Summer McIntosh looks back on her earliest memory of competitive swimming and can’t help but laugh. She was maybe seven years old, it was her first real swim meet and she sank like a stone.
“I remember in one of my races, I dove into the pool and I literally went straight to the bottom,” she says.
“Like, all the way down.”
A lot has happened in the decade since then. And certainly, no one is laughing now.
McIntosh heads to the Paris Olympics as one of the world’s top swimmers, a generational talent and a four-time world champion who could contend for as many as five or six medals. At 17, she may be the greatest swimmer Canada has ever produced.
Summer McIntosh (centre) reacts after Penny Oleksiak anchored the women’s 4 x 200m freestyle relay final at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. Team Canada finished fourth.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Her ascension began three years ago, when she made the Canadian team as a 14-year-old and narrowly missed the podium, coming in fourth in the 400-metre freestyle at the Tokyo Olympics. It was a hint of things to come.
The past few years have seen her set two world records – one has since been eclipsed – and precedents that would have been unthinkable in Canadian swimming even a decade ago.
At a meet in Florida in February, she clocked the world’s fastest time this season in the 800m freestyle – one of the sport’s most gruelling races. In doing so, she handed American Katie Ledecky, widely considered the best female swimmer in history, her first loss in more than 13 years at that distance.
But that wasn’t even the most stunning part.
When McIntosh arrived at Canadian trials in May, where swimmers compete for spots in the Olympics, she decided not to even qualify for the 800 in Paris. Despite owning the fastest time on the planet over the past year, she’ll be sitting that one out.
It’s a strategic decision. In Paris, the 800 falls on the same day as the 200m medley, one of her signature events and a highly technical race that involves all four strokes: freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke and butterfly. So she and her coaches had to pick: One energy-depleting, muscle-burning race or the other. But not both. McIntosh would be better served by rest, rather than risk burning herself out in one day.
Of all the opponents McIntosh has stared down over the past three years, quite possibly the only one she couldn’t beat was the schedule maker in Paris.
As problems go, it’s a good one to have though. Canadian swimming has never had the luxury of holding a world’s-best swimmer out of a race. But that was before McIntosh.
She’s a precision freestyler, elite at the butterfly and a talented backstroker when it comes to the medleys. Arguably, there was a time when the breaststroke might have been her weakness. But she went to work last year and fixed that.
“We’ve never had anybody at this level,” says Brent Hayden, who won bronze for Canada at the London Olympics in 2012 and swam alongside McIntosh in Tokyo.
“I don’t think we’ve seen somebody this good in that many events, ever.”
After winning the 400m freestyle at Canada's Olympic Swim Trials in May, Summer McIntosh smiles as she leaves the pool deck.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
Heavy workload
Despite trimming her race schedule, McIntosh will still have one of the heaviest workloads that a Canadian swimmer has ever attempted at an Olympics. She will swim four individual events; the 200m and 400m medleys, the 200m butterfly and the 400m freestyle, all middle-distance and endurance races. She will also be a crucial member of the relay teams.
Between heats, semi-finals and finals, McIntosh will race 10 times in nine days, plus a few more relays, depending on how many races she’s needed for in the team events. All told, she’ll swim about three kilometres in Paris, under the highest pressure of her career so far.
McIntosh does not appear fazed by all the time she’ll be spending in the pool. The past Olympics, and the many international events since then, have taught her how to better prepare, she says.
After the 2022 World Championships, where she won gold in the 200m butterfly, gold in the 400m medley, silver in the 400m freestyle, and helped the relay team to bronze in the 4x200, McIntosh said she left feeling “superexhausted.”
Since then, she’s put more work into how she recovers from race to race – eating, resting, flushing out the lactic acid to help her muscles recharge, mentally refocusing and so forth. Learning how to bounce back is how McIntosh says she’s evolved the most since her Olympic debut in 2021.
