Summer McIntosh ripped her hat off and began celebrating, punching the air, pointing to her family and breaking into the smile that is going to become forever entwined with the Olympic Games over the next decade. As she did so, soaking up the moment, she barely seemed to notice that some of her rivals in the 400m medley final were still finishing the race.
The 17-year-old could well be the next phenomenon of Olympic sport, a figure to rival Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps in popularity. She is already the present and future of swimming , and this dominant performance, winning her first Olympic gold medal, was just the start with three more individual events to come.
It was clear from the roar on her entrance to La Defense Arena that the crowd had come to coronate the new queen of the pool. McIntosh emerged laser focused, staring at her start block, and went into her routine. She pinned her goggles to her face and splashed water over her body. Then she stood beside her block, glugged in a couple of breaths and crouched into position.
She was in the lead by 25 metres of the first stroke, the butterfly, and turned into the backstroke with a 1.35sec lead over American 18-year-old, Katie Grimes. That lead was 1.56sec when they started the breaststroke, and a couple of years ago that might have been an opportunity for her rivals. But McIntosh has turned her weakness into a strength, and she raced away from the field.
McIntosh has hardly been hiding. She is the world record holder and this is, remarkably, her second Olympics after she appeared in Tokyo aged 14 and set a national record in the 400m freestyle. In the summer of 2022 she established herself as not just a bundle of potential but one of the best swimmers in the world, still only 15, with Commonwealth and World Championship gold medals in medley and butterfly.
She soon moved from Canada to Florida to train with renowned coach Bret Arkey, and he structured her daily “grind”, as she calls it. Instead of specialising at an early stage as most swimmers tend to do, Arkey and McIntosh worked hard on all four disciplines with particular attention to her supposed weakness, the breaststroke. That versatility kept training more varied and interesting.
Prodigious talent requires a blend of nature and nurture and McIntosh’s mum, Jill Horstead, can take plenty of credit for both. Horstead was an Olympic swimmer in the same events and won a Commonwealth bronze medal at Edinburgh 1986. She too was thrust into high-calibre races at a young age, and has now raised two athletes: older sister Brooke is a competitive pair skater, and McIntosh hugged them both as soon as she had the gold medal around her neck.
Horstead now spends most of her time in Florida supporting Summer. “My mum is the absolute best and I think she just gets swimming on such a high level compared to most other parents,” McIntosh said recently. “On a day-to-day basis, she’s always cooking and cleaning and helping me through training because I’m always eating, just to get enough calories. She really gets the day-to-day grind, and is always there to support me if I have a bad race or a bad practice. She just gets it on such a next level.”
Her talent has long been the talk of the swimming world. The only question left was whether McIntosh could produce the same fast times on the Olympic stage, where the pressure is highest, where expectation comes from 15,000 screaming fans and 40 million Canadians watching on, an inescapable pressure that appears in every press conference, in every interview.
Up to now she has leant into the clamour, signing lucrative commercial deals with Red Bull, Tag Heur and swimwear brands. Her 134k Instagram following will have blown up by the end of these Games, if not by the end of this article after her first gold. The attention has not fazed her so far in her short career, and she embraced it here.
There is still the 400m freestyle, 200m butterfly (in which she is a double world champion) and 200m individual medley to come. There might be three or four more Games to come too, if she desires. Swimming has a new superstar in Summer McIntosh, and her Olympic legacy has only just begun.
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