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“I hate losing more than I like winning, and I think that’s a mentality that I’ve carried with myself throughout my entire career, and that’s really what gets my hand on the wall first most of the time,” said McIntosh. “The feeling right now is something that I never want to feel again. This is what I felt in Fukuoka 2023 after the 400 free (where she finished fourth), what I felt at the Olympics in Paris when I got silver in the 400 free. Moments like this is really what I think about in training when I’m dying during a hard set and I need to keep pushing.”

It was a magnificent, towering, indelible race: McIntosh in lane three, 28-year-old Ledecky in lane four, 23-year-old Pallister in lane five. On the blocks, Ledecky stared across at McIntosh, and McIntosh looked elsewhere. Then Ledecky controlled the pace from the start. That wasn’t McIntosh’s plan.

“(We wanted) the opposite of what happened,” said McIntosh’s coach, Fred Vergnoux. “We knew the race would go out 4:01, and the race went 4:01, but the idea was for McIntosh to be faster than that, and then to make them suffer, you know?”

McIntosh is the fastest 400-metre freestyler in the world right now — she was over two seconds faster than Ledecky in the 400 free here — but she didn’t make them suffer. McIntosh was fit enough; she nearly broke that unbreakable 200 butterfly record two days earlier. Her freestyle, which she hasn’t always trusted, was good enough. Her turns, too.

But this was racing a god, and we saw that incredible rarity from this incredible athlete: McIntosh lost control. She was supposed to up the tempo around the 150-metre mark; the only time she led the race was by 0.14 seconds with 100 metres to go. Listening to her afterward, you remembered this was only the second time she has swum this race at a major meet, and the first time she had been in a distance race of this quality and intensity. It showed.

“I think I didn’t stay in the moment as well,” said McIntosh. “I was a little bit all over the place. I was thinking too much, because there’s a lot of time to think in an 800.”

She wasn’t kidding. She talked about how she thought too much about Ledecky being beside her — thinking about keeping up, and about keeping Ledecky from taking over. She talked about how she had raced Ledecky so many times and how she could tell Ledecky had a lot left, and she didn’t feel the same. Vergnoux said McIntosh also changed her style a bit: looking right toward the end of legs instead of just keeping to her preferred left-side breathing pattern.

“Doing things that she never does in training,” said Vergnoux. “The breathing pattern was not usual, the way she was turning. I think she was maybe overthinking.”

McIntosh likes to say she doesn’t feel nerves so much as adrenalin, but then that’s easier to say when you almost never lose. This was the only race she swam here where she wasn’t a favourite, and even that is understating the case. McIntosh has three gold medals and will likely add a fourth Sunday in the 400 individual medley. But this was the greatest peak.

“Just a master,” said Vergnoux of Ledecky. “Like the van Gogh of painting. Just in control from the first stroke to the last.”

Even with all that, the race was a duel. Ledecky pushed, and McIntosh was right on her shoulder. On the other side Pallister (the bronze medallist in the 1,500) went, too, and was tied with McIntosh at 400 metres. They were separated by milliseconds, but Ledecky was in charge. Vergnoux knew early that this would be difficult.

And McIntosh faded, which makes sense. She swam 8:05.07 at the trials, yes, but has only been training for this race for seven months. Ledecky kicked and finished in 8:05.62, and Pallister kicked and finished in 8:05.98. No women’s 800 has ever been this fast and this close.

“I mean, I think I’ve been a part of a race of the century maybe six times in the last decade,” said Ledecky. “It’s up to you guys to say what is the race of the century, or the race of the meet.

“I mean, this is my favourite event. It was my first gold (at the 2012 Olympics). I mean, even in practice, if I’m doing 800s I kind of tell myself — I kind of have this fake rule, like, I don’t lose 800s.”

She’s only lost one since 2013, to McIntosh at a minor meet. If you squinted, you could almost see Ledecky’s competitive steel in her answers — the way she downplayed the greatness of the race, the way she opened her press conference by saying: “I mean, it was a fabulous race, 8:07.29 getting third. That’s under the championship record.”

Ledecky didn’t mention Pallister’s time; just McIntosh’s. Maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe the desire and pride that has driven Ledecky to be this great at age 28 is a volcano and this is how it erupts. She did admit the race was stressful at times, sure, but also that she slept well all week.

There has probably never been a race that should make you appreciate Ledecky more than this. And to see her in that furnace, surrounded and pressed but still the alpha of all alphas, should make you appreciate just how significant it was that this was the task that an 18-year-old wunderkind decided to take on.

And this will be fed into McIntosh’s furnace every day, but it was a measure of the power of this race, the depth of it, that McIntosh in one breath was defiant: “I mean, this isn’t my favourite race, but that definitely will fuel me to continue to do it until I master it, and I go the times and execute it the way I want, stand on top of the podium at the international level.”

And she also talked about how this gave her flashbacks to deep disappointments, and she said: “I mean, it’ll definitely take some time. This is a new event for me, and I have lots to learn in it. And yeah, we’ll have to see where it takes me the next few years heading into L.A., whether I … I don’t know.”

This race. The last 200, Ledecky told herself to trust her legs and she could, and McIntosh couldn’t. Ledecky said that if her season ended at her world record in this event in May, her first in the 800 since 2016, she would have been satisfied and that took the pressure off; McIntosh didn’t have that. Again, it’s incredible she tried this.

“I told you many times, we don’t value this girl, what she’s doing,” said Vergnoux. “Everybody’s like, why she doesn’t win? She’s not a machine, you know. She’s 18 years old, a girl that swims against the best in the world. And she decided to do that. All the way.

“Now, she’s going to learn from that. But she made a big statement, a massive statement of: I want to win five gold medals. What does it mean? Means I need to beat Ledecky. I think that’s, excuse my French, big balls to do that for a young girl.”

He said that was the most intense he had ever seen her after a race, and that it was one of the very best races he had ever seen. McIntosh came into this race with three world records on the books, with a near world record in the 800, with a near world record in the most unbreakable world record race, and this was swimming Valhalla.

She will swim the 400 IM Sunday to complete an incredible week. Michael Phelps won five individual gold medals (and two relay golds) at the 2007 world championships as practice for his eight-medal epic in Beijing 2008, which became the apex of his — or anyone else’s — career. McIntosh is rehearsing for Los Angeles three years before the Olympics arrive, which made her chase different. This isn’t building to a peak next year; this is building toward mountains that remain in the distance. Phelps’s goal was obvious: break Mark Spitz’s record of seven golds in a single Olympics. For McIntosh, nobody can measure the altitude of the peaks in her future.

This meet was one, and Summer aimed for the highest peaks of the sport. She fell just short.