Léon Marchand Captured the 400 IM Olympic Gold and the Hearts of the French People

The biggest star of the Paris Games took down Michael Phelps’ Olympic record in the most difficult event, putting his uncanny physical gifts and work ethic on display in front of a roaring hometown crowd.

The 22-year-old Marchand won his first gold medal of the Paris Games, to the delight of the French fans. / Simon Bruty/Sports Illustrated

PARIS — The roars were deafening, rattling around La Défense Arena, pressing down on eardrums, vibrating the air. The screaming voices were urging the man of the hour, the day, the Olympiad, to go faster in pursuit of glory.

“It sounded like a soccer stadium,” said Carson Foster, an American tasked with trying to chase the man of the hour, the day, the Olympiad.

This wasn’t a soccer stadium; it was a swim meet, and it was the loudest four minutes I’ve ever heard in 32 years of covering the sport. It was a Frenchman in France, enjoying the biggest Olympic home-pool advantage since Australian Ian Thorpe “Thorpedo” in Sydney in 2000. And Léon Marchand met the moment.

Every time Marchand rose above the water’s surface to take a breath during the breastroke leg of the 400-meter individual medley, some 14,000 fans bellowed at him in unison. It was a rhythmic exhortation, pushing the 22-year-old from Toulouse further and further ahead in the third leg of the race, until it wasn’t even a race anymore. 

Marchand was fueled by the thunderous cheers from the crowd. / Simon Bruty/Sports Illustrated

All that remained over the final 100 meters was a coronation, and the pursuit of his own history. Marchand’s time of 4:02.95 took down Michael Phelps’ Olympic record in the most difficult event, but did not quite break his own world record of 4:02.50. (We appear to have the dreaded Slow Pool on our hands at these Olympics.) 

“My objective was to break a record tonight,” Marchand said. “I felt really good. In the last [lap], I took advantage of the crowd because I knew I was ahead, I knew I was an Olympic champion.”

That narrow miss of the record he set last year hardly mattered at the end. Marchand’s gold-medal rout of silver medalist Tomoyuki Matsushita of Japan and bronze medalist Foster delivered on expectations that were set Eiffel Tower-high last year, when he first erased Phelps’ 400 IM world record. Coached by Bob Bowman, the same man who mentored Phelps to a record 28 Olympic medals (23 of them gold), Marchand is now officially the biggest star of the Paris Olympics.

The son of two French Olympic swimmers had to leave the country to maximize his potential, inviting himself to swim for Bowman at Arizona State with a cold-call email. But France fully embraced its expatriate aquaman for these games, elevating him to a Victor Wembanyama or Kylian Mbappé level of celebrity.

“I felt really proud to be myself, and to be also French,” Marchand said. “It was an amazing time for me, and I was really living in the moment.”

The evening began with a festival atmosphere outside the area. French fans were chanting, singing and drinking outside La Défense Arena, waiting for the doors to open. They wore masks emblazoned with Marchand’s face. Or they carried cutout images of him. One little boy wore his Arizona State swim cap.

“Al-lez! Lé-on! Al-lez! Lé-on! Al-lez, Lé-on!” they chanted.

While Marchand won gold, Japan's Tomoyuki Matsushita took silver and the U.S.'s Carson Foster earned the bronze medal. / Simon Bruty/Sports Illustrated

And then they went inside and made more noise. The entire arena sang a French song in unison 12 minutes before the race. They cheered over the top of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” then they watched Marchand smoke the water.

They were on their feet and bellowing from the moment Marchand was introduced until after he touched the wall. When the Frenchman straddled the lane line and thrust his hands in the air, they exulted. When he blew them a kiss, they swooned. When he leaped from the pool and placed both hands on his hips, a conqueror looking down at his aquatic kingdom, they roared.

Then they sang the French national anthem with Marchand, who briefly allowed his eyelids to flutter closed while on the podium. He’s a perfect swimming machine—quite literally made for this moment—but he’s a human being who was savoring the perfect confluence of time and place and accomplishment.

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Bob Bowman isn’t one to get caught up in technical terms, so he describes the swimming study as “how your boat floats.” In more precise language, part of the Neptune Project in France was creating a hydrodynamic profile of its elite swimmers—essentially measuring how easily they go through the water.

One swimmer measured off the charts in the yearlong study: Léon Marchand.

“He has the best results I’ve ever seen,” says Ricardo Peterson, one of the data analysts who worked on the project. “By far.”

Simply put, Marchand is built to slice through a pool like nobody else. Swimmers have long talked about a vague-but-real “feel for the water,” and the French study may actually have quantified it.

