Summer McIntosh has done it again, and this one hit hard.
The 19-year-old Toronto swimmer broke the world record in the women’s 200-metre butterfly at the Canadian swim trials on Sunday night in Montreal, touching the wall in two minutes 1.65 seconds.
McIntosh was emotional after the race.
“As you can see with my emotions this is the absolute world [to me],” she told Alex Despatie. “I’m in shock right now.”
McIntosh now holds four world records, but this is the one she will cherish the most. Her mother, Jill, competed in the event at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
She also broke the oldest record left in swimming, a mark set by China’s Liu Zie in 2009 during what was known as the supersuit era.
A triple gold medallist at the 2024 Paris Olympics, McIntosh delivered another major performance at the Canadian swimming trials in Victoria last summer. She won all five of her events and became the first swimmer to break three individual world records at the same meet since Michael Phelps at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Over five days, then aged 18, McIntosh took the 400-metre freestyle world record from reigning Olympic champion Ariarne Titmus, lowered her own record in the women’s 400-metre individual medley by about three quarters of a second, and broke nine-time world champion Katinka Hosszu’s decade-old mark in the 200-metre individual medley.
She followed that with five medals at the world championships in Singapore, winning four gold and one bronze.
McIntosh is back in the pool on Monday in the 400 individual medley, on Tuesday in the 400 freestyle and on Wednesday in the 200 individual medley.
The Canadian swimming trials are streaming live on CBC Gem and the CBC Sports website from Sunday through Thursday. Preliminary races start at 9:30 a.m. ET and finals start at 5:30 p.m. ET each day.
With files from CBC Sports’s Jesse Campigotto.
Read more from CBC.
