Canada's Summer McIntosh poses on the podium of the women's 400m individual medley during the 2025 World Aquatics Championships in Singapore on Sunday.MANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP/Getty Images
When Michael Phelps landed on the 2007 world championships and obliterated it, Godzilla-style, he had a goal in mind.
“This is the time to try to put everything in place for next year and see what my body is able to handle,” Phelps said at the time. By “next year,” he meant the 2008 Olympics.
Seven world championship victories, five world records – that was the amuse-bouche before the buffet in Beijing. Sixteen months later, Phelps, then 23, would fulfill that promise. He won eight golds and, for a moment, became the most famous athlete alive.
That’s the road map Summer McIntosh is looking at right now. On Sunday, the Canadian won her fourth individual title at the world championships in Singapore. Those four golds represent the most ever won by a woman at that event, tied with American Katie Ledecky. Her five individual medals over all (including a bronze) are also tied for the all-time record.
It is now indisputable that McIntosh, 18, is the best female swimmer in the world. This is where it gets tough.
Everything you need to know about Summer McIntosh as she dominates the World Aquatics Championships
Phelps had a lot of advantages, including hands and feet that were more like flippers. But once he’d arrived, his greatest edge was timing.
He exploded onto the scene at the 2004 Games. He’d just turned 19 years old. He set a world record and won a gold in his debut race. Then he won five more of them. His celebrity was so instant that it felt he’d always been famous.
After that rise, the fall. Phelps was arrested on a DUI charge a few months later. This was back when such a thing was capable of destroying a reputation.
He went to college and disappeared for a bit while his sponsors worked to rehabilitate his image. When he showed back up in 2007, it was a reintroduction. By the time Phelps got to Beijing, people reacted to him like he was a different person.
His redemption arc kept him focused on winning as much as possible. That was the only way he was going to come out the other end intact. He managed to overcome that tension.
At the time, it was seen as a triumph. By the time Phelps’s real personal crash came, he was out of swimming and everybody had moved on to the next bright young thing.
McIntosh doesn’t strike you as the rebel-without-a-cause type, which makes things trickier.
As yet, McIntosh hasn’t chosen the traditional NCAA route, probably because she’s already too good. Instead, she works and studies on her own.
It is in the nature of swimming that people pay attention only under a few circumstances – when you win a bunch of things at once, when you set a bunch of world records, or at an Olympics.
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Once you’ve won that bunch of things and set that bunch of records, people expect you to do that again, but more. That’s the place where McIntosh has just arrived.
She is deservedly the toast of Canada right now. What she has accomplished is historic, and she is, without doubt, our greatest athlete. But it wasn’t an Olympics. By next week, everyone will have drifted off to the next newsbait. Then it’s back to the lab.
Phelps got put on ice for a little more than a year. McIntosh has to linger in that same spot for three.
Three years is a long time. Opponents who are children now may have become the next Summer McIntoshes by then.
In between, there’s another world aquatic championships, in Hungary in 2027. To follow the Phelps model, McIntosh would have to win more than four golds there. To win less would suggest some sort of retreat. It’s not fair, but there you go. That’s how amateur sports celebrity works.
The Olympic bar she has already set for herself is high – three golds and a silver in Paris. What would qualify as success after that?
The only target is Ledecky’s meet at Rio 2016 – five medals, including four golds.
McIntosh is the one pushing Ledecky, the greatest-ever female swimmer, in the direction of retirement. Completing that circle means beating her most impressive showing.
Pressure? Yeah, maybe a little.
Truly great athletes are not that physically different from their contemporaries. What they have is an unusual combination of work ethic and apathy. They are willing to go places other people cannot get to in order to succeed, but they don’t waste time worrying about outcomes.
After setting that fifth new record in 2007, Phelps told reporters, “I feel like a 12-year-old being able to drop more than a second off my best time.”
He probably didn’t mean it to sound arrogant, but that’s what the great ones are. They expect to win, which means they know the rest of you will lose. It’s so obvious to them that this is what will happen that they are freed from fretting about it.
How hard is it to maintain that posture? Hard, I would imagine. One or two setbacks will get you doubting yourself. Life changes around you, and you reconsider your priorities, especially when you’re still a teenager. Meanwhile, you’re trying to stay laser-focused on this one thing. Mostly, you’re waiting. Waiting years and years for your chance to grasp immortality.
For reasons beyond her control, McIntosh is not going to beat Phelps’s Olympic records. But given her disadvantages in timing, if she gets anywhere close, it will represent an even greater accomplishment.