As a Canadian I couldn’t help but to be drawn to swimming over the last week and a half after summer McIntosh absolutely blew up everyone’s TVs and media feeds across Canada.

Now this begs me to wonder a few things. Is there a specific race that swimmers see as “the” race? Like in track the 100m is “the” race. I kinda assume it’s the 400 IM as it’s a 100m of each stroke but I would love to know swimmers thoughts.

Secondly, I was wondering why McIntosh had such a drastic change in lead from the 400 IM (over 7 seconds) and the 200 IM where she won but maybe an arms length or more. As a average viewer I kinda assumed summer would have a 3-4 second lead (I assumed u could just split the 400) so why does going from a 200 to a 400 race change things so drastically?