The most anticipated event of the World Aquatics Championships happens this weekend
CBC
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Today in Fukuoka, Japan, Canada won its second medal of the World Aquatics Championships as veteran diver Pamela Ware took bronze in the women's 3-metre springboard event. That followed Wednesday's bronze by Caeli McKay in the women's 10m platform.
Ware's medal was the fourth of her career at the world championships and the first in eight years. The 30-year-old from Longueuil, Que., hadn't reached the podium in a solo event at the worlds since 2013.
Today's bronze also completed Ware's comeback from a disastrous performance at the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo, where she missed the 3m final after aborting a dive and jumping into the water feet first. She stepped away from competition, including last year's worlds, before returning in May at a World Cup stop in Montreal.
Following today's bronze win, Ware told CBC Sports' Devin Heroux that she thought about quitting the sport after her Olympic failure. "I was traumatized by it for about a year," she said.
Diving competition concludes Saturday with two finals. Ware and Bryden Hattie will compete in the mixed 3m synchronized event at 2:30 a.m. ET. Canada's Nathan Zsombor-Murray is in the men's 10m platform at 5:30 a.m. ET. Both events will be streamed live on CBCSports.ca, the CBC Sports app and CBC Gem.
After that, the world championships' marquee sport enters the spotlight as swimming takes over the pool. Competition begins Saturday night in Canadian time zones and the first medal races go Sunday morning.
The opening finals session includes the most anticipated race of the entire meet: the women's 400m freestyle. It's a three-way showdown between the reigning Olympic champion, one of the greatest swimmers of all time, and the 16-year-old phenom who holds the world record.
The latter, of course, is Canada's Summer McIntosh. In her Olympic debut two years ago in Tokyo, McIntosh placed fourth in the 400m freestyle as a 14-year-old. The gold and silver medallists were Australia's Ariarne Titmus and the United States' Katie Ledecky — the women she'll battle for the world title on Sunday.
WATCH | Canada's McIntosh returns to Japan as a favourite:
Since the Olympics, McIntosh has continued her meteoric rise. At last year's world championships in Hungary, she won the 400m individual medley and 200m butterfly titles to become the first Canadian swimmer ever to capture multiple gold medals at the same world championships. She also grabbed a silver in the 400m freestyle, which Ledecky won for the fourth time at worlds after Titmus declined to defend her title.
Then came McIntosh's breathtaking performance at the Canadian trials this past spring in her hometown of Toronto. She set two women's world records there, including a 3:56.08 in the 400m freestyle that erased Titmus' 3:56.40 from last year's Australian trials and easily eclipsed Ledecky's winning time of 3:58.15 from last year's worlds.
The world record could fall again on Sunday as these three women are sure to push each other to their limits in their first meeting at a major championship since the Tokyo Olympics. But who comes out on top is anyone's guess.
Ledecky, 26, has the eye-popping resumé: including her four titles in the 400m freestyle, the American has won an incredible 14 individual gold medals at the world championships and another six at the Olympics. Titmus, 22, took the 400m freestyle world title from Ledecky in 2019 before winning double gold (in the 200 and 400 free) at the Tokyo Olympics. McIntosh, a decade younger than Ledecky and six years younger than Titmus, already owns one more world title than the Australian and is a good bet to capture her first Olympic gold medal(s) next summer in Paris. Oh, and she's the fastest women's 400m freestyler of all time. At 16.
