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i need you all to understand how absolutely fucking monumental beating someone by SEVENTEEN seconds in a swim race is. normally, in olympic swimming, all the swimmers finish within the same few seconds. notice how in the event replay, all the other swimmers are roughly in a line during the race… (admittedly, swimmers tend to finish further apart from each other in longer distance races, but not by that much.) people spend months, years of their lives doing brutal training just trying to one-up other swimmers by a single second, because that can mean a win. every hundredth of a second matters.
and then. imagine being ledecky and finishing your olympic race, sitting and waiting on second place to arrive for seventeen entire seconds.