Three-time Olympic gold medalist Summer McIntosh of Canada broke the longest-standing world record for individual women’s swimming on Sunday night at the Canadian trials in Montreal.
McIntosh, 19, finished the 200-meter butterfly in 2 minutes, 1.65 seconds, bettering the 2:01.81 set by China’s Liu Zige for a long-course (50-meter) pool in October 2009. That was months before a global ban on the polyurethane “super suits” that swimmers wore in breaking more than 100 world marks in 2008 and 2009.
“To be honest, as soon as I dove in, I felt absolutely incredible,” McIntosh said in an interview with the CBC. “The crowd just got my adrenaline going. … I went out pretty fast and I think I just held on very well. It was done very well and it’s a great way to start off trials.”
McIntosh now has four world records at long-course pools, with the 400-meter freestyle and 200- and 400-meter individual medleys. Those latter three were set at the 2025 Canadian trials.
She also has multiple world championships in the 200 butterfly. McIntosh won the event as one of three golds collected along with one silver as a 17-year-old at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
McIntosh was 0.18 seconds short of the 200 butterfly mark at the 2025 world championships, and then came Sunday’s record-breaking performance.
“This is probably, in my opinion, one of the hardest world records in the books, on the women’s side at least,” she said. “That’s always been a really big goal of mine. … To now break it, it’s just very surreal.”
–Field Level Media
