The five-time Olympic gold medalist and 14-time world champion Katie Ledecky can add one more accolade to her resume—2017 Female Athlete of the Year. The Associated Press chose Ledecky, with 351 votes, over world-class tennis player Serena Williams (343 votes) and track star Allyson Felix (248 votes).

Finishing second last year in voting to gymnast Simone Biles, her candidacy was strengthened this time around by her performance at the 2017 World Aquatics Championships is Budapest, where she won five gold medals and a silver.

According to the AP, Ledecky is the eighth female swimmer to win the award and the first since Amy Van Dyken in 1996. Among others is 1969 winner Debbie Meyer who Ledecky mirrored at last year’s Rio games by swimming the 200, 400, and 800 freestyles in a single Olympics. She is also the first active college athlete to win since UConn basketball player Rebecca Lobo in 1995.

“It’s a really great history of women swimmers and freestylers,” she told AP. “I really look up to a lot of those women.”

The 20-year-old Stanford sophomore got her start in swimming at age 6 because she wanted to make friends. Over the years, she has spent time training at Michael Phelps’ alma mater, the North Baltimore Aquatic Club in Mt. Washington. Now, she is one of the most decorated American female swimmers in history and is favored to win big at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

Despite the pressure of living in a performance-driven and results-driven world, Ledecky enjoys her journey from start to finish and always puts in her best effort.

She is remaining levelheaded and trying to enjoy a normal college experience—living in dorms, swimming with friends, and trying to decide on a major.

“Just being in the college environment has kind of added another layer of fun,” she said. “Being with teammates and working toward NCAA championships and having that team goal, that’s another thing that is fun. I know the four years goes by very quickly and I want to do everything I can to prepare.”

And he wasn’t quite done. On Thursday night, Kim reached based three more times, going 2-for-3 with a walk and an RBI to raise his average to .308 for the year. His biggest moment came in the seventh inning, when he grounded a ball into right field, driving in Michael Bourn from second to give the Orioles a 3-0 lead.

The Orioles moved into a tie for the first AL Wild Card spot and last night’s win eliminated the Yankees from the playoffs altogether. We’re not sure about you, but that makes us want to mimic Kim’s dance moves in this amazing Korean music video.

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Joe Flacco has fourth baby, and first daughter.
Maybe it’s just us, but it seems like the Flacco family is having kids at the same rate Joe was throwing consecutive completions on Sunday. And on Tuesday at 2:19 p.m., they added another one to the clan—but this time it was a baby girl. Joe and Dana welcomed Evelyn Renee to join brothers Stephen (4), Daniel (3), and Francis (1).

“It was definitely different. Seeing a girl come out after three boys was a bit of a shock,” Joe told BaltimoreRavens.com. “Everybody is beyond overjoyed, beyond pumped.” During every pregnancy, the couple has waited to find out the sex of their baby. “I was keeping my fingers crossed,” Joe said. “You hear fathers getting scared about not having boys, but I was starting to get to the point that I was scared about not having a little girl. It’s just something I wanted.” Congrats to the Flacco family on the new addition!

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Arnold Palmer had many Baltimore connections.
Legendary golfer Arnold Palmer passed away on Sunday at age 87 and The Sun‘s Don Markus chronicled Palmer’s various connections to Baltimore over the years. Markus recounted that Palmer earned his first professional win in the 1956 Eastern Invitations Open at Mt. Pleasant, played for more than 1,000 people in 1972 at the Pine Ridge Golf Course for a charity event, and made his last public appearance five years ago for a Maryland Special Olympics fundraiser at Martin’s West.

“I love Baltimore,” Palmer told The Sun prior to that 2011 event. “I think it’s one of the great cities in America. I’m big on the seafood.”

Another fun piece of trivia is that the iced tea/lemonade hybrid drink named after Palmer was rumored to be first invented at a local pub here in town.

“[People at the next table] asked what he was drinking, and he said, ‘Half iced tea and half lemonade,’ and she said ‘That sounds, great, what do you call it?,” PR executive David Nevins told The Sun. “Arnie said, ‘It doesn’t have a name, it’s just that she ran out of ice tea when she was pouring it. The woman said, ‘I’m going to order the same thing and call it ‘The Arnold Palmer.’ From that day on, it caught fire.”

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Barack Obama talks about the “Phelps face.”
Thursday was Team USA Day at the White House and many of the American Olympians who competed in Rio were present, including Bethesda’s Katie Ledecky and Clarkesville native and Paralympian Tatyana McFadden. President Barack Obama gave a speech in which he discussed specific accomplishments of the athletes and a couple of Marylanders got a shout-out. First he talked about Ledecky’s phenomenal swimming performance.

“Then then there’s this young woman named Katie Ledecky,” Obama said. “She obliterates her own records in the 400- and 800-freestyle, and lapped the field in the 800. Did you watch it on TV? Like there was nobody else in the pool. Crazy!”

A few minutes later, President Obama mentioned Michael Phelps, who wasn’t in attendance, presumably still at the Ryder Cup in Minnesota. (I guess the White House is old hat at this point.)

“Michael Phelps became the greatest Olympian of all time, breaking a 2,000-year-old record for most individual titles,” Obama said. “If you’re breaking a 2,000-year record, that’s pretty impressive. If they have to go back to the Greeks, that’s an impressive record.”

The President—on stage with First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, and Paralympic soccer player Josh Brunais—went on for 15 minutes about how proud he is of Team USA before cracking just one more joke.

“I could talk about this forever,” he said. “But if I keep going longer, I could get ‘Phelps Face’ from you guys.”

“The young bucks brought tears to our eyes,” Phelps told the Today Show. “I was trying to hold back as much as I could. Nathan started shedding tears, then Ryan was shedding tears. Being a part of the 400-free relay has been a dream of mine. I’ve been on the good side and bad side of it. I was happy we could win that relay as a team.”

Phelps admitted that having his 3-month-old son, Boomer, in the audience while he won his 19th gold medal, made the experience “a lot more emotional.”

“I tried to look for him up there and, when I finally found him, he was asleep,” he said with a laugh. “Hopefully we was awake during the race but, if not, I can play it for him when he’s a bit older. It’s just an inspiration to have him here.”

Kalisz and Phelps, of course, have their training at the North Baltimore Aquatic Club in Mt. Washington to thank. Kalisz has trained at the NBAC since 2000—and, more recently, in Scottsdale, Arizona—with mentor Phelps and coach Bob Bowman. In a 2013 interview, he talked about how rewarding that experience has been.

“Training at NBAC with the greatest swimmer of all time has been probably the best environment for me,” said Kalisz, pictured, clearly enjoying himself in Rio.

“I’ve always dreamed about racing and swimming with him. I never thought that would happen to me.”

Phelps’s work in Rio isn’t done yet. On Tuesday night, he’ll swim the men’s 200-meter fly, on Thursday he’ll swim the 200-meter IM he finishes up on Friday night with his signature 100-meter butterfly.