2024 Swammy Awards: World Junior Female Swimmer of the Year — Summer McIntosh

See all of our 2024 Swammy Awards here.

A lot has been written about Summer McIntosh’s extraordinary year, and there is surely more to come. She had an exceptional year, highlighted by her four-medal haul (including three gold) at the 2024 Olympic Games. Her performance in Paris earned her many accolades, including World Aquatics’ Female Swimmer of the Year and Canadian Athlete of the Year.

The medals and awards she’s earned this year alone are more than some win in an entire career, making it hard to remember sometimes that McIntosh just turned 18 years old in September. However, her status as a junior swimmer this year is also an important part of why her performances this year were so impressive and why she is the clear winner of the 2024 Swammy for World Junior Female Swimmer of the Year. She also won this award in 2023.

It’s a fairly obvious pick—she was the only female junior swimmer to win Olympic gold, and she earned three. McIntosh’s performances in 2023 made her the favorite to win gold in the 200 butterfly and 400 IM. She backed up that status in Paris and won both events, setting Olympic, world junior, and Americas records in the 200 fly with a 2:03.03, making her the second-fastest performer in history. In the 400 IM, she was off the world record she set at the Canadian Olympic Trials but ran away from the field, winning by 5.69 seconds (4:27.71).

She faced arguably her toughest test in the 200 IM. Fans had been waiting for years to see McIntosh, Kate Douglass, Kaylee McKeown, and Alex Walsh go head-to-head in the event. The four are some of the fastest 200 IMers in history, but for one reason or another, they hadn’t all been in the same international final, and now, they were set to face each other on the sport’s biggest stage, leading to plenty of speculation about which would come out on top. Despite having the heaviest schedule of the four, McIntosh charged on the freestyle leg and claimed the gold, swimming 2:06.56 for new Olympic, world junior, and Canadian records.

The swim put an exclamation mark on an incredible Games for McIntosh that earned her a spot in Canadian Olympic history in her second Olympic appearance. She was the youngest member of Team Canada at the Tokyo Games, where she finished fourth in the 400 freestyle. Since her Olympic debut, McIntosh became the youngest World Champion in over a decade during the 2022 World Championships.

Swimming as a junior provides plenty of learning opportunities. Great swimmers take advantage of those opportunities, even if they aren’t always the most fun, and use them to propel themselves further in the sport. McIntosh’s ability to learn from disappointment helped her achieve all she did this year. McIntosh was part of another highly anticipated event at the 2023 World Championships—the 400 freestyle—which saw her match up against Ariarne Titmus and Katie Ledecky. All three had held the world record in the event.

The women’s 400 freestyle final on the first night in Fukuoka was the first time McIntosh faltered since her breakout. Everyone expected the podium to be a combination of her, Titmus, and Ledecky, but McIntosh ended up off the podium in fourth. It was a difficult way to open the meet, but McIntosh was able to respond and find success in her other events. In Paris, she wrote a new chapter in her history with the event on the international stage, opening her Games with her first Olympic medal, a silver, in 3:58.37.

McIntosh ended her year at the 2024 Short Course World Championships, where she picked up right where she left off, winning another three gold medals in three world record times. She broke the 400 freestyle world record on the first day of the meet and kept building momentum from there, breaking two Mireia Belmonte Garcia world records as she won the 200 butterfly and 400 IM.

She also earned silver in the 200 backstroke, breaking a Missy Franklin world junior record from 2011 and joining a small group of women who have been under the two-minute mark in the event.

But after the final, McIntosh told CBC’s Devin Heroux she wasn’t satisfied with the performance and had wanted to bring home another gold medal. Her first 200 backstroke international final, and she reached the podium with another historic swim—making the most of her decision to skip the 200 IM to test out this new event in the first meet of the new quad. It indicates what we can expect from McIntosh for the rest of this Olympic cycle—she showed the world what she was capable of in Paris and will try to build a generation career as she ages out of the junior scene and heads into LA 2028.

Honorable Mentions:

• Katie Grimes, USA: Katie Grimes made her first Olympic team at 15-years-old and was the youngest member of Team USA’s Olympic swimming roster since Amanda Beard made her debut at 14 in 1996. Flash forward three years, and Grimes became the first American athlete to punch their ticket to Paris, qualifying for her second Games in the 10K. Later, the 18-year-old made the U.S. Olympic team in the pool as well; she swam a range of events and qualified in the 400 IM and 1500 freestyle, the latter of which is the event she qualified for in 2021. Grimes has become a stalwart of the U.S. international team, medaling at 2022 and 2023 Worlds. Though she missed the final in the 1500 free, Grimes earned her first Olympic medal in the 400 IM, taking silver to help the U.S. repeat as the silver and bronze medalists. After testing out short-course meters at the Singapore World Cup, Grimes swam to another 400 IM silver medal in Budapest, setting an American record (4:20.14).
• Sara Curtis, Italy: Sara Curtis broke onto the senior stage this season, both in Italy and internationally. She took out the Italian record in the 50 freestyle in March, swimming a 24.56. That time, pending ratification, is a European Junior record, as is her 26.08 in the 50 backstroke swum a month later. Then, she qualified for her debut Olympics, where she reached the semifinal in the women’s 50 freestyle and swam in Italy’s eighth-place women’s 4×100 freestyle relay. Curtis is a sprint freestyle and backstroke specialist and took another step in her career at the 2024 Short Course World Championships. She finished sixth in the 50 backstroke after a world junior record in the semifinal (26.03) and seventh in the 50 freestyle. Finally, she anchored the mixed 4×50 freestyle relay in 23.34 to help Italy win its first gold of the meet.
• Mizuki Hirai, Japan: 17-year-old Mizuki Hirai had a strong 2024 season. During the lead-up to the Olympic Games in June, Hirai broke the official girls’ 100 butterfly world junior record, clocking a 56.33. The swim was a personal best for Hirai by .58 seconds and improved her standing as Japan’s #2 performer in history. She’s now a quarter of a second away from Rikako Ikee’s national record of 56.08 from 2018. Hirai made the 100 butterfly Olympic final, finishing seventh in her debut Games; then, she swam butterfly on Japan’s fifth-place women’s 4×100 medley relay. Hirai affirmed her butterfly prowess in short-course meters as well as long-course at the 2024 Short Course World Championships, finishing fifth in Budapest.