Peterson and his colleagues identified “passive and active drag” affecting swimmers. Passive drag measured them in the gliding position primarily on starts and turns—when they are streamlined and not actively moving their limbs. Active drag measured them during actual swimming movements. Marchand was elite in both categories. 

“He’s almost like natural selection,” Peterson says of his body type. Legs create more drag than torso because they don’t float, and Peterson says Marchand is blessed with a larger and longer torso and shorter legs—much like Michael Phelps. Via nature or nurture, he also has an optimal swimming posture.

“He has a uniform body, in the streamline position, from shoulders to feet,” Peterson observes. “He’s an outlier in terms of morphological characteristics.”

The Frenchman doesn't have an imposing physique but his physical gifts are remarkable. / Simon Bruty/Sports Illustrated

When not gliding, Marchand is both ferocity and poetry in motion. His stroke technique is impeccable, and his underwater work might be the best in the world at this point. In the crucial 15 meters at the starts and turns when swimmers are allowed to be submerged, Marchand blows away his competition. There are greater drag forces on the surface than beneath it, so the work down below is critical.

“Léon is much, much better than anyone else underwater,” Peterson says. “His movement underwater is very symmetric, and he’s able to sustain his underwaters for a very long time. He can reduce drag by staying underwater. Comparable to other swimmers, he has a lower energy cost.”

That helps explain how he can do what he does without overwhelming physical prowess. Marchand on dry land is an unremarkable sight; he’s about 6'2" and not overly muscled. His handshake is as fluid as water—which, come to think of it, might be telling.

Some of this may simply come down to good genes. Marchand is the son of two French Olympic swimmers, Xavier and Céline, which certainly helps account for body type and “feel.” But the other element that has to be present in addition to physical gifts is work ethic. Marchand has that in abundance.

After selling himself to Bowman in a cold-call email, Marchand showed up at Arizona State as an accomplished swimmer but not a superstar—he’d competed in the Tokyo Olympics but wasn’t a medal threat. Nobody could have easily foreseen what he’s become. It’s the work he put in at the Mona Plummer Aquatic Center at ASU, under the tutelage of arguably the greatest IM coach of all time, that turned him the sensation he is today at age 22.

“He just pushes himself to the limit, and past the limit a lot of times,” says Hubie Kos, who swam with Marchand at Arizona State and will continue to do so at Texas, where Bowman recently moved. “I trained with a lot of people who don’t show the same kind of potential in practice that they do in meets, but Léon is quite the opposite. He has crazy practices.”

Adds another ASU swimmer, Grant House: “Everybody breaks down at our practices eventually, and I’ve only seen him break down about three times in three years. When he does it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, he’s human after all.’”

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Léon Marchand was standing underneath a maze of scaffolding underneath the stands in the arena when someone handed him a phone. He pressed it to his right ear. On the line: French president Emmanuel Macron.

“That was a first for me,” Marchand said. “He called me and told me that he was watching the final with all his family and everyone was kind of screaming on the phone.”

It might not be his last presidential call of the coming week. Marchand still has up to three races ahead: the 200 IM, 200 breaststroke and 200 butterfly. The 400 IM is his unbeatable event, but he will have a chance to win all the others, and certainly will be a medal threat in each.

The challenge now will be returning to earth and returning to the grind of this meet. Marchand has Monday off, but will dive back in with both the 200 fly and 200 breaststroke preliminaries and semifinals on Tuesday—a killer double, but one he has been planning to take on for a while now. The final in those events will be Wednesday, and then the 200 IM rounds begin on Thursday.

Marchand still has three events remaining: the 200 IM, 200 breaststroke and the 200 butterfly. / Simon Bruty/Sports Illustrated

If anyone has been coached for this multitasking, it’s Marchand. Bowman guided Phelps through incredible workloads and understands the other elements that come into play—all the press conferences, the drug testing, the warmups and warmdowns, and recovery work. Managing everything outside the swimming is where the Olympics becomes a real beast.

Marchand was sufficiently ready for this moment that Bowman didn’t have to do much pre-race coaching. There was nothing to discuss. If there was a message to convey, it could be boiled down to: Go be Léon.

“I don’t think we had to talk about the race,” Marchand said. “We were both ready to do what we had to do. I think before the race he was telling me to relax and stay happy. This was a pretty good chance for me to be home at the Olympics.”

It’s been a long time since a swimmer enjoyed this kind of home-pool advantage, if ever. France’s Léon Love-In was an audio bombardment that will echo through the rest of these Olympics.