Leon Marchand delivers as the new king of Olympic swimming

Jul 31, 2024, 09:20 PM ET

PARIS ​— ​LEON ​Marchand stood ​on​ the podium Wednesday night and looked nervously around La​ De​fense Arena, where ​balladeers w​ere ​​singing — or more accurately roaring in time with the count — every note of ​La Marseillaise​, the French national anthem.

Though he looked at once amused and skeptical, when the song finished he told me he was shy and didn’t like being centre-stage. He also happened to raise his voice along with us and broadly smile at the end.

And then he made a fast circuit of the arena, his pupils swirling brightly before he galloped through the doors.

But it wasn’t because he wanted to avoid the sudden spotlight. It was just that there was another race to get ready for.

A day later, Marchand won the 200-metre butterfly in a scintillating late-race surge to become the first French swimmer to win multiple individual golds at one Games. He had to be on the starting blocks 47 minutes after receiving his medal in the butterfly for the 200m breaststroke final. No Olympics swimmer had ever won an Olympic medal in the breaststroke and the butterfly – let alone in the same night to accomplish what may have seemed impossible.

As the crowd roared his name with every breath, he appeared unrattled, and unrelenting. With his triumph, the 22-year-old Marchand not only won the race but set an Olympic record with his time of 2:05.85. His arms outstretched toward the wall, then flung skyward as he glanced up to the videoboard to see those digits, Marchand smacked his fist into the water in exultation.

Among the athletes scheduled to compete in Paris, Marchand was one of the biggest names in town, projected to be the lingua franca of the Games, maybe France’s best shot at an Olympic stardust sweep and becoming the next Michael Phelps after ahead of the Games when he broke one of Phelps’s long-standing records in the 400m individual medley in 2023. Just five days into the 2024 Olympic Games, Marchand is delivering on every promise – and some – with three golds. The win, and roaring chants of the crown-obsessed French crowd, feel more and more like a coronation of the new king of swimming.

Describing Wednesday night as ‘indescribable’ on an Instagram post, and calling his first victory on Sunday night in the 400m IM ‘a dream come true’, Marchand is also, in the truest sense, experiencing ‘the next step’ in a career on which Marchand has modelled himself after Phelps – in his own ‘art of being’. Had it not been in the spotlight of world-class records and fame, it would have still been, in his own words, ‘just a 50-second swim’. It’s what he had been working towards for three years.

‘It’s like when destiny happens’ As Marchand’s coach at Arizona State since 2021, Herbie Behm spoke to ESPN this week about the star’s results: ‘I think in a lot of ways it has been sort of expected and [this] is what we talked about [during the recruiting process]. He knew this was opportunity for the Paris Olympics and we told him this is what we’re going to try to do to get you there. [But] it’s not always what you hope. And he still has to go out and challenge himself and still has to train hard.’

“To see him deliver has been incredible.”

SOON AFTER COMPLETING sixth in the 400m IM in his Olympic debut in Tokyo, Marchand moved on to Tempe, with the specific goal of competing in the 2024 Games, which would be held in his home country. He had selected the school largely to work with then-head coach Bob Bowman, who had coached Phelps.

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Both of his parents have been Olympic-class swimmers, his father Xavier having competed against Phelps, and one gets the impression that the family wanted to follow the US icon’s footsteps as closely as possible. Needless to say, hopes have not always aligned with reality.

Behm, now the head coach, was an assistant for the team when Marchand walked on to campus. He knew the young athlete had tremendous potential and was going to be good’ but winning an Olympic medal ‘was a long shot’.

That is, until the first day of practice.

Or, more specifically, the first 10 seconds of the first practice.

‘We’d just watched him get in [the pool] and we’d watched him kick underwater,’ Behm said, ‘and we just felt like we’d hit the lotto. And just to see the first time he pushed off the wall, just how he kicks and how he moves. It’s like: “My God, this kid is so good.” We knew he was going to be the best short-course [that is, the 25-yard length of the block-style pool most teams use for collegiate-level competition] swimmer who ever lived.’

But by the end of that first day, Behm was still reeling over the efficiency of Marchand’s kick, but not for long. All it took was one practice to be wowed by his work ethic and ‘insane endurance and speed’. It took only a short time for the rest of the NCAA swimming world to know just how special Marchand could be. By the end of his rookie season, he had won four Pac-12 championships and NCAA titles in the 200 IM and 200 breaststroke, while leading the Sun Devils to a sixth-place finish – the team’s best since 1982.

‘People recognised that by the time of Season Two he was the real deal.’

And although his personal goal was an Olympic medal, and he had spent much of his life this way, like so many European swimmers, he quickly bought into being a team member and ‘How you do anything is how you do everything,’ its unofficial motto. He hung with his teammates. He offered to swim any races at meets that would score team points, even if tiring him out for his A races. He capped a 4.0 GPA (computer science, his major) most semesters.

By the end of his third and final year at ASU – he became pro this spring, after his third and final college season – he was one of the most decorated swimmers in the history of collegiate swimming. He competed in virtually every race, in every stroke and distance, and won 10 NCAA titles and 17 Pac–12 titles, broke numerous collegiate and school records, and helped Arizona State to its first NCAA team title in April. He also won five gold medals at the world championships in 2022 and 2023, and smashed the Phelps record in the 400 IM.

