Canada swim star Summer McIntosh primed to take worlds by storm
Summer McIntosh of Canada celebrates as she poses with her medal after winning the women's 200m at the Paris Olympics.
LOS ANGELES – Three world records in five days put Summer McIntosh in rare company and now the 18-year-old Canadian swimming sensation is primed to take the world championships by storm.
McIntosh won three gold medals at the Paris Olympics last year and then broke three world records in a breathtaking performance at the Canadian trials in June.
The teenager is the first swimmer to set world records in three different individual events since Michael Phelps did it on the way to his glittering eight-gold haul at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
'Absolutely wild,' McIntosh said of the accomplishment in an interview with Canadian broadcaster CBC.
Then she promptly pointed to a litany of things she could improve on in each race, saying the self-criticism is part of her mission to keep testing the boundaries of her sport.
'I don't think there is such a thing as a perfect race, at least I haven't done it yet,' she said ahead of the world championships in Singapore starting on Sunday.
'There's room for more and that's what keeps me going. And I'm also still so young, I have so much more to achieve and I know I can get so much stronger.'
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That competitive spirit runs deep in the McIntosh family.
Her mother Jill competed at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics in swimming and older sister Brooke is a top pairs figure skater who won bronze in 2022 at the world junior championships.
'We're very competitive. This is really in our blood,' Brooke once said.
McIntosh's rapid journey to the pinnacle of swimming has taken her from Canada to Florida, where she trained with the Sarasota Sharks from 2022 and through the Paris Games.
After the world championships she will begin training with Phelps's mentor Bob Bowman in Texas, as she builds toward the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.
In the meantime she has been training since January with French coach Fred Vergnoux and his group in Antibes, crediting his contribution to 'the best meet of my career' despite the relatively brief association.
'I've gone way faster than I ever could have imagined,' she said.
At the Canadian trials in Victoria she smashed the 400m freestyle world record with a time of 3min 54.18sec, regaining a mark she had lost to Australian Ariarne Titmus.
She also broke the decade-old 200m individual medley world mark and lowered her own 400m medley world record. In between she threatened Katie Ledecky's latest 800m free world mark on the way to the third-fastest time in history.
She also clocked the second-fastest 200m butterfly ever, edging toward the record set by China's Liu Zige in 2009.
McIntosh launched her Olympic career in 2021 in Tokyo, where at 14 she was the youngest member of the Canadian team.
She didn't win a medal but in Paris last summer she took gold in the 200m butterfly, 200m medley and 400m medley, and claimed silver in the 400m free.
In Singapore she's expanding her program to include the 800m free and another mouthwatering showdown with Ledecky – one of the swimmers she idolized as a youngster.
Now that she has established herself among swimming's elite, McIntosh has no trouble finding new motivation.
'I always want more,' she said. AFP
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