Article content Long before her daughter became one of the most accomplished swimmers in Canadian Olympic history, Jill McIntosh had an amusing window into her competitiveness. Summer McIntosh was just a little kid then, far from her world-class swimming form and a good decade before her whirlwind, three gold, one silver medal tour de force at the Paris Games this past summer. Young Summer loved sports, be it running or swimming or whatever contest Jill and her husband Greg signed her up to play.
So imagine their amusement the time the parents found a soccer trophy in the trash can of their Etobicoke home. See, Summer’s team had just lost a championship game and in her still-developing competitive brain she couldn’t quite fathom why they’d hand some hardware to her. “She was like, ‘they were better than us,'” Jill McIntosh said with a laugh recalling their daughter’s reaction.
“She has a big respect for competitors. She thought it was crazy that she got the same trophy as someone who had an 8-0 record and they had like an 0-8 record.” There was a brief moment when the parents wondered whether they should intervene.
“Greg said to leave it,” Jill McIntosh recalled. “He said ‘That’s brilliant.’” It’s a cute part of Summer’s backstory now, but in its own way a precursor of the ambition and drive that has taken her to places few athletes her age have gone.
The winning baubles are piling up now in the form of medals — an unprecedented run for a.
