INDIANAPOLIS — The face of a blond, blue-eyed boy who competed in the Paris Olympics hides among a crowd of broad-shouldered college students at a public swimming pool.
Leon Marchand knows the spotlight will follow him this summer. But for now, he's trotting down a nondescript Midwestern staircase with his hands in his coat pockets. His 6-foot-2, 170-pound frame is indistinguishable from the hundreds of others gathered here in central Indiana for the NCAA Men's Swimming Championships.
He has spent the past three years in Tempe, Arizona, and even there, he says, strangers rarely recognize him.
“We're undercover,” added Arizona State teammate and fellow world champion Hubert Koss.
In a way, they're just kids playing Call of Duty and going to class. Marchand is majoring in computer science. He lived in a dormitory and ate in the dining hall. With his sharp French cheeks, curly mane and lean physique, he is often anonymous.
That is, until it explodes after being soaked in chlorinated water.
Marchand, 21, has also erased his vaunted record over the past three years.
Last summer, he chased Michael Phelps' last and longest record in his signature event, the 400-meter individual medley. He has set and broken several NCAA all-time records. At Indy on Wednesday, he started with a relatively tame breaststroke relay, then set an NCAA record in the 200-yard freestyle with his third-best stroke in the second relay an hour later. .
He'll probably win three individual events here by the end of the week. He could lead Arizona State to its first national title. And then we turn our careful, unflinching focus to Paris. He will enter the 2024 Olympics as a gold medal favorite in several local events. To the six French reporters who flew to Indianapolis and ran around the IU Natatorium to catch a glimpse of him, Marchand is a rising megastar.
But no, he doesn't shy away from the spotlight.
And no, he never imagined himself standing on a podium in Paris, with “La Marseillaise” filling his ears and his country brimming with pride.
This gentle boy from Toulouse, a humble city in the south of France, doesn't even have a fairy tale to tell about how the announcement that Paris would host the Olympics in 2017 ignited his Olympic dreams.
“Not really,” Marchand said. “I wasn't very good at swimming back then.”
Leon Marchand's slow start
Léon Marchand was born into a family of French swimming royalty: Olympic athlete father Xavier Marchand and mother Céline Bonnet, but as a child, Léon Marchand was not actively involved in sports.
He tiptoed inside and shivered. he was cold he was bored. So he quit.
He also dabbled in rugby and judo as a child. His parents never drove him to the pool. However, after being away for about two years, he returned to his Dauphins du TOEC, the swimming club where his father once trained. And he became friends with water.
But he wasn't a 12-year-old genius like Michael Phelps. “I was little,” he recalls, “and I wasn't really a racer. I didn't really want to win. I just swam — a little bit every day, just to have fun.”
He started getting serious when he started growing up. He fell in love with the sport as a teenager with precocious technique. At the age of 17, he won the French championship in the 200m butterfly. He set a national record in the 400 IM. And he decided to leave home.
College competition, academics, and community brought him across the Atlantic.
Cal was his first choice, but told him “quite late in the process” that they couldn't offer him a full scholarship.
So one evening in the spring of 2020, Marchand sent out a mass email to other college coaches asking the following questions: Can I swim for you? Bob Bowman, Phelps' longtime mentor and current head coach at Arizona State University, had never heard of Leon, but he knew Marchand's name. So he checked the child's time. Bowman emailed back almost immediately: we are very interested.
That night, Marchand could hardly sleep. For the next few weeks, confined to his home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he spoke with Bowman and others via FaceTime and Zoom. He considered several schools. He saw “amazing” facilities and strong training groups everywhere. “It was the coach who tipped the scales,” he said in 2022.
He chose ASU and Bowman both because of Bowman's experience and human connections. He spent time in France training for the Tokyo Olympics (where he finished sixth in the 400 IM at age 19) before enrolling at Arizona State University in the fall of 2021. Bowman picked him up from the airport. And soon they were at work.
Since then, they've worked and worked, honing Marchand's strokes and sculpting his body. Marchand maintains a strong relationship with his hometown coach, Nicolas Castel, who runs around Tempe's pool deck every day at 6 a.m. and again in the afternoon, coaching and encouraging his newest protégé. It's Bowman.
Of course, the days can be exhausting. When Marchand was in the early stages of learning English as a freshman, his brain would shut down at 5 p.m. Even now, in his third year, he has little time to relax, as his Olympic year class load is deliberately light. “Because of Coach Bowman, he's always really tired so he can't do anything,” he says with a laugh. He relaxes and watches Peaky Blinders and listens to music.
But their efforts are paying off. As a rising sophomore in 2022, Marchand swept her 200m and his IM in the 400m at the World Championships, establishing himself as the best male swimmer on the planet. He seemed shocked by his own meteoric rise — “It all happened so quickly,” he said that summer. After that, he continued to accelerate.
He was already something of a star when he landed in Fukuoka, Japan last July. Fans flocked to him and even his parents and younger brother. But what surprised them was his 400 IM. Phelps was broadcasting the race on Peacock, and as Marchand headed into the freestyle leg, he called out, “Oh!” “It's gone,” Phelps said of the world record Marchand had held since 2002, when he was two months old. And a time of 4:03.84 had remained untouched since the 2008 Beijing Games (Phelps broke his own record seven times, but no one else broke it for the next 15 years).
A minute later, after contacting the wall in Fukuoka, Marchand looked up and saw 4:02.50. I screamed like I was talking to myself: “What is happening?”
A few weeks later, he returned to Tempe and spent a year in relative anonymity that he recently described as “the most fun I've ever had.”
The calm before the Olympic storm
Conceptually, watching the world's best swimmers march into claustrophobic aquatics centers like Tucson, Arizona, or Federal Way, Washington could be extremely unpleasant.
that was It was very jarring to see the bleachers at the IU Natatorium nearly empty Wednesday night, filled mostly with friends and family of the swimmers.
It was jarring to see Marchand's parents casually chatting next to something called Ben's Soft Pretzels in the concourse.
It was jarring to watch Marchand stand behind two of his ASU teammates on the second step of the podium, losing two relays to Florida and then to Cal.
It was jarring to see him get off the pool deck with Bowman and several teammates. The cart almost rattled into Marchand, only to be blocked by a volunteer pushing the cart.
But perhaps it's no wonder this NCAA is his favorite swim meet. Because “he doesn't swim just for himself,” he says. “You swim for something bigger than that, the team.”
That's stress. “I'm pretty nervous about that, because I don't want to disqualify the team.” [by making a mistake]” says Marchand. He calls the NCAA “the most competitive competition in swimming.” But he loves energy. Competitive camaraderie. That's part of the reason he came to America, where his ASU team consists of 40 people.
On the other hand, “When I go out into the world, it's just me,” he says. Me and just me. ”
Him, himself, and the spotlight.
“The difficult thing is that I'm never alone anymore. There's always someone taking pictures of me or filming me,” Marchand said last June. Speaking after the French national championships, he knew: “I have to get used to it, because in Paris it will be even worse.”
Here, for now, in the relative quiet of Indianapolis, I was able to trudge back up the stairs, away from several French reporters rushing around with cameras inside the media center. .
