Jill Horstead and Greg McIntosh wanted their daughters to try a kaleidoscope of sports. Brooke and Summer did horseback riding, gymnastics, even downhill skiing growing up around Toronto.
By age 7, Summer narrowed it to figure skating and swimming and had an epiphany after falling during her program at a skating competition.
She still won. It perplexed her. Her parents explained how judged sports, where flawed performances can prevail, differed from racing against a clock.
“She stopped skating the next day,” Greg said.
Summer McIntosh chose swimming because she wanted to earn it.
Over the past three years, her coach died suddenly and her father was diagnosed with treatable cancer in the early stages. She made her Olympic debut at age 14 in Tokyo, then last June won two gold medals at the world championships to become one of the faces of the sport.
“Swimming was always my favorite because it’s very simple,” she said. “You go the fastest time, and you win.”
Turns out, McIntosh went into the family business. Horstead swam at the 1984 Olympics and won the consolation final of the 200m butterfly for ninth place overall.
Three decades later, they watched it together on an old family computer.
“I remember being amazed about how far swimming’s progressed since then,” McIntosh said.
“I remember her giggling at our swimsuits,” Horstead said.
McIntosh actually never finished her first learn-to-swim lessons. By level seven of a 10-level program, it was suggested she be accelerated into a more competitive group “because she had a very natural feel for the water,” Horstead said.
McIntosh, who turned 1 year old the day after Michael Phelps won his eighth gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, said she began to take swimming seriously by age 12.
In a scene reminiscent of Phelps, McIntosh’s coach pulled Horstead aside as she began breaking national age group records.
“We’re not really going to talk about them with Summer,” Horstead remembered Kevin Thorburn telling her. “Because what you don’t want is a 12-year-old thinking they’ve made it when she has a lot more potential to go.”
In separate interviews, McIntosh’s parents said that it was Thorburn, then coaching her at Etobicoke Swim Club in Ontario, who first predicted the kinds of big things that McIntosh is now achieving.
Like after McIntosh turned 13 years old in August 2019. Thorburn sat her down and told her that she could swim the 1500m freestyle fast enough to qualify for the 2020 Tokyo Games, which would make her the youngest Canadian Olympian across all sports in 44 years. They altered their training from all four strokes to focus on the grueling distance freestyle.
McIntosh was given an extra year to qualify due to COVID-19, and she ended up doing so in three individual events and a relay.
Thorburn was not there to see it. He died in April 2020 at age 63.
“His passing was an absolute shock and was devastating to Summer,” Greg said.
In January 2021, Greg was diagnosed with throat cancer from which he has recovered. Horstead remembers that day as probably the only time that McIntosh has missed a swim practice.
The family decided that he would live in a separate apartment from Jill, Brooke, by then an elite-level figure skater, and Summer, who was training for the Olympic Trials, in part to lessen the risk that any of them caught COVID.
“She just used swimming as a positive thing in her life at that point, and it was truly a blessing,” Horstead said.
On June 20, 2021, Horstead dropped McIntosh off at the Toronto Pan Am Sport Centre for the Olympic Trials 200m freestyle final. COVID restrictions meant no spectators.
CBC had offered the swimmers’ families the opportunity to video in to be part of interviews with winners. Horstead had to watch the race on a stream from the parking lot while waiting to drive her daughter home. So Greg, dealing with side effects from radiation and chemotherapy, showered for the first time in three days and dialed in, just in case.
McIntosh won to clinch an Olympic spot and spoke virtually with Greg, wishing him a Happy Father’s Day on national TV.
A month later, McIntosh traveled outside of the U.S. and Canada for swimming for the first time. It was to Tokyo for the Olympics. Sportsnet reported that, before the Games, McIntosh told the rest of the Canadian swimmers in a team-building exercise that her wish for a super power “would be to never age.”
In her first Olympic race, she broke the Canadian record in the 400m free heats, then lowered it again in the final to place fourth. It was the best individual Olympic finish for any swimmer that young in 25 years, according to Olympedia.org.
“I didn’t really have any expectations,” she said. “For me to even make the Olympic team was, like, a really big deal for me and one of my main goals.”
