Word – Léon Marchand: The French Swimmer Who Is Carrying His Country on His Back

The French swimmer Léon Marchand understood that he would be his country’s marquee athlete at the Paris Games, and he surely is. Event workers stop him to sneak in selfies. A giant photo of him on the starting blocks adorns a skyscraper. Cameras are trained on him everywhere he goes.

But Marchand’s star turn didn’t begin just this week. Even in the months leading up to the Games, his growing fame was evident thousands of miles away in Arizona, where he was swimming for Arizona State. After a road meet at the University of Arizona, fans lined up to have him sign whatever they had handy — a swim cap, Nike Jordans, a scrap of paper.

He was asked if this happened at every meet.

“Just this year,” he said.

Marchand, 22, has ascended to the top of the swimming world just in time for his home country to host the Games, and as one of France’s best — and earliest — hopes for Olympic gold.

Carrying the weight of a nation’s hopes can be an uncommonly heavy burden for any athlete, and Marchand will not bear it alone, of course. Victor Wembanyama, the 7-foot-4 sensation who just completed his rookie season with the N.B.A.’s San Antonio Spurs, will lead France’s men’s basketball team. Teddy Riner, one of the best judokas in history, will look to claim a medal at a sixth straight Games. The World Cup winner Thierry Henry is coaching France’s men’s soccer team, and the pressure to deliver will be just as intense in a handful of sports — rugby, cycling, tennis — that France loves the most.

But swimming is one of the Olympics’ marquee events, and that is turning a different kind of spotlight on Marchand, whose profile has grown exponentially since the day last summer when he broke Michael Phelps’s last remaining world record by more than a second. He is entered in four individual events in Paris, and is a threat to win a medal in all of them.

His first chance could come Sunday in his signature event, the one he used to knock Phelps out of the record book: the 400-meter individual medley.

“It does feel weird,” Marchand said. “Because when I went to Tokyo, I was nobody. I was just a random swimmer. Just happy to be in the final. This year is going to be different because I want to win gold. And it’s at home.”

Pool Genes

It is no surprise that swimming — or even butterfly, the sport’s most difficult stroke — came naturally to Marchand: Both his mother, Céline Bonnet, and his father, Xavier Marchand, were Olympic swimmers for France.

Marchand was 4 or 5 when his parents enticed him to swim 25 meters of butterfly in their local pool in Toulouse, France, by promising him McDonald’s if he could make it across without stopping or clinging to the edge. He easily earned his fast-food reward. But because his parents also had a keen understanding of the commitment the sport requires, they took care never to force it upon either of their two sons. (Léon’s younger brother, Oscar, found that he liked swim meets but not the training, so he decided to play basketball instead.)

Marchand even quit swimming for a couple years as a child, partly because he was bored: He was so much faster than his teammates in practices that he often found himself spending far too much of his time waiting at the wall, shivering, for them to catch up.

He eventually returned to the pool, but when Paris won the hosting rights to this summer’s Games in 2017, Marchand was only just starting to take the sport more seriously. The idea of swimming in an Olympics, let alone being a face of one, wasn’t tangible. Within two years, though, he began to break through on an international level, winning a bronze medal at the world junior championships in 2019 and setting a national record in the process.

In 2020, facing a crossroads, Marchand made two decisions: He began to work with a mental trainer to address the nervousness that he felt was holding him back. And he sent a cold email to a coach he thought might be able to guide him to the top.

That coach was Bob Bowman, a man who had plenty of experience with the Olympics and high expectations: He had coached Phelps for all 28 of his Olympic medals.

Marchand was looking to swim for a college program in the United States, and he asked Bowman, who was then the head coach at Arizona State University, if he might consider having him on his team. The coach’s only familiarity with the Marchand name at that point was Marchand’s father, Xavier, but he looked up Léon’s times and was excited by his potential.

“I had no idea he’d be this good,” Bowman said.

