Just turned 21 and the youngest member of the Great Britain shooting team at London 2012, she has come a long way in a short time.
With her father Donald Scotland's fourth most-capped marksman and her mother, Shirley, an MBE with four Commonwealth Games medals, there is no surprise that she should have targeted shooting as her chosen sport.
At 19, McIntosh won two gold medals and a bronze at the last Commonwealth Games in Delhi and, if she considers herself an outside bet for a medal in her first Olympic Games, it does not dilute the dream.
Not that there was much glamour around when she first became aware of the sport she had been born into.
"My earliest memories are being a toddler hanging about in the club room of Edinburgh University Rifle Club – my parents were members of the EU Alumni club – and the various other members taking it in turns to keep an eye on me," she recalls. "But my first memories of actually shooting are probably aged 10, shooting off a rest and freaking out about how heavy the rifle was.
"I generally hated sports at school. I was a really gangly, unco-ordinated kid and I didn't do so well in teams but I was still super competitive which was a really bad mix. I was pretty good at tennis and I enjoyed it but I don't think I'd have ever been a successful player. I'd like to think that if I hadn't found shooting I'd have found another sport but I don't know what that would have been.
"My first real success was in my first competition in Women's Air Rifle. I was 14 or 15 and I shot at a Scottish Grand Prix where you are put into a class based on your average. Because I had no average I was in D Class but I shot so well in my match, the organisers had to put me up to C Class and I still won.
"The big turning point on a national level was winning the British Championships – Junior Ladies Air Rifle – in 2008. I didn't shoot fantastically but it was a real boost. Internationally, it was later the same year where I shot a Scottish record at the Nordic Championships. It was good to know I could do it abroad."
Striking gold twice at a Commonwealth Games while still a teenager might be seen as precocious but she believes it was important for her to establish her own identity. There is certainly no chance of her going into an Olympics with an inferiority complex even if the standard of competition moves up a few notches.
"I still can't find the words to properly describe how I felt about those gold medals," she says. "In some ways it's turned my life upside down but in other ways it's pretty much the same as it was before.
"I still don't have much of a life outside my sport and I still have my ups and downs but now the press report on it and people know who I am – other than just Shirley and Donald McIntosh's daughter. And that's nice – to be able to trade on your own name."
For the past few years, she has dedicated herself completely to her sport, her only escapism being science fiction and fantasy novels, although she does admit to spending an inordinate amount of time attached to her PlayStation.
"Now, I'm just working in short, intense bursts up to the Olympics. I'm not doing massive four-hour training sessions but shorter, more focused sessions to replicate match conditions. The GB back-up is massively important, the physio and sports psychology support particularly. I'm still bouncing stuff off my coaches and feeding back to them how everything is going.
"China and the US are the ones to watch but you can never discount the Germans, the Russians, the French. Technically, there's probably not a massive difference between the girls at the top. All it'll come down to is who can get it together on the day. Obviously, a medal is the dream but, realistically, I want to make the final in one of my two events. Once you're in the final, anything can happen."
Time is on McIntosh's side to achieve her goal of winning at least one Olympic gold, but that is not her only dream.
"My ambition outside of shooting is to write a book," she says. "I've already started one and have a plot outline and everything, I just need to find the time to write it."