The ascent continued at her world championships debut last June in Budapest. In the 400m free, she went 3.03 seconds faster than at the Olympics to earn silver behind Ledecky.
She followed that by winning her mom’s event, the 200m fly, to become the youngest individual world champion since 2011. There was no exuberant celebration in the pool. “I think I’m a little bit in shock right now,” she said moments later in a pool-deck interview. Months later, she said it’s the highlight of her career. Unlike trials and Tokyo, her parents were there to see it.
“She was calm and collected about the whole thing,” Greg said. “She made a very good point that she had more races to go, so she didn’t want to get too high.”
On the last day of the eight-day meet, she won the 400m individual medley, which crowns the world’s best all-around swimmer.
The family then went to Birmingham, England, for the Commonwealth Games. McIntosh swept the 200m and 400m medleys in world junior record times and made six podiums total. She flew home and decompressed at the family cottage along an Ontario lake with 11 friends.
The medals rest in a box that looks like a chair in the family basement in Toronto. McIntosh is now the third-fastest woman in history in the 400m IM and fourth-fastest in the 400m free. The times seem less of a focus to McIntosh than to Ledecky, who famously wrote goal times in code on a pull buoy before the Rio Games (and met them).
“Everything’s different for everyone,” said McIntosh, who puts the onus on intermediate splits within races. “If you have a time and you don’t know how to get to that, it’s harder to gauge what you want to do.”
As of a late November interview, McIntosh had put little thought into the Olympic schedule, where she could swim finals of the 200m butterfly and 4x200m freestyle relay in the same session (a double Phelps did in 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016, winning seven golds).
She doesn’t have a favorite event. “It’s like asking a parent who’s their favorite child,” she said.
From the outside, the most anticipated race is on the first night: the 400m free, potentially against the last two Olympic champions in Ledecky and Australian Ariarne Titmus, the two fastest women in history. Two years out, it has already been compared to the “Race of the Century,” the 2004 Olympic men’s 200m free that included Phelps, Australian legends Ian Thorpe and Grant Hackett and Dutch star Pieter van den Hoogenband (won by Thorpe).
“She wants to be to live up to what she thinks is her full potential, which is compete with the best,” Greg said.
That in mind, McIntosh relocated last year from Toronto to Sarasota, Florida (a three-hour drive south of Ledecky in Gainesville), where she previously had a training block when COVID got bad in Ontario. The Sarasota Sharks have more swimmers closer to McIntosh’s age who share her events, said Horstead.
Horstead and McIntosh rent a home less than a mile to the outdoor pool. McIntosh needs a driver for 5 a.m. practices since her learner’s permit does not allow her to legally get behind the wheel before sunrise. “I get up at 4:10am to drive her a minute and a half to the pool,” Horstead laughed.
McIntosh fuels with banana walnut loaf cake from Publix, does virtual school (set to graduate next year) and scans TikTok for home decor and interior design inspiration.
She made sure to be in Ontario in late October. She sat at an ice rink in Mississauga, watching older sister Brooke practice for the biggest international figure skating competition of her young senior career. The next day, McIntosh beat Ledecky for the first time at a World Cup meet in Toronto. The day after that, Brooke and her pairs’ partner finished fourth as the second-youngest team in an eight-team field at Skate Canada.
McIntosh is in the middle of heavy training, so she will watch Brooke compete at this week’s Canadian Championships via live stream from Florida. Those close to her praise her work ethic. Penny Oleksiak, the co-2016 Olympic 100m freestyle champion, has labeled her “all gas and no brakes.”
It’s been that way for years. McIntosh said that another sport she dabbled in during elementary school was running. She did the 400m because she said it was the farthest distance for kids at that age.
“I wasn’t the best runner,” she said, “but if I wasn’t a swimmer. I’d be a runner.”
OlympicTalk is on Apple News. Favorite us!
More: Olympics
Katie Ledecky opens 2023 with a win, and a question Alpine skiing TV, live stream schedule for 2022-23 World Cup season U.S. Olympic diving trials in 2024 to be in Knoxville
Summer McIntosh chose swimming and became Canada’s big splash originally appeared on NBCSports.com