His dreams of gold at the Olympics felt that much closer with every fraction of a kilo of silverware he won.

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But apparently Marchand applies the same intensity to everything he does, and even in his final semester, having been told that he wouldn’t be returning for senior year and might instead soon upon this place assume the mantle of global pop-culture superstardom, he took 18 academic credits.’ Yet that wildcard mentality, Behm believes, at least partly explains his success now.

‘You can’t be scattered in class then get to practice and be wired and amped and at meditation time not study and not really care when you wanna sleep or what you’re gonna eat and when you’re going to bed and if you’re going to bed or anything it all has to be the same kind of scheduled rigorousness,’ Behm said. ‘So if your thing is raising the bar on yourself, it has to be everything. … Now Léon has some other challenges obviously with the media stuff and all that and that starts to take his attention away from swimming. But in a way that helps him because he knows to only look at what I’m doing here and he’s trained his nervous system to always be in the now.

So when it’s time to get up on the starting blocks and race, he is in the moment rather than thinking ‘Next, next’ and getting ahead of himself.

And scoring at the college level – and training to swim whatever event was called for – is part of the reason Marchand believes he was able to show up in so many finals in the same night.

‘Then there was almost two hours between races,’ Marchand said Wednesday. ‘I’ve done way harder I think in the NCAA season.

SHY HE MIGHT BE, but Marchand is also ubiquitous in Paris. His face can be found plastered all over the city as well as in advertisements for Louis Vuitton and Omega (in a combined campaign with Phelps), on the front pages of the local newspapers and the leading French websites and broadcasts.

Bowman is with Marchand as part of the French coaching staff, and the first thing the coach did after the pair arrived in Paris was look out for ways around the arena so that Marchand wouldn’t be ‘swarmed’ by fans waiting to see him – something he’d picked up from his years with Phelps.

He has [an idea how smothering it will be],” Bowman told The Washington Post before the competition commenced. “But until you live through it, you don’t really have an idea.

And while the swimming is always among the most popular of the Olympic sports, on those nights so far, amid the raucous, proud humanity of France, the crowds have represented some of the hot tickets for these Games. On Sunday, in his first crack at a medal, it felt more than it did a swimming one. The French flags were omnipresent, there were ad libbed chants and songs, a loyal unison ‘Allez! Allez!’ for every stroke in the breaststroke lap, and a nearly deafening roar upon his touch.

the US trials were in a football stadium and there were a lot of people there and there was noise, but … that wasn’t nearly as loud as that was American Carson Foster, who took bronze in that race, commented after: It was really cool. Everyone knows they’re cheering for Léon and rightfully so, but it was fun, it was a special experience. It was an honour to swim with [him] in his home country, in his home Olympics.

Léon Marchand wins gold for France in 400-meter IM

Léon Marchand earns first career Olympic gold medal in 400-meter individual medley.

When he pulled himself out of the pool using his starting block instead of swimming to the wall, his arms shot into the air, and the fans launched a shower of applause. ‘Jimmy Don jumped over the fence into the crowd to be one of the first guys to embrace him,’ Behm told me, with pride. ‘He’d been Marchand’s roommate.’

Moments later, French President Emmanuel Macron called him with congratulations.

‘He said he was watching it with his family and everyone was screaming on the phone,’ Marchand said of their convo. ‘It was a little funny.’

The cheering burst into a huge ‘Lé-on, Lé-on’ chant, and then, as the national anthem started up over the loudspeakers, they sang it all together. As Marchand made his victory lap around the arena, gold medal heavy around his neck, you could spot the Kazakhstan team’s officials, or the Romanians’, filming him on their phones, knowing that, someday, this could be seen as the unofficially inaugural event for what will now have to be a new era.

That was more of the same on Wednesday, in both heats and both medal ceremonies. ‘I usually hate the spotlight, so running as fast as I possibly can put in the semi-finals, it was just the crowd kind of propelling me,’ Marchand said.

‘I wasn’t, like, “Ah, I want to drown this out,”’ Marchand said. ‘I was really listening, trying to hear during the 200 fly because the 200 fly was insane on the last 50 [metres] because I was just catching up to Kristof [Milak] and I could hear the crowd just screaming, and then also in the [breaststroke], and every time I take a breath I can hear this huge noise, so it’s pretty cool.

There are, in fact, two further opportunities for Marchand to add to his medal count – in the 200m IM on Friday and in the French 4x100m medley relay on Sunday, the final day of competition; Behm thinks that of all his achievements, a relay medal would be the one they’d be proudest of.

And it would be a chance for him to leave his historic Games the same way Phelps did in 2008, leading his US team to the gold medal and a world record in the process.

‘I think he views a relay medal as being more significant than an individual medal,’ Behm said. ‘That’s the way most people see it in the NCAA system. If he can somehow help facilitate having three other guys come back with a medal, specifically a gold, that would be the coolest thing for him.

And there’s the 2008 relay that’s fixed in his mind, and so if he has the opportunity to do that for France, then of course he will do it. He’s really aware of the history.’