Major honours
Canada was for a long time a programme with plenty of finalists but few golds. That changed once the country concentrated its high-performance training at the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre, built for the 2015 Pan American Games, and the turning point came at Rio 2016, when 16-year-old Penny Oleksiak shared gold in the women's 100m freestyle. The seven Olympic medals Oleksiak has since amassed are the most by any Canadian athlete in any summer sport. At Tokyo 2020, Maggie Mac Neil took the 100m butterfly. Then came Summer McIntosh. She swept the 200m butterfly, 200m individual medley and 400m individual medley at Paris 2024 to win three titles at 17, and took silver in the 400m freestyle behind Ariarne Titmus. At the 2025 Canadian trials, she broke the world records in both the 400m freestyle and the individual medley events in succession, moving Canadian swimming into an entirely different bracket.
Record comparison
Bars are scaled to the strongest team in this list.
Club legends
Rivalry
The women's 400m freestyle, fought out among McIntosh, Katie Ledecky and Ariarne Titmus, is the most closely watched triangle in 2020s swimming. An event that was a straight US-Australia duel at Rio and Tokyo is now a three-nation fight.