By: Derick Zhang

In Budapest, the 400-meter freestyle is won yet again by Katie Ledecky, but the fans raise a question, where is her rival? Well, the answer to that is halfway across the world. In bed lies Ledecky’s one and only rival who may give her a hard time, Ariarne Titmus. For a simple reason, she didn’t feel like it. For anyone who plays sports or is competitive in general knows that it probably wasn’t the greatest idea to just hand your rival a gold medal. To be fair though, this is an incredibly important race, and she didn’t even try to defend her title as 400-meter freestyle queen. While Ledecky was at the World Championships, Titmus will swim in the Commonwealth Games, a sporting event of former British Colonies (America doesn’t participate in this event) in late July.

Now with the present clear, let’s talk about the past. Ariarne Titmus was born in 2000 in Launceston, a small city in Tasmania, an island south of the Australian mainland. At an early age she was in the water, and she said, “We always had backyard pools.” In 2008 she was watching as Stephanie Rice and Libby Trickett starred at the Beijing Olympics. When she was seven she joined a local swim club and began racing. She flew up the ranks and she also flew when she was swimming, and before she knew it, she was on the national team. In the middle of her career, she hit a roadblock in her career. As you would imagine Tasmania has a mere population of half a million, to put that in perspective Washington D.C has around seven hundred thousand residents. There weren’t any coaches that could really teach anything else to the child prodigy and so at age 14, her family went to mainland Australia where she slowly, but eventually caught up with Ledecky. When finally at the 2017 world championships she won a bronze medal in a relay, her first big medal. Then, only two years later, she dethroned the best of the best, Katie Ledecky.

Titmus is a genius, but in any competitive sports, talent alone wouldn’t be enough, any top swimmers work around the clock. We all need breaks; this was like any other break that Titmus needed. It’s just that there was an important race while having that break, but she knows that if she takes this gamble maybe. Just maybe she could beat Ledecky somewhere else while she’s celebrating and catch her off guard.