If all goes according to plan, the names of these three swimmers – American Katie Ledecky, Canadian Summer McIntosh, Australian Ariarne Titmus, in one order or another – will be pretty much a foregone conclusion. All three have held the 400m freestyle world record for the past 27 months, and all still hold at least one world record in other events. All three can lay claim to being the world’s dominant swimmers right now.
But what happens during those eight furious lengths of the pool – and the athletes’ ability to perform at their peak at the peak time – will determine whether the 400m freestyle, the most anticipated event of the opening night of the nine-day swim meet, fulfills its role as the race of the century or becomes just another piece of overcooked hype.
“I think it’s going to take a world record to win this race,” said Anthony Nesty, coach of the U.S. men’s team and Ledecky’s coach at the Gator Swim Club in Gainesville, Fla.
If so, the target time will be below 3 minutes 55.38 seconds, Titmus’ current mark at 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 swimmer in history, as evidenced by the world records she still holds in the 800 and 1,500 meters. Her basic personality, she likes to say, is “calm and happy.” She plays the piano, loves Bruce Springsteen and, as of last month, can call herself a published author.
At 17, McIntosh, a two-time Olympian, is an all-around phenom best known for her individual medley prowess; she holds the world record in the 400m individual medley. She’s a bubbly teenager whose mother was a 1984 Olympic swimmer and whose sister is a figure skater on the Canadian national team. She loves TikTok, malls and Drake.
Titmus, 23, is a middle-distance freestyle legend, world record holder in the 200 and 400 metres and the answer to the question: Who handed Ledecky the first individual defeat of her international career? Titmus is graceful and poised, unlike her almost equally famous coach, Dean Boxall, who became known during the Tokyo Games for his manic celebrations, with his fists raised and his hips thrust forward, during Titmus’ victories.
“I’ve got a lot more experience now,” Titmus told reporters in Brisbane last month. “… But at the same time, there’s a lot more attention on me. People outside of swimming expect me to win now, which is a whole other thing to deal with, but I think I’m pretty good at letting that go.”
Outside the pool, they have an undying respect for each other. Titmus, who was drawn to the sport in part by watching Ledecky win four gold medals at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games as a teenager in Tasmania, credits Ledecky with recalibrating what’s humanly possible in the longest 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 I’m partly responsible for the competitiveness of the event today,” Ledecky said. “I hope I opened people’s eyes to how you can swim certain races, what times are possible. … I know I have to be very fast in this event to compete for gold or even to win a medal.”
In recent years, the pace of human progress in the 400m freestyle has been astounding. Just 10 years ago, no female swimmer in history had managed to go under 3:59, but Ledecky, then 17, did it twice in two weeks in August 2014, clocking 3:58.86 and 3:58.37. For Rio 2016, Ledecky had the audacious goal of going under 3:56.
“At that point, we didn’t even have to talk about winning,” she recalls of conversations with her then-coach Bruce Gemmell, “because there was no way at that point that anyone in the world was going to set that goal.”
Between 1992 and 2012, six Olympic races, the margin of victory in the women’s 400m averaged 0.52 seconds, but in 2016, Ledecky clocked 3:56.46 to win gold by a staggering 4.77 seconds. Five years later, at the Tokyo Games (after a one-year postponement due to the pandemic), Titmus (3:56.69) caught Ledecky (3:57.36) in the final 50 metres to win gold. McIntosh, 14 at the time, faltered in the end and finished fourth.
The trio has spent the last two years passing the world record around like a hot potato. Ledecky’s record in Rio, his third time lowering the world standard, stood for nearly six years until Titmus (3:56.40) dethroned it at the 2022 Australian championships. The following year, McIntosh (3:56.08) took it from Titmus at the Canadian trials before the worlds, but Titmus (3:55.38) then reclaimed it at these worlds in Fukuoka, Japan, with a victory over Ledecky by nearly 3.5 seconds.
“It’s more satisfying in my races than knowing that to win I have to beat the best… that if I win, it’s in the toughest field in the world,” said Titmus, who after these world championships underwent surgery to remove benign ovarian tumors that were discovered by chance during an MRI scan on a painful hip.
The race is far from a three-way showdown. Anything can still happen, including an unforeseen calamity that could prevent one of the three swimmers from qualifying for the preliminaries on Saturday morning. Among the potential spoilers, New Zealand’s Erika Fairweather is one of only five swimmers in history to go under four minutes, and China’s Li Bingjie edged McIntosh for the bronze medal in Tokyo.
Recent results suggest that Titmus, McIntosh and Ledecky finished the race in that exact order. Titmus is the only person to have two sub-3:56 performances in history, both in the last year. At 17, McIntosh is the second-fastest runner of all time and he continues to improve.
Ledecky, meanwhile, has never dipped below 3:57 since Rio, although she came close to breaking that threshold with her 3:57.36 in Tokyo. She is 27, so time is no longer on her side. But Nesty, her coach, warns those who might be inclined to underestimate her. He thinks she still has a personal best, if not a world record, in her.
“I see it all the time in training,” Nesty said. “I don’t really believe in the idea that when you get older you can’t do the things you did when you were younger. Personally, I think she’s on track to have a great 400. Because the last couple of years she’s been good, but not at the level she wants to compete at. I think she’s ahead of her time for the most part.”