Following is the delivered remarks by Katie Ledecky at the 134th Commencement ceremony on June 15, 2025.
Thank you, President Levin, for that very kind introduction, and congratulations, Class of 2025!
Faculty members, Provost Martinez, Board of Trustees, and all of you – thank you for the very warm welcome back to campus.
I understand from the senior class presidents that I was selected to speak today through some kind of a class survey, and I am so honored to be given this opportunity – but I have to say, I hope there was no padding of the survey results by the men’s and women’s swim teams. I saw many of you out there in your Wacky Walk swimsuits, and I appreciate being made to feel at home.
Thank you to my family for being here and a huge shoutout to my former Stanford swim coaches Greg Meehan and Tracy Slusser. I’ve enjoyed spending time the last few days around campus – swimming, seeing old friends, and meeting many of you at Dinner on the Quad and around campus. I just love Stanford so much.
As President Levin said earlier, it’s Father’s Day, and I, too, would like to wish all the fathers here – including my own – a very happy Father’s Day.
You know, I’m so fortunate to have a father who was willing to wake up at 4 a.m. to drive me to swim practices when I was younger.
When I was a little kid, about yea high, my dad – knowing that I loved to swim and also that I loved math – taught me that swim races could be decided by just fractions of a second. He said some races might be decided by just one one-hundredth of a second. And to demonstrate what a small period of time that was, he gave me this stopwatch and told me to try to start and stop the watch as fast as I could – and then look to see how much time was measured on the stopwatch.
I’m going to do it here now ... 0.16. I could never do it faster than a tenth of a second. Which revealed to me just how short one one-hundredth of a second really is. And in some ways, that exercise also taught me how fast time flies by.
I know that some of you sitting out there, though you may have had some long days completing assignments, probably feel that your time here at Stanford has flown by. Others of you, perhaps not. But here you are at your graduation. If you spent four academic years on campus here at Stanford – say, about 300 days each year – you’ve been here for approximately 104 million seconds of your life.
104 million seconds.
And I’ve got to tell you, once you graduate, you’ll spend nearly as many seconds of your life explaining to people why Stanford’s mascot is a dancing tree.
Okay, let me say something right off the bat. I am at most seven years older than many of you undergrads here today. I can tell you everything you need to know about freestyle and flip turns. I cannot tell you everything you need to know about life. I can’t even tell you what it’s like to turn 30.
But one thing I do feel like I have expertise in is distance. As a distance swimmer, I have logged a lot of miles in the water. I’ve spent countless hours practicing and staring at that black line on the bottom of the pool, learning what it means to keep going when no one is watching.
So, Stanford Class of 2025, allow me to offer some insights as to how to go the distance – in whatever field and whatever life you may choose.
In my experience, there are three elements to going the distance: pacing, process, and time.
Let’s talk about pacing first.
I was 15 years old when I won my first Olympic gold medal. Looking back now, it’s crazy to me too. Let me set the scene for you for the race.
I had just finished my freshman year of high school. I was the youngest member in the entire U.S. Olympic athlete delegation, and it was my very first time swimming in a meet outside the United States.
Nobody knows who I am. The Olympics are in London, and the defending Olympic champion and favorite in my race is British. Her name is Becky Adlington, a really gracious champion. I know the crowd will be chanting “Becky! Becky!” and I have programmed myself to think they are shouting “Ledecky! Ledecky!”
Prince William and Princess Kate are there. And it is so loud. It gets quiet for swimmers. “Take your mark.”
Then the beep goes off. I dive in – and I’m instantly in the lead.
My coach at the time, Yuri Suguiyama, and another coach, the late great Jon Urbanchek, had advised me to be cautious – not to go out too fast, given the excitement I would feel swimming in the lane next to the reigning Olympic champion.
Well … I didn’t quite listen to that advice. I took the lead from the start and I kept expanding on it. About midway through the race, I remember thinking, “Where is everybody?” There’s a brief second where I wonder if I’m doing something wrong. Like I’ve gone out too fast. Then I tell myself Just keep going.
And I did.
I won by over four seconds.
After my win, Coach Urbanchek comes up to me with this befuddled look on his face and says, “You didn’t follow the plan.” Then he gives me a big hug and says, “But that’s OK.”
