Last year, Summer McIntosh turned in a performance for the ages at the Canadian swimming trials in Victoria, winning all five of her events and becoming the first swimmer to break three individual world records at the same meet since Michael Phelps during his legendary eight-gold-medal performance at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
McIntosh’s feat is even more impressive when you recall the details. Over a span of just five days, the then 18-year-old phenom seized the 400-metre freestyle world record from reigning Olympic champion Ariarne Titmus, lowered her own record in the women’s 400m individual medley by about three quarters of a second, and broke nine-time world champion Katinka Hosszu’s decade-old mark in the 200m IM.
And her non-world-record swims may have been just as impressive. McIntosh came within a second of nine-time Olympic gold medallist Katie Ledecky’s mark in the 800m freestyle — a distance she did not even swim at the 2024 Olympics. And she was less than a half second away from taking down the oldest women’s swimming world record on the books: Liu Zige’s 200m butterfly standard from 2009, during the ludicrous super-suit era.
“This has probably been the best meet of my career,” said McIntosh, who a year earlier had won a Canadian-record three gold medals plus a silver in her four solo events at the Paris Olympics.
And it probably was. For about a minute. Because, a couple months later in Singapore, McIntosh had arguably the best world championships ever by a female swimmer, winning four gold medals and a bronze. Though she fell just short of her audacious bid to match Phelps’ record of five individual golds in a single worlds (set in 2007), McIntosh joined Ledecky as the only women to win four solo golds and bettered Swedish star Sarah Sjostrom’s five-medal haul in 2019, which included only one gold. McIntosh’s only defeat, if you can even truly call it that, came in the 800m freestyle, which she only began training for a few months earlier in a bold attempt to challenge Ledecky at the American superstar’s signature distance.
Swimming Trials Preview: Summer McIntosh sched overview, fly vacancy, Rivard & Routliffe return
So, what do you do for an encore to all that? Well, if you’re Summer McIntosh, you set an even more ambitious goal — to capture five individual gold medals at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. That’s how many Phelps won in 2008, and it would break the (dubious) women’s Olympic record of four set by East Germany’s Kristin Otto in 1988.
To that end, McIntosh is now working with legendary coach Bob Bowman — the man who trained Phelps — on the University of Texas campus, where quadruple Olympic men’s gold medallist Leon Marchand of France is also part of the star-studded training group. Though she’s been in Bowman’s camp for less than a year, McIntosh, who turns 20 this August, told CBC Sports’ Devin Heroux this spring that her work with the famously exacting coach is already paying off.
“I’ve grown and matured as a person and I think I’ve also put myself out there and I’ve put myself in situations where I feel very out of my comfort zone,” she said. “There’s definitely no days off. And I think this is the first program where it’s really felt like that.”
‘No days off’: Summer McIntosh settles into new training environment with famed coach Bob Bowman
Considering all she’s accomplished already, it’s scary to imagine how good McIntosh might be in L.A. after two more years of training with Bowman. And they are laser-focused on those Olympics, treating every competition before then (even the major ones) as an opportunity to help McIntosh reach her absolute peak in July 2028. “Everything we’re doing is hopefully putting the pieces of the puzzle together for L.A.,” Bowman said.
With no world championships this year (the next one happens in July 2027) McIntosh’s priority meet of the summer is the Pan Pacific championships in California in mid-August. The Pan Pacs are the rest of the world’s answer to the European championships and feature swimming powerhouses Australia and the United States.
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But before that comes the Canadian trials, beginning this Sunday in Montreal. McIntosh will swim “only” four events this time: the 200m butterfly, 400m freestyle, and the 200m and 400m individual medleys.
Those are the four events that McIntosh won gold in at last year’s world championships. Her bronze event, the 800m freestyle, is out for now as she continues the process of figuring out what her fifth event will be at the L.A. Olympics.
After the incredible show she put on last year in Victoria, Canadian fans might be expecting more such fireworks from McIntosh in Montreal. Could she break three world records again? Four? With Summer, even the most outrageous outcomes seem possible. And she seems to get better and better every time she gets in the pool.
On the other hand, this is a different year, in a different pool, and McIntosh now has different priorities with a different coach, who has a different plan. That’s a lot of differences! So who really knows.
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But, just to get some idea of what might be in store, we thought it would be fun to reach out to our friends at Shoreview Sports Analytics to forecast Summer’s chances of breaking more records at these trials.
You might remember that Shoreview’s statistical model gave us a pretty good idea of what to expect in the two McIntosh vs. Ledecky showdowns at last year’s world championships. So, they figured they’d stick with the same system, which involves simulating thousands of performances based on prior trends and physiological assumptions, to arrive at a predicted time and a percentage chance that Summer will break the world record in each of her events. The simulations are based on her previous times at the Olympics, world championships and Canadian trials.
Here’s what they came up with after crunching the numbers (the gold-highlighted lines indicate McIntosh currently holds the world record in that event):
And, for the real nerds, here is the predicted time distribution for each of Summer’s four events, showing where she’s most likely to land along with some of the less-probable tail outcomes.
As you can see in those handy visuals, a world-record performance is (almost by definition) an outlier — even for an athlete as great as McIntosh. But, with four kicks at the can, it works out to better than a coin-flip chance that she nabs at least one. And, knowing Summer, it might not be a bad idea to take the over.
You can watch the entire Canadian swimming trials live on CBC Gem and the CBC Sports website from Sunday through Thursday. Preliminary races begin at 9:30 a.m. ET and the finals at 5:30 p.m. ET each day. Here’s the full schedule and results.
