Never meet your idols, they say.
Summer McIntosh, the 17-years-old swimmer clocked a time of 4:24.2…….
But as Canada’s swimming prodigy Summer McIntosh stared across at Katie Ledecky on the podium of the women’s 400m freestyle race on Day 1 of the Olympic Games Paris 2024, she might have allowed herself a small smile at not only meeting her idol but beating her to silver on the greatest sporting stage of all.
McIntosh famously had a poster of Ledecky on her wall as a youngster growing up in Canada. Now, just weeks before her 18th birthday, she is racing side-by-side with the seven-time Olympic gold medallist and hoping to write her own chapter of Olympic history.
SUMMER MCINTOSH: A RARE TALENT WITH AN UNWAVERING DRIVE TO SUCCEED
At eight years old, McIntosh had a decision to make: would she follow her figure skating older sister Brook to the ice or her Olympian mother Jill into the pool?
“I’m glad I decided to focus on swimming because I think I’d be too tall for figure skating,” she said in an interview with Air Canada’s enRoute in the lead-up to the Paris 2024 Games.
After choosing swimming, not least because “whoever gets their hand on the wall first wins”, McIntosh took the first strokes in a jaw-dropping journey in the sport.
By 14 she beat Canadian legend Penny Oleksiak at the Olympic trials to book her place on the Canadian Olympic team. Just a few short months later, she was competing at Tokyo 2020 as the youngest Canadian at the Games, where she finished fourth in the 400m freestyle.
It was a far cry from how most teenagers were spending their summer but for McIntosh, the grind it takes to make it in sport has become part of her very makeup.
“Motivation isn’t something that you always have every single day,” she said in an interview with The Athletic. “It comes in waves. But I always have that discipline, no matter how I feel when I wake up, I get to the pool and I try my hardest.”
