Katie Ledecky’s victory in the 1,500-meter freestyle final at the Paris Summer Olympics on Wednesday was no rarity: Since arriving on the world stage, Ledecky has dominated the event and set a new Olympic record on her way to winning the gold medal.
On Wednesday, she simply left the field behind, often appearing as the only swimmer in the frame.
But while her overwhelming strength was typical, some of the congratulations that came in were anything but typical and a reminder of the changing campus landscape.
Shortly after Ledecky’s win, the Atlantic Coast Conference sent out a congratulatory tweet honoring the 2021 Stanford graduate. The ACC’s message included the conference’s tagline, “Achieve Greatness,” and the hashtag, “Olympians are born here.”
Now…read it again.
Stanford is one of the schools joining the ACC this season along with University of California, Berkeley and Southern Methodist University (SMU). SMU became a full member on July 1, 2024, while the two former Pac-12 schools are scheduled to become full members in early August.
Conference realignment always takes some getting used to, and the ACC’s congratulations to Stanford University players who graduated from the school years before the school joined the ACC was just the latest warning that this year will take some getting used to, too.
