The swimmer has taken on an unprecedented challenge, that of competing in both the 200m butterfly and the 200m breaststroke, the events of which are held less than an hour apart. With his ability to propel himself underwater and recover quickly, he is a candidate for two new medals this Wednesday.
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He likes to try his hand at something never seen before. Léon Marchand is aiming for four individual gold medals in swimming at the Olympics? No Frenchman has ever tried. He is lining up for the 200m butterfly and 200m breaststroke? Never has an Olympics seen a swimmer (with a serious chance of winning) register such a double in his program. Especially since the combination of these two events is quite unusual. Athletes usually concentrate on their favorite stroke or opt for the crawl (“the base”) and another stroke. It turns out that the UFO Marchand has a predisposition for the breaststroke and the butterfly. Go for it. Except that by opting for this program, the Toulousain with a touch of American spirit has gotten himself into a real mess. Lining up for both races requires him to compete in heats, semi-finals and then finals, with an hour’s interval each time to catch his breath, on Tuesday and Wednesday, July 31, the day of these finals (8:37 p.m. for the 200m butterfly and 10:30 p.m. for the 200m breaststroke). To succeed, the 22-year-old swimmer relies on two fatal weapons: his glides and his recovery.
His impressive underwater undulations have become “the Marchand signature”. During his victorious final in the 400m medley at the Fukuoka World Championships a year ago, he wowed everyone by pushing his last stroke to the authorized limit of 15 meters. To 14.77m to be precise. “Oh my God, he’s still underwater”, exclaimed the legend Michael Phelps, now a commentator for US television. Same thing again on Sunday at La Défense. “We saw a Marchand underwater while the others were swimming [en surface]observes Roxana Maracineanu, Olympic vice-champion in Sydney and former Minister of Sports. It’s the little extra that makes all the difference, because underwater, you move much faster.”
“It’s been a work in progress since childhood.”
Marchand has the natural qualities needed for these glides, “a form of flexibility, elasticity, muscle structure in the segments and that is specific to each person,” analyzes Nicolas Castel, his coach in Toulouse. “I know that even if I had trained all my life, I would never have managed to do the same,” confesses Alain Bernard, the former swimmer who won the Beijing Games.
To achieve perfect mastery of this technique, Marchand repeats the same movements in each training session. “It’s something you work on from a very young age, and then you maintain it,” says Nicolas Castel. “It’s the fact of being technically perfect in all the strokes that also allows him to work on his glides,” notes Roxana Maracineanu. These repetitions also allow him “to get used to swimming with little air, because by spending more time underwater, you get less oxygen.”
“These races leave traces”
The other source of amazement is the ability of Sunday’s Olympic champion to string together races in record time. At the 2022 World Championships, it took him just 51 minutes to win silver in the 200m butterfly, climb onto the podium, then swim a second race that qualified for the 200m medley final (which he won). Based in the United States since the fall of 2021, he has become familiar with the American university championship and its formidable pace. “It trains you to dive every ten minutes to get your best performances,” confirms Roxana Maracineanu. “And he’s been doing it for three years without really wearing himself out.”
But the Paris challenge is a first: “He has never done so many races with such a high stake. And these races leave their mark on the body, it takes several hours, even several days to recover,” explains Alain Bernard. To lose as little time as possible, Marchand therefore rushes to his recovery as soon as he leaves the pool. If the details of his routine are not known, we know that it includes regular lactate tests, these blood samples allowing the level of muscular fatigue to be measured. Above all, we know that its main architect is called Bob Bowman, a luminary who coaches Marchand in the United States. The Games at a hellish pace, this former mentor of Phelps knows very well. In Athens or Beijing, the legend had swum five individual events. With, with one exception, gold to his name.
