6) and Laszlo Cseh (5). But, Ryan Lochte and Michael Phelps still suck so much air out of those rooms that it doesn’t leave much space for other swimmers.
• There are some cases where swimmers made these lists without coming all that close to a World Record, with multiple swims ranked in the 20s. Anastasia Fesikova in the 50 back, for example, has swims ranked #17, #24, and #25. Others are the opposite – Kolesnikov’s 7 top-25-ranked swims in the 50 back aren’t the highest number, but all 7 are in the top 15 as well.
• Rivals Lilly King and Yulia Efimova are tied for number of total entries in top 25 lists across all events, with 16 each.

While we had the data open, for fun we looked to see who had the most all-time top 25 swims across all races. At least 8 swimmers have a minimum of 20 total entries. Scroll to the end to see who leads that list.

Data was all compiled by hand, because Daniel is busy. Let me know if I missed anything.

Most Top 25-Ranked Swims By Event

Most Top 25-Ranked Swims, All Events (Minimum 20)