On a warm July evening in Montreal, Summer McIntosh reached into the past and pulled swimming into a new era. The Canadian teenager clocked 2:01.65 in the 200-metre butterfly at the national trials, erasing the oldest individual world record in women’s swimming.
A super-suit shadow, finally lifted
The mark she chased had stood since October 2009, when China’s Liu Zige swam 2:01.81 in a polyurethane suit that was banned months later. For seventeen years no woman had come closer than McIntosh herself — her 2:01.99 at the 2025 World Championships left her just eighteen-hundredths short.
The race decided on the third lap
McIntosh tore out in 27.45 seconds over the first 50 metres and flipped at halfway in 58.21, a tenth slower than Liu’s pace. The record tilted on the next length. She split 31.52 on the third 50, where Liu had taken 32.12, before a closing 31.92 as the home crowd roared her to the wall.
The margin was the slimmest of edges — just 0.16 seconds — but it was built decisively in the middle of the pool. She touched, turned to the board, and shared a long embrace with coach Bob Bowman on the deck of the same pool where her mother Jill set a Canadian record four decades earlier.
Four records, one name on the list
With this swim McIntosh becomes only the third swimmer in history, after Michael Phelps and Sarah Sjöström, to hold four individual long-course world records at once. The 200-metre butterfly joins her global marks in the 200-metre and 400-metre individual medleys and the 400-metre freestyle.
“Growing up, this is the one world record that I thought I would never break,” she told reporters afterwards. The admission underlined the aura the super-suit era still carried — an aura she dismantled in under two minutes.
At nineteen, with three Olympic golds and eight world titles already to her name, McIntosh has turned the unbreakable into simply the next line on her programme.