Summer McIntosh is the obvious choice for our SOS Female Swimmer of the Year 2024, the Canadian teen outstretching the towering achievements of three double Olympic champions in Paris, namely Sarah Sjostrom, Kaylee McKeown and Katie Ledecky.

All those latter three added to pantheons bursting with success from previous Olympics/World Championships and bountiful world-record accounts. Each has been the SwimVortex/SOS top woman swimmer of the year before and their Paris 2024 campaigns were truly impressive, both in the hour and in terms of the longevity of their specific supremacy.

But in Paris, the young Torontonian coached by Brent Arckey and the expert team including Vern Gambetta at the Sarasota Sharks in Florida, tipped the scales in her favour with three gold and a silver, all in solo events, her podiums extending beyond the 200 and 400m medley to gold in the 200m butterfly and a second place adrift another top 5 outstanding player, Ariarne Titmus, and ahead of Ledecky in the 400m freestyle.

In this feature...

“Our job as parents is not to coach them at all. It is to make sure that they're in a day-to-day training environment that they have fun in and that they excel in and then are surrounded by really good people. And so far they've had that for their whole career." - Jill McIntosh (nee Horstead)

" ... what we tried to do is give the kids access, let them find their passion and then and if they're going to spend time and energy on something, to give it 150 per cent every single time. But there was never any professional pressure to perform, ever." - Greg McIntosh