“Being able to manage that and feeling fresh is something that has really taken a lot of skill set and effort,” she says. “It kind of comes back to how I manage myself in between races.”
The stories of her work ethic and her ability to withstand back-to-back races are almost apocryphal.
At the Commonwealth Games in 2022, McIntosh won silver in the 400m freestyle, narrowly missing gold by 0.09 seconds.
She then spent about five minutes cooling down in the nearby diving tank, before immediately jumping back into the competition pool to anchor Canada in the women’s 4x100 medley relay.
With almost no rest, she helped Canada win silver. In the last leg, McIntosh (53.33 seconds) was less than a second behind Mollie O’Callaghan (52.38), the two-time reigning world champion in the 100m freestyle.
It was less of a swim than a feat of strength.
“She’s a little bit fearless,” says Mary-Sophie Harvey, one of her teammates. “She just goes out, goes as hard as she can and then, like, holds on.”
At the Canadian Olympic trials in May, Harvey swam against McIntosh in the 200m freestyle and finished second.
Though the clock would later reveal Harvey had swum one of the fastest races of her life, she knew mid-race that things were going extremely well. Why? When she glanced over in the next lane, she could still see McIntosh ahead of her.
“I was like, oh my gosh, I can see her feet – that must be good.”
High pressure
McIntosh heads into her second Olympics in a much different headspace than before. Three years ago, she was the youngest Canadian athlete in Tokyo. The expectations weren’t as high. The spotlight is shining a lot brighter now.
“Even the fact that I made the Olympic team was still such a shock to me,” she says.
“But having that experience at such a young age was awesome. I mean, I know in some ways what to expect when it comes to an Olympic Games now.”
Just how good she can be is an open question – and one that resonates far beyond Canada.
“I have really big goals for Paris, which is just reaching my full potential – whatever that is,” she says.
McIntosh will face Australian superstar Ariarne Titmus, who is six years older and the defending champion in the 400m freestyle.
In a sign of what may come, McIntosh eclipsed the Australian’s world record in Toronto this spring, in a time of 3:56.08. Four months later, Titmus took it back, lowering the mark to 3:55.38.
In Australia, her emergence has conjured more worry than amazement: “Meet the teen who could topple Titmus,” a headline in the Sydney Morning Herald read. Another dubbed her “The Canadian teen chasing Michael Phelps who can break Australian hearts.”
Summer McIntosh waves after winning the women's 400m individual medley final in Fukuoka.STEFAN WERMUTH/Reuters
McIntosh insists the number of eyes on her heading into Paris doesn’t bother her.
“I don’t think about it too much to be honest, because it doesn’t really have an effect on me,” McIntosh says.
“No matter how many or how little, I have the same mentality as I did at 14. Just go out there and do my best and have lot of confidence in my training and in my coaches and in my support staff.”
The pressure bearing down on McIntosh at these Olympics will be unmatched by any other Canadian athlete. When Penny Oleksiak exploded on the scene with four medals as a 16-year-old at the Rio Olympics in 2016, her arrival caught much of Canada and the world off guard. But McIntosh arrives in France without that same element of surprise, and a lot of anticipation of what she might accomplish.
If she finds the podium in her four individual races, and goes on to win a relay or two, McIntosh would match or set the record for medals won by a Canadian at a single Olympics. The current mark is held by speed skater Cindy Klassen, who won five at the 2006 Winter Games, at the age of 26.
Bracing for the biggest meet of her life, McIntosh leans on those closest to her – her parents and her sister – to help manage the pressure. And speed runs in the family.
Her mother, Jill Horstead, competed for Canada at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games, placing ninth in the 200m butterfly. She also won bronze in the same event at the 1985 Pan Pacific Championships, and again at the 1986 Commonwealth Games.
It’s a bond they share. In May, swimming in her mom’s event, McIntosh had the world’s fastest time this season. Her time of 2:04.33 was more than nine seconds ahead of Horstead’s race in Los Angeles, where she touched the wall in 2:13.49.
