Summer McIntosh won four individual gold medals at the 2025 World Aquatics Championships in Singapore. She took the 400m freestyle, the 200m individual medley, the 400m individual medley and the 200m butterfly. No Canadian swimmer had ever reached that mark at a single Worlds.
A 400m medley won by seven seconds
The fourth title came on the closing Sunday in the 400m individual medley. The 18-year-old from Toronto touched in 4:25.78, a championship record, shaving 1.3 seconds off her own mark from Fukuoka. Australia's Jenna Forrester and Japan's Mio Narita tied for silver, 7.5 seconds back.
The butterfly earlier in the week had been just as clear. McIntosh won the 200m in a meet-record 2:01.99, only 0.18 of a second outside Liu Zige's 2009 world record. She reached the wall three seconds ahead of American silver medallist Regan Smith.
Second only to Ledecky in the record books
The haul places McIntosh alongside rare company. She is only the second woman to win four individual titles at a single long-course Worlds, following Katie Ledecky in 2015. Her Singapore week lifted her career total to 13 World Championship medals, eight of them gold, the most by any Canadian swimmer.
A fifth title slipped away when Ledecky won the 800m free ahead of her. That bronze still made McIntosh the third swimmer, after Michael Phelps and Sarah Sjöström, to win five individual medals at one Worlds.
"Even though I fell short of my goal in the 200 fly and overall with the gold-medal count, I mean it's not a failure whatsoever," she told CBC Sports after the medley. "Four golds is four golds."
The week followed her three-gold Paris Olympics and her butterfly world record set weeks earlier. At 18, McIntosh keeps rewriting what a Canadian swimmer can reach.
