Summer McIntosh has just had an incredible meet at the Canadian Trials:
I don’t know much swimming history, but this must be up there on the list of great individual meets.
McIntosh is literally now throwing her medals to fans. She has that many. She destroyed the World Championships last year, too, not just the Olympics.
She is only 18; if she stays healthy and motivated, she will likely end up being Canada’s greatest Olympian - she already has three golds and one bronze, and the record for any Canadian is seven medals - and one of its 3-5 greatest athletes of all time in any sport. With enough health and determination, maybe THE greatest.
Or she might say “the hell with it” and quit in two years. And if she does, hey, who could blame her? She’s won three Olympic golds and a raft of other stuff, she doesn’t really have anything else to prove.
Not to downplay her excellence, but comparing across sports can be tricky. A great discus thrower, or even an all-around athlete like a decathlete, can only win one Olympic medal every four years. Sprinters can win a few, or gymnasts. They could be as great in their sport as McIntosh, but without the hardware to show for it. The really high medal counts seem to always be swimmers.
Still, setting three different world records in a single day’s competition is something that could, in principle, happen in almost any sport (if the sport tracks enough different statistics), but it’s still quite rare (has it ever happened?).
Don’t decathletes usually also compete in individual events?
Also, it’s largely just convention that “swimming” is considered one sport. I imagine that backstroke and freestyle use different muscle groups, for instance, so if it weren’t for the cultural factor that the same people usually train for both, it’d be quite possible to have someone who was an excellent backstroker but mediocre freestyler, or vice-versa. So you could say that someone who’s an excellent freestyler and also an excellent backstroker has the opportunity to win two medals, but then, so could someone who’s an excellent gymnast and an excellent boxer. Except that cross-training between gymnastics and boxing is much rarer than cross-training between backstroke and freestyle.
While true, I did say “likely.” It’s interesting to note that one of the athletes she’d be chasing Is a sprinter, Andre de Grasse, but de Grasse does have three events he’s won medals in. I think McIntosh needs more than his seven medals to truly exceed him, true, but she could end up with twice that many or more. She is also setting world records, something de Grasse has never done; even accounting for more events in swimming, McIntosh could be clearly more dominant by the time she is done.
The other interesting ones are the two Canadian hockey players, Jayna Hefford and Hayley Wickenheiser, who each have five medals but of course can only win one per Olympics. I mean, that’s a hell of a thing, winning the only medal you can evey year from 1998 to 2014. But on the other hand
She’d have to win at both Los Angeles and Brisbane to really establish herself above anyone else.
Not that I’m aware of. A good decathlete would beat me in all ten events, but wouldn’t be among the world elite in any of them. They’ll be a very good pole vaulter, and a very good shot putter, etc., but not as good as those who specialize in that event.
There are also schedule and fatigue issues, but this is enough of a hijack already.
Summer McIntosh sounds amazing, and three world records in the same meet is fantastic, but just comparing medal counts across sports doesn’t mean much.
I guess I’m out of touch with the sporting world. I thought this thread might be about apples.
So they are basically a “Jack of Ten Trades”?
It definitely seems more common for a top swimmer to be competitive across multiple events, compared to track athletes or other sports. For someone like Summer, the issue becomes trying to fit in all the events. She’s world-class at the 200m freestyle and backstroke events too, but there isn’t really time to race so many events at one meet.
Or how about this: Looking at the heat sheets for this meet, I see that 4 years ago Summer set the 13-14 Canadian age group record in the 1500m freestyle at 16:15. That time is 13 seconds faster than the fastest competitor’s entry time at these senior Canadian trials. As far as I can tell, Summer has never raced the 1500 again in competition since that race. Based on what she did in the 800m this week, she’d probably be second-fastest in the world if she raced it right now, behind Katie Ledecky.
I looked up Michael Phelps’s results from the 2008 Olympics, where he won 8 gold medals. They were in freestyle and butterfly, plus individual medley, freestyle relay, and medley relay. That seems to be the same sort of combination as McIntosh. I suspect there’s something about freestyle and butterfly that allows someone to be world-class at both. And if you’re great at two strokes, that would lead to success at the IM.
I was thinking it was a new hardware announcement from the Worldwide Developers Conference.
Hm, I was thinking of Jesse Owens, but on checking Wikipedia, it looks like he didn’t have any particular accomplishment in any of the throwing sports.
Still picked up four gold medals in one Olympics, though.
I think Carl Lewis won the 100, 200, 4x100 relay, and long jump in a single Games; Owens was probably the same. For golds in a single Olympics is phenomenal; but I can’t imagine any track or field athlete surpassing that.
Main way I could see it happen would be a middle-distance runner/hurdler. 400, 4x400, 4x400 mixed, 800, and 400 hurdles. Perhaps Femke Bol could add the 800 to her repertoire? She’ll need a lot of good teammates as well, though - ones that could get the relay teams through qualifying while she rests up for the finals and her solo events.
Another possibility might be to do the Jesse Owens/Carl Lewis and tack on a triple jump.