“My mom just really understands sports on such a deep level,” McIntosh says. “Her understanding of me, along with my sister and my father, has been really helpful for sure. Being able to understand what I’m going through, no matter the circumstance, and always being there to support me, is kind of really what has kept me going.”
McIntosh has faced pre-Olympic adversity before. Her coach Kevin Thorburn died a year before the Tokyo Games, then her father was diagnosed with throat cancer, which he has since come through.
Older sister Brooke, 19, is a Canadian pairs figure skater. During the pandemic, McIntosh uprooted her training from Toronto to Florida to train with coach Brent Arckey, a medley specialist in Sarasota. The move has meant Summer and Brooke have less time to catch up. When they do, they try not to dwell on what’s going on at the pool or on the ice.
“We don’t really talk about our sports at all,” McIntosh says. “We are just chatting about shopping, or a new TV show we’re watching, things like that. It’s kind of nice to have that kind of breather.”
Narrow margins
Taking a breather is not something McIntosh is known for.
For the past year, her coaches have been focusing on how to walk the line of keeping her primed for as many big events as possible in Paris, without burning her out.
When the entry sheets were posted two weeks ago, listing which swimmers would compete, they revealed McIntosh had opted out of the 200m freestyle.
She won bronze in the event at last year’s world championships and is a threat for a medal. But in June, both Titmus and O’Callaghan simultaneously set the world record at Australia’s Olympic trials, solidifying their death-grip over that particular race.
So McIntosh and her coaches made another calculated decision: Similar to having her sit out the 800m freestyle, removing her from the 200 freestyle would afford her precious time to concentrate on the 400m individual medley, a more specialized race that is both mentally and physically taxing, and an event she has won two world championships in.
Though McIntosh looked like she might attempt five individual medals in Paris a few months ago, she will now go for four, in addition to the relays she will be called upon to swim.
“The margins at the very, very top are very narrow,” said John Atkinson, high-performance director and national coach at Swimming Canada.
“It’s not always the fastest swimmer who wins at the Olympic Games, it’s the one who can continue to perform and recover from race to race, and still be as good on day nine as they were on day one. And that’s a very difficult ask.”
Hayden, a three-time Olympian who swam for Canada at the age of 37 in Tokyo, is confident McIntosh can handle the workload and the pressure.
“She’s got such an amazing head on her shoulders and she’s so talented. But she also has a work ethic that goes along with it,” he said.
Mark Tewksbury, who won gold in the 100m backstroke in 1992 Olympics, sees comparisons between McIntosh and two-time medley gold medalist Alex Baumann, who was so elite he would often be racing himself, using that as his measure for success.
“I would imagine that Summer is just wanting to beat Summer. That’s where her head is,” Tewksbury said. “She’s in that very rarified field.”
It’s not that Canada hasn’t churned out world-class swimmers before. The likes of Baumann, Tewksbury, Victor Davis, Elaine Tanner, Anne Ottenbrite, Curtis Myden, Ryan Cochrane, Marianne Limpert, Maggie Mac Neil, Oleksiak and others, are a testament to that.
But this could be different.
Hayden saw it first-hand when he got in the pool at Canada’s training camp before Tokyo.
One of the quickest sprinters to ever swim for Canada, Hayden likes to warm up with a fast 50m tilt to get his muscles firing. It isn’t full speed, but he’s also not holding much back.
“So I’m pushing myself pretty hard on this 50, and I take a breath to my left and there’s this 14-year-old girl who’s right there with me. I’m like, I’ve never seen this before. I’ve never seen a 14-year-old girl staying with me like this,” Hayden recalls.
“I was blowing everybody else out of the water,” he says. “But she was just right there. And I don’t think she was trying as hard as me.”
He shakes his head thinking back to his first real glimpse of McIntosh. The kind you only get going up against her.
“I was like, okay, that is special.”