Summer McIntosh is the world’s best women’s swimmer. At Pan Pacs, she hopes for new heights
IRVINE, Calif. — When Canadian Olympic swimmer Summer McIntosh began training with the University of Texas pro group following the 2025 world championships, Bob Bowman wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The longtime coach, best known for his work with 28-time Olympic medalist Michael Phelps, quickly discovered the same qualities that have been lauded by those who have been around McIntosh for years.At 19, she is businesslike. She wants feedback. She’s constantly looking for tiny ways to improve. All of it has transformed her into one of the most dominant, versatile swimmers in the world.“I knew she’d train hard, but wow,” Bowman said. “She’s more serious than I am, and that’s pretty serious.”This week, the Toronto native will compete at the Pan Pacific Swimming Championships in Irvine, her first major international meet under Bowman’s tutelage. She’ll go head to head against many of the top swimmers from the U.S., Australia and Japan and will look to bolster a resume that already includes four Olympic medals (three golds), eight long-course world championship golds and four world records.“It’s such a gift to witness it,” said Brittany MacLean Campbell, a 2016 Olympic bronze medalist for Canada and now an analyst for CBC. “And if I could fully understand it, I would have been a better swimmer.”Pan Pacs also carries family connections. McIntosh’s mom, Jill, is a former Canadian Olympian who won bronze in the 200-meter butterfly at the 1985 Pan Pacs, one of her two international medals (the other being at the 1986 Commonwealth Games). That, as well as the meet being about an hour’s drive from the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic venue, adds extra layers of excitement for McIntosh. She said she’s “been working towards Pan Pacs for a long time now.”All that effort, she hopes, has put her in position to peak this week.That’s a good sign for her national team. Said John Atkinson, Swimming Canada’s high performance director and national coach: “You can’t put a limit on what she can achieve.”Though McIntosh’s mom was a swimmer, Summer and her older sister Brooke were given plenty of athletic options growing up. The 21-year-old Brooke took to figure skating, competing in the sport until 2025.Summer skated as a kid, too, and Brooke said that when her sister stopped around age 9, “she was better than me.” Not bad, considering Brooke went on to represent Canada at the World Junior Championships and Winter Youth Olympics. But for as talented as Summer might’ve been, some of the traits that make her an excellent swimmer held her back on skates.“She dives in the pool and just goes 110 percent all the time,” Brooke said. “Sometimes you can’t really do that in skating. You’ve gotta have some control to it. She couldn’t really grasp that part of it.”Plus, Summer didn’t like the judging aspect. In swimming, she didn’t have to deal with that. All racing comes down to is touching the wall first, and as McIntosh did that more and more, she started drawing eyes across Canada.MacLean Campbell came up through the Etobicoke Swim Club, just as McIntosh did after her. In the years after the 2016 Olympics, MacLean Campbell occasionally popped by practices. She remembers standing behind the blocks one day as her former coach, the late Kevin Thorburn, excitedly pointed out an 11-year-old McIntosh cutting through the water.“He was bragging to me about all the times she was hitting,” MacLean Campbell recalled. “‘How cool is this? This is what she was able to do in this set that you used to do! I can’t believe she’s so young!'”Before long, people far outside Canada knew she was coming. At 14, she made the Tokyo Olympics, which were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Though she narrowly missed the podium, finishing fourth in both the 400-meter freestyle and 4×200-meter freestyle relay, she established herself as one of the brightest young swimmers in the world. And the experience, in her eyes, was invaluable. She got a sense of how international meets work behind the scenes — going through the processes of media and drug testing, for example — and “was like a sponge” observing her idols on deck.“Being 19, looking at my 14-year-old self, I couldn’t be more proud of what I did,” she said. “I couldn’t care less about not having a medal there. That was, I think, the perfect scenario. Not getting that medal just left me so much hungrier into the following year.”That hunger propelled her to the top of her sport. Two golds at worlds the next summer. Two more in 2023. Then, finally, a massive showing at the 2024 Olympics: golds in the 200-meter butterfly, 200-meter individual medley and 400-meter IM, plus a silver in the 400-meter freestyle. The meet showcased two of McIntosh’s greatest strengths: her versatility and her penchant for rising to the occasion. MacLean Campbell says she could probably “be world-class in double-digit events” if meet schedules allowed for it.By the end of the Paris Games, McIntosh was known around Canada. MacLean Campbell said that while she makes sure to say swimmers’ full names when talking to non-niche fans in Canada, with McIntosh, “Summer” suffices.In December 2024, a few months after the Olympics, McIntosh was back in the Toronto area, shopping at a mall. Suddenly she noticed a police officer approaching her. She grew nervous. Had she accidentally done something wrong?No. The cop had recognized her and wanted to say hello.McIntosh doesn’t like the word “sacrifice.” When she was a little younger, she sometimes viewed what she gave up for swimming that way: Seeing her friends less often or going to school in person, for example. But not nowadays.“It’s just the steps I have to take to be able to reach the goals I want to do,” McIntosh said.Moving away from family — from Toronto to Sarasota, Fla., for training in 2022 — is an exception. “That is truly a sacrifice,” she said. But forgoing parts of a standard 19-year-old’s life? That’s just part of the deal.Whether considered sacrifices or necessary steps, her decisions have led to major accomplishments. Last summer, she won four individual golds at world championships, and she picked up a bronze in the 800-meter freestyle, an event she says she contested to “just get out of my comfort zone.” Most recently, at Canadian Swimming Trials in July, she won the 200-meter butterfly in 2:01.65, breaking Liu Zige’s 2009 world record — the longest-standing record in women’s swimming and the last from the “super suit” era that saw scores of records fall. She raised her fist and slapped the water in excitement.An illness forced McIntosh to withdraw from the end of trials — she says she’s fine going into Pan Pacs — but her world record at least gave her home crowd an enduring memory. McIntosh’s reflections on the race offer insight into her mindset. She’s happy with the swim, but she also can watch it back and believe she could start the race a little faster, speed up her turns and maybe even improve the way she moves underwater off walls.To McIntosh, the impracticality of perfection isn’t discouraging. It guarantees she always has something to work toward.Her move to Texas is the latest step in that process. She read Phelps’ books and dreamed of training under Bowman, who runs the Longhorns’ men’s team and pro group. Now she trains daily with the likes of Léon Marchand, Simone Manuel, Regan Smith and Hubert Kós, all Olympic gold medalists.“There isn’t a single thing at practice that she doesn’t excel at, which is really cool, because I think a lot of swimmers have their specialties,” says Smith, who takes credit for sparking McIntosh’s recent interest in reading. “You can kind of count on her to be A+ at anything we do.”McIntosh is set to race the 200-meter freestyle (Wednesday), 400-meter individual medley (Thursday), 400-meter freestyle (Friday) and 200-meter individual medley (Saturday) at the Pan Pacific Championships, she told CBC. That means she’ll scratch Wednesday’s 200-meter butterfly — the event she’s already set a world record in this summer — to focus on the 200 freestyle, the only of these five events in which she isn’t the current world-record holder, on the first day of the meet. That race could end up being her fifth individual event at the 2028 Olympics, so a fully rested race should provide a valuable data point as the Los Angeles Games creep closer. And another showdown with American star Katie Ledecky awaits in the 400 freestyle.Given her trials performance and the fact that she’s fully rested, McIntosh seems primed for a big meet in Irvine and is hoping to set personal best times.And when the 19-year-old sets best times, it usually means heights no other swimmer has ever reached.This article originally appeared in The Athletic.Olympics, Global Sports, Women's Olympics2026 The Athletic Media Company
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