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Inside Summer McIntosh's big change that led to three world records

“He’s the reason I did that,” Summer McIntosh said after breaking the 400m freestyle world record in her first of five finals at the recent Canadian swimming trials for the World Championships.

Four days later, he — veteran French swimming coach Fred Vergnoux — felt tears after watching the 18-year-old McIntosh’s last race of the meet in Victoria, British Columbia.

“It’s like a painter,” Vergnoux reasoned. “You can have everything in your mind, but then when you paint, maybe sometimes it isn’t good, or it’s not what you want. But the fact that she could express what she had inside herself, that’s so special. That’s why it was, for me, emotional.”

The final strokes of McIntosh’s work of art. She became the first swimmer to break world records in three individual events at one long course meet since Michael Phelps at the 2008 Olympics.

It was, to an extent, the product of spending much of the previous six months training with Vergnoux’s group in a Pyrenean ski resort and on the French Riviera.

McIntosh followed her Phelpsian feats in Victoria by attending the Formula One Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal over the weekend.

Then she was due to return to Vergnoux’s group in France to start a monthlong build up to Singapore, where she can become the second swimmer after Phelps to win five individual golds at a single world championships. To do that, she’ll have to displace Katie Ledecky in Ledecky’s trademark race.

It would be an epic follow-up to the Paris Olympics, where McIntosh won gold medals in the 200m and 400m individual medleys and the 200m butterfly and silver in the 400m freestyle. That silver, behind repeat champion Ariarne Titmus of Australia, didn’t sit right.

"(Paris) Olympics, the goal was the four golds, and I didn’t reach that,” McIntosh told CBC Sports after the trials. “So I was hungry for more, and that really kept me motivated heading into this season.”

McIntosh, who had trained in her native Ontario and, for the last two years, in Sarasota, Florida, wanted to try something new in 2025.

“Different scenarios and different stimuluses just to kind of switch it up,” she said.

That’s where Vergnoux and his France-based group came in. He was approached last year by John Atkinson, the Canadian national team high performance director. The two knew each other from when they both coached in Great Britain in the mid-2000s.

Atkinson said McIntosh might be interested in joining Vergnoux’s swimmers (some of whom she already knew) for an altitude camp.

Vergnoux discussed it further with Brent Arckey, McIntosh’s coach since 2022, at December’s short course worlds in Budapest. They talked about Vergnoux’s training methods, including incorporating skiing.

“He was 100% supportive,” Vergnoux said.

After a talk with McIntosh, she flew over after Christmas to mile-high Font-Romeu near France’s border with Spain.

There, McIntosh impressed not only with her work ethic, but also for regularly saying “thank you” after training sessions.

“We did some cross-country skiing, which was the first time for Summer,” Vergnoux said. “At the end of the camp, she was actually skiing pretty good.”

She and Vergnoux discussed goals in the pool. The 800m freestyle came up.

McIntosh swam it at the Tokyo Olympics at age 14, placing 11th. She eschewed it from her program at the World Championships in 2022 and 2023. Then in a small meet in February 2024, she became the first swimmer to beat Ledecky in the event in 14 years.

Still, the 800m wasn’t a priority for McIntosh, who left it off her Olympic program. It conflicted with the 200m IM final on the same night in Paris.

The World Championships schedule is different. It has no such conflict.

“We actually talked about some of the potential that I would see in Summer,” Vergnoux said. “Not that I did convince her to swim the 800m freestyle, but the conversation was more showing her capacity and abilities to perhaps try to swim that race.”

Summer McIntosh, an Olympic swimmer from Canada, is challenging Katie Ledecky.

So McIntosh descended from Font-Romeu and entered an 800m free this past February in Orlando. She swam 8:09.86, a personal best by 1.53 seconds, to become the second woman to break 8:10 in the event. Ledecky has done it 11 times.

Then in May, Ledecky lowered her own world record in the 800m free from 8:04.79 to 8:04.12 at a Tyr Pro Series meet in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

McIntosh was at that meet, too, but didn’t race the 800m. They did go head-to-head in the 400m free. McIntosh led Ledecky by 85 hundredths (nearly a body length) at the 300-meter mark. Ledecky then zoomed past the swimmer 10 years her junior over the final lap and prevailed by 1.47 seconds.

McIntosh still swam the second-fastest time of her life to that point, nine hundredths quicker than she did in Paris.

She went back to France. After another training stint, including regular cycling sessions, she knew she was capable of something special at the Canadian trials. She swam one event per day.

June 7: 400m free, world record
June 8: 800m free, third-fastest time in history
June 9: 200m individual medley, world record
June 10: 200m butterfly, second-fastest time in history
June 11: 400m individual medley, world record

“(Vergnoux) has really taken me to the next level in the sport and pushed me farther,” she said after the last race and before a FaceTime call with a golfing Phelps that she revealed as the ninth photo of an Instagram slideshow. “I’ve gone way faster than I ever could have imagined.”

A young McIntosh named one of her cats “Mikey” after Phelps.

A young McIntosh also put a quote from Ledecky on her bedroom wall. McIntosh tried to recall the specifics in 2023 and surmised it was something like, “Every race is a sprint, some are just longer than others.” (The line may have come by way of one of Ledecky’s former coaches.)

McIntosh reveres Ledecky, saying the nine-time Olympic gold medalist has “completely revolutionized” the distance freestyle events.

While McIntosh is the world’s best all-around swimmer via her individual medley dominance, her freestyle stroke has been emphasized in 2025.

"(Vergnoux) has really taught me and really motivated me and done so much for my confidence in freestyle and really gotten it back to form and even better than where I was before,” she said.

That will come in handy in Singapore if she wants to go five for five in golds.

McIntosh is the world’s fastest swimmer this year in the 400m free and 200m IM by more than two and a half seconds each, the fastest in the 200m fly by more than three seconds and No. 1 in the 400m IM by more than 10 seconds.

But in the 800m free, she is ranked second in the world in 2025.

On Aug. 2, Ledecky can become the first swimmer to win a seventh world title in the same race, an event she won at the last four Olympics, too.

Or McIntosh can claim her first major 800m free title.

“No offense to no one of course, but we talked about the fact that Ledecky was already going to be the only swimmer in history to have five golds in one event at five Olympic Games, and perhaps Summer would be the one who wanted to challenge that,” Vergnoux said. “The conversation keeps evolving, evolving, and now she’s at 8:05 (95 hundredths shy of Ledecky’s world record), so she’s getting closer and closer. I think probably also the fact that this 800m at the worlds in Singapore is going to be one of the main, let’s say, attractions of the worlds, it’s something that Summer is taking into high consideration. She has a lot of respect for Ledecky, of course, but she really wants to challenge herself and see what she can do against her.”

McIntosh said she’s still learning the event. Vergnoux is working with Canada’s federation and his own staff to develop a race plan for Singapore.

“Knowing that if it goes down to the last 50 (meters), it’s going be quite amazing,” he said. “Especially looking at the speed that Ledecky has shown recently, it’s going to be super tough.”

After worlds, McIntosh will switch it up again. She plans to move to Austin, Texas, to train under Bob Bowman, Phelps’ career-long coach, and start taking college classes in 2026.

She, and Vergnoux, will always have the masterpiece of 2025.

“I really want to enjoy as much as possible this moment as a coach in my career,” he said.