Summer McIntosh, the happy teenager and GOAT candidate who broke swimming’s untouchable world record
Summer McIntosh is no stranger to setting world records at the Canadian Swimming Trials.
She did it for the first time in 2023, putting her name on the women’s 400m freestyle mark. Days later, she claimed the world record in the 400m individual medley.
In 2024, before going on to win three Olympic gold medals that summer, she lowered the 400m IM record again. In 2025, she took back the world record in the 400m freestyle and then broke the 10-year-old global mark in the 200m individual medley before re-setting the 400m IM record one more time.
But this past Sunday night in Montreal, she finally got the one world record she “always dreamed of as a kid”.
READ: Summer McIntosh erases oldest women’s swimming world record
The 200m butterfly was the last remaining event in which McIntosh is an Olympic and/or world champion in which she wasn’t the fastest ever. That world record had belonged to China’s Liu Zige since October 2009. Her time of 2:01.81 was set in a year when 66 world records were broken—the most in any calendar year.
It came at the end of the so-called “super suit era”, when swimmers were wearing full bodysuits made of polyurethane that helped them ride higher in the water and thus go faster. In July 2009, the international governing body FINA (now known as World Aquatics) announced that as of January 1, 2010, non-textile suits would be banned and they could cover no lower than the knee.
In the years that followed, no one had come closer to breaking Liu’s mark than McIntosh. At the 2025 World Aquatics Championships, she became the only other swimmer to break the 2:02 mark, clocking 2:01.99 to win her third world title in the 200m butterfly.
READ: Summer McIntosh takes historic gold in 200m butterfly at World Aquatics Championships
It was just over a second faster than McIntosh had swum to win Olympic gold. And it put her within two-tenths of a second of her most coveted world record.
“She always said she liked it because everyone said it was untouchable, so that’s why she wanted it so bad,” said her mother, Jill.
Although it was her main goal for this season, as she was heading into the Trials McIntosh said she “tried not to think about world records too much” though “it’s always kind of in the back of my mind.”
Instead, her focus was just on “getting out fast, because that’s what Bob wants me to do.”
The Bob she speaks of is Bob Bowman, with whom she began training in Austin, Texas in the fall of 2025. Bowman is best known as the coach who guided Michael Phelps to his 28 Olympic medals. While Phelps was a podium stalwart in both the 200m and 400m individual medleys, just like McIntosh, it was the 200m butterfly that was considered his specialty. It was the event in which he made his Olympic debut as a 15-year-old and set his first world record.
“Of course he knows how to train someone for 200 fly,” McIntosh said of Bowman. She explained that the event is all about endurance, so she doesn’t do a lot of “crazy fly sets”. She instead works to be fast in that stroke while gaining her endurance through the training she does for longer events like the 400m freestyle.
“I know her and Bob were talking about ‘let’s just do one 200 fly where you kind of send it on the first 100’ and her second 50 was significantly faster. So I thought she might have a shot. But you can tighten up so easily on butterfly and then there’s nothing you can do,” Jill McIntosh said, speaking from experience, after watching the world record performance. The 200m butterfly was her event, the one in which she became an Olympian at Los Angeles 1984.
Training in Texas, McIntosh is surrounded by top-level international competitors such as Léon Marchand, who won four gold medals for France at Paris 2024 (three of them in the same men’s events as McIntosh), and Hungary’s Hubert Kos, who won Olympic gold in the men’s 200m backstroke.
“We all kind of share the same mentality,” said McIntosh. “Getting to train with them every single day is an absolute privilege and it’s definitely uplifting me as a person in and outside the pool.”
Jill McIntosh says it’s been amazing to see the way her daughter has been embraced by her training mates, who have also become good friends. The soon-to-be-20-year-old (in mid August) has also found balance, something Bowman has quickly recognized.
“She’s all business at the pool. I mean, she’s very serious,” said Bowman. “I finally got her to laugh a little bit at practice. I have the worst jokes but I keep telling them.
“She knows what she wants to do. She knows what it’s going to take to get there and she’s willing to work that hard. But she’s kinda like a normal kid in a lot of ways.”
“Summer’s very laser focused on the pool deck and swimming,” echoed Jill. “She’s very much a teenager. She’s gone through a lot of changes. She likes to go out and have fun, party. She has a boyfriend now, so she’s put all of that to rest—that you can actually be a fun, happy teenager and still swim really fast.
“I think that’s what I’m most proud of: she loves life, not just swimming, and she doesn’t define herself by swimming but she does work really hard.”
Bowman says McIntosh is “scarily similar in some ways” to Phelps, the boy he coached from age 11 to become the most decorated Olympian of all time.
“[The] ability to step up here and do it when it needs to be done. She has a very clear way of preparing for the races. She knows exactly what her routine is, from the time she walks in until the time she swims,” he said, adding: “She uses the crowd’s energy to swim faster. A lot of swimmers don’t do that.”
McIntosh was clearly attuned to the fans in attendance on Sunday night in Montreal.
“The crowd was always loud throughout the whole race, but I could tell on the last 50 that I must have been close to world record pace just based off how loud the crowd was and that really kept me going and motivated me to get to the wall,” said McIntosh.
Because McIntosh swims the same events as Phelps did and Marchand does, Bowman expected he would be able to use the same system of training with her. But “she doesn’t fit into that exactly.” That’s meant adjusting how practices are arranged, how her taper for competition is arranged.
“I’ve learned quite a bit like that from her, which has been good for me,” acknowledged Bowman. “She takes more rest than you think a young girl would. I thought maybe I give her a day or two rest and she would just pop off a record. That’s not how it works. She has to have a little bit of preparation to do these and I’m learning now how to do that.”
Bowman feels quite positive about McIntosh getting “better and better” as their working relationship continues.
“I’ll learn more about how she reacts to certain things and I’ll be able to try some new things that she hasn’t done before, because that’s what it’s going to take for her to keep progressing is to keep adding things and trying things, a new stimulus that she hasn’t had.”
When asked about whether McIntosh has the potential to become one of, if not the greatest swimmer of all time, Bowman responded: “She already is, right?”
“It’s hard to start naming the best women’s swimmers of all time and not say her, even now. She’s very versatile, swims at the top level, has done so for a period of time. I think she’ll need to obviously have another good Olympics or two and then that would be the answer.”
