Triple Olympic gold medallist Summer McIntosh is Canada’s Athlete of the Year for 2024
After swimming her way into the Canadian Olympic history books at Paris 2024, Summer McIntosh can add one more accolade to her already illustrious résumé: the Northern Star Award.
The teenager who won an unprecedented three Olympic gold medals this past summer has been named Canada’s Athlete of the Year for 2024.
The now-18-year-old is the first swimmer to take the honour since her Olympic teammate Penny Oleksiak did so in 2016.
While McIntosh matched Oleksiak’s Canadian record of four medals won at one Olympic Summer Games, she did something no Canadian athlete has ever done—win three gold medals at one Olympic Games.
With her silver medal in the women’s 400m freestyle on Day 1, McIntosh kickstarted Team Canada’s medal haul at Paris 2024, which grew to be the country’s second biggest ever at one Olympic Summer Games. It was the last time she would be beaten to the wall in an individual event at Paris La Défense Arena.
Two days later, McIntosh absolutely dominated the women’s 400m individual medley. She had entered the Games as the heavy gold medal favourite, having smashed her own world record at the Canadian Trials in May, becoming the first woman to break the 4:25 mark in the event. In the Olympic final, she finished nearly six seconds ahead of runner-up Katie Grimes of the United States for the largest margin of victory in the event at the Olympic Games in 40 years.
Three nights later, McIntosh won the women’s 200m butterfly, the event in which her mother Jill had become an Olympian at Los Angeles 1984, setting an Olympic record time of 2:03.03 in the process. When asked to pick her favourite medal moment, this one is it.
McIntosh made one more trip to the top step of the podium, winning her third gold of the Games in the 200m individual medley while putting her name on another Olympic record time of 2:06.56.
While her victories in the two prior events were almost expected—after all, she was a two-time world champion in both—then the last one, if not surprising, was perhaps not as certain. McIntosh hadn’t competed in the 200m IM much internationally and towards the end of a very demanding Olympic schedule was swimming in a stacked field of multiple gold medal contenders. But in her 12th race of the meet, McIntosh out-touched two-time reigning world champion Kate Douglass of the United States by 0.36 of a second.
When it came to selecting Team Canada’s Closing Ceremony flag bearers, the achievements of the then-17-year-old phenom made her an obvious choice to share the honour with another history-maker, gold medal hammer thrower Ethan Katzberg.
Now assuredly among the biggest names in the swimming world, McIntosh was recognized with inclusion on the TIME100 Next list, putting her alongside influential global leaders from many domains.
There were four other finalists under consideration by the national panel of journalists who voted on the Northern Star Award, which is administered by the Toronto Star. Those athletes were: Paris 2024 hammer throw gold medallist, Ethan Katzberg; last year’s award winner and Paris 2024 Olympian in basketball, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander; the PWHL’s first ever MVP, Natalie Spooner; and Edmonton Oilers captain and Stanley Cup playoffs MVP, Connor McDavid.