The noise is a part of his fuel. The vast, rhythmical, incantatory chant of Allez every time his head surfaced from the water on Wednesday night as he powered to victory in the 200 metres breaststroke – his second gold in as many hours.
The now familiar version of La Marseillaise sung for the individual who is France’s face of these Olympics, with ‘Marchons, marchons…’ adapted to ‘Marchand, Marchand’.
Let us count the ways France declared its love for Leon Marchand the morning after he swam to gold in both 200m butterfly and breaststroke.
‘Tout Puissant’ (‘All Powerful’) pronounced the Aujourd’hui en France front page. ‘Marchand d’Histoire’ (‘History Maker’) concluded L’Equipe.
This feels like the fulfilment of a destiny for a city which has dropped a massive image of its 22-year-old swimming genius, crouched in starting position in swim cap and goggles, on to the Tour Montparnasse skyscraper in southern Paris. Marchand is everywhere.
French swimmer Leon Marchand has become of the poster boys of this summer’s Olympics
The 22-year-old claimed a first gold medal with victory in the 400m individual medley in Paris
Marchand comes from a family of athletes, with both parents Olympic swimmers
For an individual who had never before won an Olympic medal to provide moments which will be remembered here 100 years from now seems like a miracle, though it’s not mere happenstance, of course.
Many factors – technical, psychological, dietary, and most certainly genetic – form the story behind the story of the boy from Toulouse who, having been unknown to the wider world, has joined Michael Phelps, Ian Thorpe and Mark Spitz in the pantheon.
Genetic, because he was born into a swimming family – to parents who were both Olympians. His mother, Celine Bonnet, competed in the 1992 Games; his father, Xavier Marchand, was an Olympic finalist in 1996 and 2000.
Xavier’s older brother Christophe also swam in the 1988 and 1992 Olympics. They say he brings the swimming qualities of both parents to the pool.
His mother’s buoyancy, with a position high and light in the water. And gradually, because he is not an individual with vast ego and presence, his father’s drive.
But no parent can bequeath the commodity which is putting him on a different plane.
It is what they call Marchand’s ‘fifth stroke’: the dolphin-like capacity, invisible to spectators but revealed by underwater cameras, to swim with extraordinary strength under water.
Swimmers are faster down there below the surface because there is less water resistance. Marchand’s coaches have said that he began working on this technique because he was a smaller and less robust teenager than others.
It is not as elementary as it sounds. Elite swimmers explain how, when under water, the lungs ‘burn’ and that by cutting off your breathing, you suffer an intense headache.
Some swimmers are astonished by Marchand’s capacity to operate down there for so long. ‘It’s Poseidon! I swear, it’s Aquaman,’ said backstroke swimmer Yohann Ndoye-Brouard. ‘You think, ‘How does he have that much air to stay under water?’
But the benefits were graphically demonstrated in Marchand’s 200m butterfly final. When he disappeared beneath the water at the last turn, he was trailing Olympic champion and world record holder Kristof Milak.
When his swim cap re-appeared at the surface, he was almost ahead. It was an unfeasible moment. A vanishing trick. A moment of stunning drama which will quite possibly surpass any other at these Olympics.
French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal cheered Marchand onto his first Olympic gold
The French swimming sensation wants to emulate the sport’s greatest-ever, Michael Phelps
Phelps was also a king of the deep, who so often won through in his duels with Dutch legend Pieter van den Hoogenband because of the underwater sections after each turn.
But coach Bob Bowman, who worked with both Phelps and is now driving Marchand on, says the French swimmer is better than the American beneath the surface. While Phelps brought pure power and strength, Marchand also has a different body shape.
‘His body is shaped perfectly,’ Bowman told Le Monde. ‘It’s like a torpedo. He has no hips. It’s just like straight down.’
The vast aerobic component of his training, which enabled Marchand to be submerged for 45 seconds during his pulsating 400m individual medley final on Sunday – nearly a quarter of the race – also explains his remarkable recovery times.
His tolerance of the lactic acid build-up during a race meant he required one hour and 50 minutes’ recovery, some of which was spent at a medal ceremony, between finals on Wednesday.
To fuel the enormous outlay of energy in a training regime which entails swimming perhaps 13km, six or seven days a week, Marchand needs to consume an estimated 8,000-10,000 calories a day.
For Marchand, dinner is usually a combination of pasta and chicken and, as a college student, he prepares them himself. ‘All my life, everything I do all day is to be better the next day in the water,’ he has said of his diet.
But Marchand also assigns much significance to an improved mindset between races. He has described a fear of failure at the Tokyo Olympics – when, as a 19-year-old, he returned without a medal.
He speaks often of his psychological coach, Thomas Sammut, who has encouraged him to think of only his own performance, rather than the race in its entirety. ‘Control the controllables.’
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Coach Bob Bowman said his body is perfect: ‘He’s like a torpedo. He has no hips.’
The rigours of his training routine is making Marchand the next big thing in world swimming
Many in France feel Marchand’s decision to leave the country for American college swimming – he competes for Arizona State University – has reduced the intense expectation and media scrutiny that living in France during the Olympics build-up would have brought.
The routine is brutal there. For six days a week, Marchand – a computer programming student – has been getting up at 5.20am to swim between five and seven kilometres per session.
But he has escaped pressure in a country for which no swimmer had previously won multiple individual Olympic golds in a single Games.
Marchand was back in the Olympic pool at La Defense yesterday to swim a heat of the 200m individual medley.
Britain’s Duncan Scott, hero of the gold-medal relay winning team, edged him into second. But no one is betting against Marchand taking a fourth gold tonight.
Paris again awaits the presence of an individual described by L’Equipe as ‘L’extraordinare. Monsieur Tout Le Monde’. The man who has everything.