Later that night in the Olympic Village, I watched the replay of the race. For most of the race, the NBC announcers seemed like they were trying to will me into slowing down.
Thirty-five seconds into the race, I’m leading, and they say: “She needs to take her foot off the pedal here.” Twenty seconds later, still in the lead: “She swam too fast. She needs to settle back and get into a rhythm.” Another two minutes later, they question my strategy: “She is so far out there now – unless she has a lot of confidence in her stroke and her pace, it may be a little quick. Because these wily veterans know exactly what they’re doing.”
Finally, three-quarters of the way through the race, the tone of the announcers changes. Now they’re celebrating as I extend my lead and eventually win. No second-guessing, no telling me to take my foot off the pedal.
Okay, the point is not to criticize the announcers – they were just doing their jobs. But can you imagine what it would’ve been like for me if I were hearing that commentary the whole time I was swimming? I’d be thinking, hmm, maybe they’re right. I should probably slow down.
The point is: You will probably have people tell you to pace yourself, try not to rush, you’re still young. And that might be the right advice.
But I also want you to consider where being young and unknown could be an advantage. Go fast when you need to go fast.
It’s easy to hear the voices telling you to pace yourself and take your foot off the pedal. But I’ve found that once you start fast, you can go further than you think you can.
So I say to you today: Listen to your coaches. Listen to your family members. Listen to your mentors and bosses. But also listen to yourself. Don’t be afraid to take the lead. Sometimes you just have to go for it – and find out what you’re capable of.
Of course, knowing when to go full speed is only part of the equation. Going the distance is also about enjoying the day-to-day process.
I’m often asked for my secret – as if there’s some secret code to Olympic gold.
And today, Stanford, I’m going to share my secret. Ready?
It involves food. Yes, everyone loves food. Especially at Stanford.
As I was making my way through the sport of swimming, the one question other parents always asked my mother was, “What do you feed Katie? What are you feeding that kid?”
My mother, in her special mom sort of way, would often say, “Oh, whatever’s on sale that week. That’s what we feed her. If strawberries are on sale, then strawberries.”
When I was about 10 years old, my mother read somewhere that low-fat chocolate yogurt was a good breakfast meal for swimmers. But for whatever reason, she couldn’t find low-fat chocolate yogurt at the store. So – for about a year – she somehow substituted chocolate ice cream for the low-fat yogurt.
And I think that explains why I was so eager to wake up early in the morning for practice.
You know what’s funny, everyone loves that ice cream story. But when I tell them that’s the secret, they look kind of disappointed. Like, “Come on, Katie, what’s the real secret?”
Obviously, ice cream isn’t the secret. Truth is: There really isn’t a secret.
Perhaps the closest I can come is this: I set goals. But those goals aren’t about winning.
Winning is inherently about comparison – comparison to others, and then even if you keep winning, you eventually get compared to yourself. A younger, more dominant version of yourself.
That’s why my goals are always about my own performance. And my goals are always times.
Last month, I hit a time I hadn’t hit in nine years. I was elated. I talked about that time like it was an old friend: 3:56. Great to see you again.
Afterward, I was being interviewed, and I could tell the reporter wanted me to say I’d been chasing my own ghost from 2016. The truth is: That’s not what I do.
I chase goal times – not my past self. I stay focused on my pacing, my technique, and the effort it will take to reach those goals.
The real race is always the same. It’s me against my goals.
I’m not oblivious to the fact that hitting those goals may result in winning. And I don’t want to downplay the feeling of winning gold. Being on that medal stand is a feeling I wish everyone could experience. But when I look back at those races, what gives me the most joy is the goal being reached.
This is why I tell you: You don’t have to win the race. You just need to win your race.
And winning your race means falling in love with the process. Fall in love with the process, not the podium.
I’ve been in an Olympic final race 15 times – which is about 170 laps, or around five-and-a-half miles. But I estimate I’ve swum 26,000 miles in my life – and actually, I’ll do another few later today.
All told, that’s 26,000 miles to set up about five-and-a-half miles of Olympic finals.
Swimmers talk about the fact that every time you swim in a practice, you’re putting miles in the bank to call upon in competition.
I was thinking about how many pages you seniors have read over four years at Stanford. I asked some of this year’s class presidents to run some calculations for me. In true Stanford fashion, they wanted to be precise – separating out different types of reading, like reading for class, reading for leisure, reading op-eds.
