If all goes according to form, the names of those three swimmers — the United States’ Katie Ledecky, Canada’s Summer McIntosh, Australia’s Ariarne Titmus, in one order or another — will have been all but preordained. All three have held the world record in the 400 freestyle within the past 27 months, and all still hold at least one world record in additional events. All three can make a case as the dominant female swimmer in the world at this moment.
But what transpires over those eight furious lengths of the pool — as well as the athletes’ ability to summon their optimum performances at the optimum time — will determine whether this 400 freestyle, the most anticipated event of the opening night of the nine-day swim meet, fulfills its race-of-the-century billing or becomes just another overcooked bit of wishful hype.
“My guess is it will take a world record to win that race,” said Anthony Nesty, men’s coach for the United States and Ledecky’s coach with Gator Swim Club in Gainesville, Fla.
If so, that makes the target time something below 3 minutes 55.38 seconds, Titmus’s current mark from the 2023 world championships.
The three protagonists have different temperaments, swimming styles and even specialties.
Ledecky, 27, is a four-time Olympian, a seven-time Olympic gold medalist and the greatest distance freestyler in history, as evidenced by the world records she still holds at 800 and 1,500 meters. Her baseline personality, she likes to say, is “quiet and happy.” She plays the piano, loves Bruce Springsteen and, as of last month, can call herself a published author.
McIntosh, at 17 already a two-time Olympian, is a versatile phenom best known for her individual medley prowess; she holds the world record in the 400 individual medley. She is a bubbly teenager whose mother was a 1984 Olympic swimmer and whose sister is on the Canadian national team as a figure skater. She loves TikTok, shopping malls and Drake.
Titmus, 23, is a middle-distance freestyle legend, the world record holder at 200 and 400 meters and the answer to the question: Who handed Ledecky the first individual defeat in her international career? Titmus is graceful and composed, in contrast to her almost-as-famous coach, Dean Boxall, who gained notoriety during the Tokyo Games for his maniacal, fist-pumping, hips-thrusting celebrations of Titmus’s victories.
“I have a lot more experience now,’’ Titmus told reporters in Brisbane last month. “ … But at the same time, there’s a lot more eyes on me. People outside of swimming are expecting me to win now, which is a whole different thing to manage, but I think I’m pretty good at letting that go.”
Outside of the pool, they profess their undying respect for each other. Titmus, drawn to the sport in part by watching Ledecky win four gold medals at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games when she was a teenager in Tasmania, credits Ledecky with recalibrating what is humanly possible in the longer freestyle races. McIntosh grew up in Toronto with a poster of Ledecky on the wall, along with a quote attributed to her: “Every race is a sprint. Some are just longer than others.”
“I hope that I’m part of the reason why [the event] is so competitive now,” Ledecky said. “I hope I’ve opened peoples’ eyes in terms of how you can swim certain races, what times are possible. … I know I have to be really fast in that event to compete for gold or even to win a medal.”
The pace of human advancement in the 400 freestyle in recent years has been breathtaking. As recently as 10 years ago, no female swimmer in history had been under 3:59, but then Ledecky, 17 at the time, did it twice in a two-week span in August 2014, going 3:58.86 and 3:58.37. For Rio in 2016, Ledecky had the audacious goal of getting into the 3:56s.
“At that point, we didn’t even have to talk about winning it,” she recalled of her conversations with her coach at the time, Bruce Gemmell, “because there was no way at that point that anyone else in the world was setting that as a goal.”
Between 1992 and 2012, a span of six Olympic races, the margin of victory in the women’s 400 averaged 0.52 seconds, but in 2016, Ledecky finished in 3:56.46 to take the gold by a staggering 4.77 seconds. Five years later at the Tokyo Games (following the one-year postponement because of the pandemic), Titmus (3:56.69) tracked down Ledecky (3:57.36) in the final 50 meters to claim the gold. McIntosh, 14 at the time, faded at the end and finished fourth.
The trio have spent the past two-plus years passing the world record around like a hot potato. Ledecky’s record from Rio, her third time lowering the world standard, stood for nearly six years, until Titmus (3:56.40) took it down at the 2022 Australian championships. The following year, McIntosh (3:56.08) took it from Titmus at the Canadian trials ahead of the world championships, but then Titmus (3:55.38) reclaimed it at those world championships in Fukuoka, Japan, a nearly 3.5-second win over Ledecky.
“It’s more satisfying in my races that to win, I have to beat the greatest … that if I do win, it’s in the toughest field in the world,” said Titmus, who following those worlds underwent surgery to remove benign tumors from an ovary, which had been discovered by chance during an MRI exam on a sore hip.
The race is far from a three-swimmer showdown. Anything could still happen, including an unforeseen calamity that might prevent one of the vaunted triumvirate from advancing out of the preliminary heats Saturday morning. Among potential spoilers in the field, New Zealand’s Erika Fairweather is one of only five women in history to go under four minutes, and China’s Li Bingjie outpaced McIntosh for the bronze medal in Tokyo.
Recent results would suggest a Titmus-McIntosh-Ledecky finish, in that precise order. Titmus owns the only two sub-3:56 performances in history, both coming within the past year. At 17, McIntosh is the second-fastest performer ever and still getting better.
Ledecky, meanwhile, hasn’t been under 3:57 since Rio, though she threatened that threshold with her 3:57.36 in Tokyo. She is 27, so time is no longer on her side. But Nesty, her coach, cautions anyone who might be inclined to count her out. He believes she still has a personal best, if not a world record, within her.
“I see it in practice all the time,” Nesty said. “I’m not a big believer in [the notion that] when you get older you can’t do the things you could when you were younger. Personally, I think she’s due for a great 400. Because over the last two years, they’ve been good but not at a level she wants to compete at. I think she’s well overdue for putting one together.”
