Canadian women are on a hot streak. Sarah Polley won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards. Aaliyah Edwards and Laeticia Amihere led their college teams deep into the NCAA March Madness tournament. Canada’s national women’s soccer team is currently ranked fourth in the world standings.
And the latest Canadian woman to make her mark on the international stage is swimmer Summer McIntosh. Over the weekend, the sixteen-year-old McIntosh set two world records at the Canadian swimming trials in Toronto. She set a world record in the 400-metre freestyle and the 400-metre individual medley. The individual medley required McIntosh to swim four separate strokes–backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly and freestyle.
McIntosh is now the first swimmer to hold the world record for these 400-metre events simultaneously. That makes McIntosh the world’s greatest middle-distance swimmer.
The Ontario-borne McIntosh is now vying with seven-time Olympic medalist Penny Oleksiak as Canada’s best swimmer.
Alberta has produced our share of top swimmers. Red Deer’s Rebecca Smith won a silver medal as part of the Canadian team in the 4×100 m freestyle relay at the 2020 Summer Olympics. Edmonton’s Graham Smith also won a silver medal in the men’s 4×100-metre medley relay at the 1976 Summer Olympics.
This isn’t the first time McIntosh has excelled. At 14, she was the youngest athlete on Canada’s Olympic team in Tokyo in 2020. She almost broke through, finishing fourth in two finals.
Fast forward two years, and now McIntosh is setting the pace.
After setting five records at the recent Canadian swimming trials, McIntosh put on one of the most memorable performances in Canadian national swimming history. McIntosh smashed two world records and lowered her own world junior and Canadian records in the 100-metre butterfly and the 200-metre individual medley.
McIntosh didn’t have the luxury of being paced by other world-class swimmers in her two record-setting races. When she touched the wall to set the record, she was so far out in front of her competitors that she may as well have been swimming alone.
She rewrote the Canadian and world junior record books in all five of her events. It was a spectacular performance.
Swimming Canada chose McIntosh as the female swimmer of 2022 because of her medal haul at the Commonwealth Games and FINA world championships. In July, she will lead the Canadian team at the world championships in Fukuoka, Japan.
With the Paris Olympics just sixteen months away, McIntosh just became the leading contender to be the face of Canada’s Olympic team. She is the odds-on favourite to be our country’s flag bearer at the opening ceremony in Paris.
The next few years will be a wild ride for the sixteen-year-old. Until now, she’s been the young upstart; now, she has become the target.
We’ll be cheering for you, Summer.
