Emmanuel Macron raised both fists as if he had won the Olympic final of the 200-metre medley. The President of the Republic did not want to miss the last individual performance of the great French national hero and yesterday he dropped by the pavilion at La Défense to melt into the emotional brew that has been produced every time Léon Marchand has swum. As on Sunday and Wednesday, the approximately 15,000 French people who congregate in this new pagan temple experienced an immediate, magical identification with this boy from Toulouse of average height, rather puny, with a childlike face and an air of vulnerability that contrasts with his unstoppable glide through the water. The kind of power that allowed him to cover the four lengths in 1 minute 54.06 seconds and take his fourth gold in Paris, more than anyone else at these Games.
The roar of the crowd was heart-stopping from the moment Marchand launched into the butterfly split, the first of the short race that crowns the most versatile. After winning gold in the 400m medley, 200m butterfly and 200m breaststroke, the last individual event of the Frenchman’s programme seemed a sure bet. Macron did not miss a beat. The 22-year-old did not let him down. From the first metres, he controlled the event with authority, even though the Chinese Shun Wang touched the 50m wall first. Marchand turned and advanced underwater faster than anyone else. He executed the eight famous kicks and emerged at the 15-metre line in the lead. When people ask why other swimmers are not capable of doing those apneas that allow the champion to avoid the resistance of the surface by generating vortices like dolphins, the physiologists of the French federation respond that it is because these episodes usually cause terrible wear and tear.
If Marchand can swim so many metres underwater, it is because when he swims above water he is extremely “aquadynamic”. His body flows so well that he avoids friction as much as possible, and thus reserves energy for apnea during turns. It is a virtuous circle. The same circle of efficiency that characterised Michael Phelps or Ryan Lochte, the most spectacular of all the wave-style swimmers who have ever existed, a diver without a tank, author of the current world record of 1m 54.00s in 2011.
“My goal as a coach is to have Léon break the world record from now on,” said Bob Bowman, his coach, after the finals. Marchand swam the 200m freestyle 15 hundredths faster than Pheps at the 2008 Games. But what will now focus Bowman’s attention is the comparison between Marchand’s splits in Paris and Lochte’s in Shanghai 13 years ago. In the Marchand/Lochte time series, the sequence is 24.72s/24.89s in the butterfly; 28.83s/28.59s in the backstroke; 32.36s/33.03s in the breaststroke; and 28.15s/27.49s in the freestyle. Marchand was six hundredths off the absolute record for two main reasons. First, because Lochte swam the backstroke and the freestyle as well or better than him, and second because Lochte swam in Shanghai, in the same pool where the synchronized swimming championships were held a few days earlier, a three-meter-deep pool that is the regulation for artistic swimming, almost a meter deeper than the 2.2m pool in Paris. Underwater vortices are enhanced in deep water.
“Allez Lion!Allez “Léon…!” the crowd cheered him on. Macron gave him a thumbs-up, seeking his complicity, but the winner seemed disoriented. He must have felt dizzy. This week Marchand confessed that he had experienced a kind of depression when he considered giving up swimming five years ago. “I had a small episode on a mental level in 2019, but I learned,” he said. His psychologist, Thomas Sammut, warns that it was a case of puberty anxiety. “I was not swimming in freedom, but in anticipation of failure,” he explained in the newspaper. The Team“What if I can’t do it? That state of mind held him back. He left the state of being a child who has nothing to lose to become an adult.”
La Défense singing La Marseillaise with Marchand on the podium was the apotheosis of a fairy tale. The hero turned around hugging the crowd and the people exalted him and themselves. It was not difficult to light the fuse. Paris has the richest history of mass exaltations in modern times. This time, the three glorious days did not end with a revolution, but with four gold medals each at the rate of an Olympic record.
You can follow EL PAÍS Sports on Facebook and Xor sign up here to receive the Daily newsletter of the Paris Olympic Games.
