Summer McIntosh, the shiny side of a two-sided coin

Summer McIntosh is Canadian. She was born in Toronto just over 17 years ago. Surely most of you have heard of her; it is likely that some of you are even a fan of it. However, it never hurts to highlight the salient and perhaps some of the not so well-known aspects of one of today’s best swimmers: I have no doubt that she is the most complete.

The daughter of another Canadian Olympic swimmer, Jill Horstead, Summer made history at Tokyo 2020 when, at just 14 years old and the youngest member of her country’s delegation, she achieved an unexpected fourth place in the 400 meters freestyle.

Since then, her career offered one of the most impressive evolutions in the history of this discipline.

Representative of the High Performance Center, in Ontario, her first world championship for seniors, the one in Budapest 2022, was enough to stand out even among a team full of stars such as Penny Oleksiak, Sydney Pickrem or Kylie Masse. In the Hungarian capital, she won her first four podiums, including gold medals in 200 butterfly and 400 medley. A year later, in Fukuoka, she repeated the above-mentioned titles and won bronze medals in 200 freestyle and the posse medley. While she was established among the majors, she was breaking world youth records, including the 200-meter record as the first relay of the 4x200.

A few days ago, during the Olympic teams in her country, she ridiculed the other competitors because not only did she improve the world record for the most in the 400 medleys - third among the greats of his short career - but she also got more than 14 seconds difference from the second one.

Retired Usain Bolt, already without Michael Phelps and with the uncertainty as to whether the Simone Biles we will see in Paris will be more like the incomparable one in Rio or the substantially more humane one in Tokyo, it is very likely that the first week of the next games will have his name sealed in fire.

There may still be some doubts about what your competition schedule will be: sometimes, believing that our talents are indelible can lead to the mistake of forgetting that, to win some medals, you don’t need to swim once, not twice, but up to three times per test. Anyway, this phenomenon, who will celebrate his 18th birthday as soon as the games are over, probably with several medals hanging around his neck, has arrived in the Olympic world to make history. Surely for a long time. And most likely starting in the French capital.

Speaking of its versatility, there is an amazing sign that we don’t always stop at. Taking into account her personal bests and Olympic qualification standards, Summer could compete in 200, 400 and 800 freestyle, 100 and 200 backstroke, 100 and 200 butterfly and, obviously, 200 and 400 medley. And in the other competitions included in the Olympic program, it has records compatible with the B Brands.

Of course, we should not expect McIntosh to jump into the water so many times starting the morning of next July 27. What we can hope for is to see her smile often while listening to her country’s national anthem.

Along with her talent, the exponential growth of the contribution of sponsors whose search for figures is summarized in someone virtuous, young and winning like the Canadian one. A growth that justifies the change of names of some federations -for example, from FINA to World Aquatics- as if making it clear that the word Amateur in the acronym is an anachronism.

Summer’s is one side of the coin.

The other is that of the vast majority of the other female swimmers who will be in Paris. Perhaps one of those cases is that of Argentinian Agostina Hein, a 16-year-old swimmer who specializes in freestyle distances from 400 to 1500.

Agostina was born in the city of Campana, in the north of the Province of Buenos Aires. Shortly after winning the bronze medal in the 800 meters freestyle of the last youth world championship in 2023 and two months before the Pan American Games in Santiago, she was left without her training pool at the Club Independiente of Zárate, where her coach was kicked out due to a political conflict between two factions of the ruling party after the internal elections to elect a new mayor.

Hein is, without a doubt, one of the great hopes of swimming in her country, which although she has only won two Olympic medals among women (Jeanette Campbell in 1936 and Georgina Bardach in 2004) has a long tradition in this specialty. Within the scholarship system that should guarantee support for full-time athletes, their income does not currently exceed $200 per month. A few weeks ago, one of the Argentine sports authorities stated in an interview that minors - she is for local legislation - should not receive support from the state. “It’s great that they do collections or raffles. We have been spoiling them” was the administrator’s summary.

Maybe then you’ll cross paths with McIntosh in the Olympic Village or in the training pool. Maybe they match up in the 400 free series.

Once again, the games would witness a brutal clash of realities between two frankly unequal universes.

Nothing to reproach Olympism, even if we have to look suspiciously at anyone who wants to tell us that this is a territory of equal opportunities.