Success, though, was not a straight line. In the months after setting his first French record, and before he reached out to Bowman, Marchand said he began experiencing stress and nervousness before meets. In the spring of 2020, he began working with Thomas Sammut, a mental performance coach for the Olympic sprint champion Florent Manaudou and other top French athletes. Sammut said Marchand told him that he felt as if he was swimming in fear of performing poorly.

“When we first started talking, he had asked me if this high level necessarily meant living with this constant tension,” Sammut wrote in an email interview that was translated to English. “Not at all,” Sammut reassured him, adding that “he could choose his own path.”

They started speaking regularly. Marchand learned to use breathing exercises to focus himself before races and calm himself at bedtime. But the foundation of their work, Sammut said, was changing Marchand’s outlook from swimming in pursuit of results to seeking personal and professional happiness through a sport that challenged him.

That would jibe with the message Marchand was soon getting from Bowman: The challenge of the Olympics, the coach told his new star pupil, is not necessarily swimming the events. It is swimming the events in a noisy and high-stakes environment.

When Marchand arrived in Tempe, Ariz., it felt like “the other side of the planet” to him, but that was what he had in mind. He blended in among the other students his age, attending computer science classes, playing video games and learning to love hamburgers, and he began to shed his shyness. He built trust in Bowman, who in one of their first conversations had offered Phelps’ warm-up routine when Marchand mentioned he was struggling with warming up for races. He has used it at every meet since.

Putting aside the inherent unfairness of any Phelps comparison, Marchand has his own style in the pool. He’s equally talented in the 200-meter breaststroke and butterfly events, a pairing so uncommon that the finals of both will be contested on the same night. (The French swimming federation successfully lobbied for more time between the events to give Marchand his best chance for medals in both.)

His 6-foot-2 frame is not particularly imposing, but Bowman describes him as “fishlike” in the water. Phelps, who called Marchand’s record-breaking 400 I.M. race live for NBC at last year’s world championships, deemed it a “perfect” swim.

“Bob is giving him the tricks,” Phelps cheered from the broadcast booth as Marchand inched closer to erasing his last world record. He pointed out that even on the grueling event’s final turn, Marchand had undulated underwater for the full distance allowed by the rules, a sure sign of Bowman’s tutelage.

And before he presented Marchand with the gold medal, one of three he won at the worlds, they talked about how Marchand could go even faster. Marchand’s freestyle split, the former record-holder told the new one, was nearly a second-and-a-half slower than Phelps’s had been.

Showtime

Marchand’s first preview of what this Olympics may be like for him came last June in Rennes, France. He had returned for the qualifying meet for the world championships and found fans waiting for him outside the pool in the small city in northwest France.

“That was kind of shocking,” Marchand said. “I just wanted to focus on my races and stuff. But you can’t really do that. You can’t ignore people. I’m still learning.”

His parents said that Léon’s rising popularity over the last year sometimes scares them. “We try as hard as we can to protect him and keep him sane. Live like a normal family, in fact,” Xavier and Céline wrote in an email.

Other French athletes have spoken about the pressure they will face at this Games. In an interview with French media, Wembanyama said that if the French team doesn’t win gold, “I would see it as a failure if I think we could have done better.” Riner, the French judoka, acknowledged that all of his previous success now pales in comparison to the challenge — and the expectations — he will carry into a Games on home soil.

“I know the sensation, the feeling of winning a gold medal,” he said in an interview at a New York Times fashion conference earlier this month. “But, in Paris, with the family and friends, it’s very different. That means a lot of pressure. So I need to win this medal.”

That same challenge is in front of Marchand. It has been years in the making, but so has his preparation: in mile after mile in the pool under Bowman’s expert gaze, and in his sessions with Sammut, who has reminded him that pressure is subjective, and that Marchand can process it in his own way. His way?

“It’s going to be like a party, a swimming party,” Marchand said. “All the best swimmers will be there just to race as fast as they can.”

Steven Moity contributed reporting. Alain Delaqueriere contributed research.