Summer McIntosh breaks oldest ladies’s swimming world file

Summer McIntosh broke the longest-standing world file in ladies’s swimming, and the final ladies’s file remaining from the super-suit period.

McIntosh, a three-time 2024 Olympic gold medalist, clocked 2 minutes, 1.65 seconds within the 200m butterfly on the Canadian trials in Montreal on Sunday.

The earlier file of two:01.81 was set by China’s Liu Zige in October 2009 on the tail finish of a two-year stretch when the world’s finest swimmers rewrote the file books in polyurethane fits that had been banned beginning in 2010.

“As you can see by emotions, this means the absolute world,” McIntosh stated in a pool-deck interview moments after the record-breaking swim. “Growing up, this is the one world record that I thought I would never break.”

McIntosh, a 19-year-old from Toronto, now owns the world file in 4 occasions — the 200m and 400m particular person medleys, the 400m freestyle and the 200m fly.

She is the primary swimmer to carry 4 particular person long-course world data concurrently since Swede Sarah Sjostrom held the 50m and 100m fly and 50m and 100m free world data from 2017 to 2024.

The 200m fly is McIntosh’s trademark occasion.

Her first world title got here within the 200m fly in 2022 — at age 15. She broke the Olympic file in Paris, swimming 2:03.03. In 2025, she recorded, on the time, the second-, third- and fourth-fastest occasions in historical past, together with a 2:01.99 on the World Championships, lacking Liu’s file by 18 hundredths.

McIntosh’s mother, Jill, swam the 200m fly on the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

“She liked (the 200m fly world record) because everyone said it was untouchable — that’s why she wanted it so badly,” Jill stated, according to the Toronto Star. “Tonight was extra special because that world record (was) Summer’s dream as a 10-year-old.”

Before McIntosh got here alongside, no one had swum inside two seconds of Liu’s file since she set it.

With these tremendous fits in 2008 and 2009, a world file was damaged in each occasion that was on the Olympic program besides the boys’s 1500m freestyle (and the ladies’s 1500m free, which wasn’t on the Olympic program then however was contested at World Championships).

Now, simply 5 world data — all in males’s occasions — stay from 2008 or 2009 out of the 20 males’s occasions and 20 ladies’s occasions which can be on the present Olympic program: males’s 200m and 800m frees, 200m backstroke and 4x100m and 4x200m free relays.

American Katie Ledecky is now the longest-standing world file holder in any ladies’s occasion, having first damaged the 800m and 1500m free world data on the 2013 World Championships.

Ledecky and McIntosh have gone head-to-head within the 200m, 400m and 800m frees and are anticipated to take action in a minimum of the 400m free on the Pan Pacific Championships in August in Irvine, California.

McIntosh, who now trains in Austin, Texas below Michael Phelps’ career-long coach Bob Bowman, has stated she needs to swim 5 particular person occasions on the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

She did so on the 2025 Worlds, profitable 4 golds and a bronze within the 800m free behind Ledecky and Australian Lani Pallister.

The solely swimmer — male or feminine — to win 5 particular person golds at a single Olympics was Phelps in 2008.

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