The consensus is you probably had something like 15,000 pages of assigned reading to reach graduation. Maybe a little more if you’re an English major.
15,000 pages. You won’t remember every page – but every page mattered.
Every lap. Every page. Every late-night study session. Every line of code. Every conversation with professors and peers. Every latte at Coupa. They’ve all been part of your process.
As you move forward, trust your process. Fall in love with your process. Build a community that supports that process. And trust that all those small, seemingly insignificant moments have added up to something special. They’ve made you into the person you are today.
There’s one more element we need to discuss, and that’s time.
This probably sounds like I’m going to reference the stopwatch again. But I actually want to talk about how you spend your time – and who you spend it with.
One of the questions I’m often asked is: “What do you think about when you’re swimming?”
Well, I’m a little suspicious this is just another way of saying, “You must get kind of bored during those long races.” I also get it. Distance swimmers have a lot of time to think. When your races are 15 minutes long, you can’t spend your whole time thinking “must … go … faster.”
So what do I think about?
I always count the laps. Sometimes I have a song stuck in my head.
But my favorite races are the ones where I think of people. I think about training partners. I think about my Grandpa Jerry, immigrating from Czechoslovakia to study at an American university. I think about my Grandpa Hagan, serving as a Navy surgeon in World War II.
In the Tokyo Olympics, I had two medal races about 70 minutes apart. The first was the 200-meter free. I’m still not quite sure what happened, but I just felt off. It was my 36th international race and the first time I didn’t medal.
I had under an hour to get ready for my next race, the 1500-meter freestyle. I knew I’d have to dig deep and fight. I remember I was in the warm-down pool. My brain was clouded with doubt. I kept telling myself to relax. I had to find a way to shake things off and focus.
That’s when I started to think about my grandparents. I envisioned my grandmothers watching me on TV back home. I pictured them cheering for me. And if I were going to dwell on anything in those difficult moments, it was going to be on the toughness and warmth of my grandmothers.
For nearly every stroke of that 30-lap race, I just repeated their names:
Grandma Hagan.
Grandma Berta.
Grandma Hagan.
Grandma Berta.
And it worked.
I swam with a sense of strength and freedom. I felt like my grandparents lifted me up to gold that day.
My Grandma Hagan is now seven months shy of turning 100 years old. We don’t know exactly how long our distance in life will be. But whatever it is, we need to spend that time in a meaningful way.
Sometimes that means trying to get from point A to point B as fast as we can. Most times, that means sitting with uncertainty. It means spending time on hard problems. Problems that you sometimes can’t solve on your own.
As you leave Stanford, so many of you are going places where you won’t have a roadmap. The truly important work will sometimes feel like you’re swimming alone.
Yet I’ve found those are the moments when I’ve most needed my people: my family, my teammates, my coaches.
They are the voices that carry you through the tough times.
Here are my questions for you.
Who are those people who are in your corner?
When you and your friends are spread out across the country, who will you feel cheering for you?
When you have to dig deep and find a way to swim your best race, who will be on your mind?
Here’s something that might surprise you: Your Stanford friends aren’t limited to who your Stanford friends are today. You have no idea how many alumni you will wind up friends with. I have Stanford friends from every generation.
Because even if you don’t know them now, you know Stanford, and they know Stanford. They know what it’s like to have a picnic at the Oval. They know what it’s like to go fountain hopping. They know what it’s like to return from class and see one of their professors interviewed on national news. And yes – they know about CS106A.
Point being: you can’t go the distance alone. Continue to surround yourself with people who will challenge you, support you, and make you laugh. Make sure you spend time with the people who matter to you.
Pacing. Process. And time.
Like many of you, I’m still figuring out what it means to go the distance in life.
How do you pace your life? What does your day-to-day process look like? How do you prioritize your time?
We’re all coming from a place here at Stanford that has taught us to ask tough questions like these. We might not have all the answers – but today we can take joy in the pursuit.
So, as you take the starting block and get ready to dive in to go the distance, I want you to remember this: Stanford was the best choice on your first day. It’s the best choice on your last day.
I’ve loved everything about being a Stanford grad. I think you will too.
And the best is yet to come.
So, graduates – take your mark. And go out there and make your mark.
Congratulations, Class of 2025.
Thank you.
Videographer
Stanford Video
