What’s a GOAT to the current world-record holder? What’s the current world-record holder to a future Hall of Famer? What’s all of them to a dreamer?
The four — the GOAT, the world-record holder, the future Hall of Famer and the dreamer — will likely swim on the Opening night of the Paris Games. It has already been dubbed as the ‘Race of the Century’.
As far as sporting hyperboles go, ‘Race of the Century’ is a decent starting point. It may be unoriginal but there’s no doubting what it aims to convey. The Paris Games, like a few other preceding ones, will have its own version. The women’s 400m freestyle. Katie Ledecky vs. Summer McIntosh vs. Ariarne Titmus vs. Erika Fairweather. All four have won multiple Worlds medals. Three of them, McIntosh, Titmus and Ledecky, have been at it for at least two years.
In 2023, Fairweather entered the chat. The then Kiwi teen won bronze ahead of McIntosh at the Worlds. In 2024, at a Worlds without any of Ledecky, McIntosh and Titmus, Fairweather won gold with a time of 3:59.44. Another swimmer going below the magical four-minute mark. With a time like that, she would be a favourite for gold in most Olympics. In Paris, she is the fourth favourite for first. So, basically, the woman who beats everybody (Titmus), against the woman (Ledecky) who generally beats everybody except the woman who beats everybody, versus the woman (McIntosh) who has shown that she can beat everybody, versus the woman (Fairweather) who could well defeat all of them, at least in the future.
Welcome, then, to what is likely already four of the most over-hyped minutes in the Games’ recent history.
Just before the Rio Olympics, Ledecky, still a teen, was considered unbeatable. She was so ahead of the rest of the pack, that a piece in the New York Times began a feature like this. “The question,” they had written, “is not whether Katie Ledecky will win. But by how much?”
The generational talent was like an orca in the pool in Brazil as she decimated the competition in front of her. She entered into five events, won gold in four of them and set new world marks in two of them. To underline her dominance, there was an image just after she touched the wall to signal the end of the 800m freestyle final. She clocked 8:04.79 — silver-medallist Jazmin Carlin wasn’t even past the halfway mark of the last lap. That winning image showed her all alone, waiting for the other athletes to finish, almost looking bored. There was this allure, a myth when it came to describing her feats. Journalists frequently fell into the trap as they tried to overdramatise, perhaps rightly. At a select phone conference where this newspaper was present, one of the questions she was asked was: “Do you feel sorry for your rivals? Because there is an embarrassing distance between you and them.”
The US swimmer, who picked up her first global gold when she was 15 (London Games), didn’t know how to react so she laughed. “I don’t know how to answer that,” she said after collecting her thoughts. “I don’t really pay attention to the distance. I’m always trying to put together my fastest race. You can only control what you can control...”
What made her Rio achievements that bit special was cornering glory in the two middle-distance events and the one long-distance event (200m, 400m, 800m). She combined speed plus endurance, a devastating cocktail and other swimmers couldn’t live with that duopoly (she’s also gun at the 1500m free and won the Olympic gold when it was introduced for women in Tokyo).
Two years later, at the Pan Pacs in Tokyo, Titmus had her first brush with Ledecky and, by extension, immortality. The US athlete kept her crown in the 400m — at this point she was yet to lose an international final in this distance — but Titmus had become the third woman in history to breach four minutes. If that was the teaser, July 21, 2019, was the red-letter day. The young Australian shark had taken down the orca. In the 400m final at the Worlds in South Korea, Ledecky tasted her first-ever defeat in an international final across this distance. For so long, the Maryland-born swimmer had only raced herself; her only competition, a record she had set in a previous event.
After seven years at the top, a question. Put it this way. Was this going to be swimming’s Robin Soderling d. Rafa Nadal at the French Open in 2009 moment? Or was Titmus here to stay? The Olympic final in 2020 couldn’t come fast enough. It lived up to the hype with a pandemic sandwiched between for good measure. Titmus took on the queen of world swimming and swam past her when the finish line was in sight.
She came for the queen’s throne. She didn’t miss.
In that same final, a 15-year-old finished fourth after leading the field at the first turn. McIntosh. While the US have produced Olympic and world swimming champions at the drop of a hat, it has been relatively quiet North of the border. In fact, out of the 55 Olympic medals they have won in the sport, 18 came at either Montreal in 1976 or Los Angeles eight years later. The next batch of 18 was split between eight Summer Games from Seoul in 1988 to Rio in 2016.
This lull period has ended thanks to a couple of generational athletes. Penny Oleksiak, the country’s most decorated Olympian with seven medals across three Games, took them on this path. While the 24-year-old free and fly specialist will be in Paris, the link between the present and future will be provided by McIntosh, the daughter of Jill Horstead, a former fly specialist who medalled at the 1986 Commonwealth Games.
You can say there’s some swimming DNA in the family. Even otherwise, this was going to be her calling. Growing up, Ledecky was her idol. She named her cat after another of her swimming idols. Mikey. Michael Phelps. She’s already the owner of world records and glory at the international level (she is also a medley specialist) but global gold in this event would elevate her into an air reserved for legends.
The 17-year-old is already one of the very few swimmers to have beaten Ledecky in both the 400m and the 800m over the last eight months. In the 800m final at the US Swimming Southern Zone South Sectionals in Orlando in February, the US great finished second, her first defeat across this distance in almost 14 years. Around the same time, halfway across the globe, Fairweather made a splash and dashed to gold to send the already stacked 400m free competition into overdrive. Unlike the other three, the Kiwi has had a more measured rise. She was very much there in that same 400m final in Tokyo where she finished eighth. Since then, she made marginal improvements. A few metres here. A small fraction. Eating a few seconds there. Now, she’s eyeing three of the biggest fishes in the pool.