“The best is yet to come,” said Leon Marchand, 21, after the Fukuoka pool attended one of the greatest displays of a swimmer in the 400 IM, not just because of the Frenchman’s wild run and his extraordinary world record (4:02.50) but because of the symbolism behind those strokes. This record was the last one held by Michael Phelps, the legend, the GOATwho with a white shirt and her hair up, attended from the commentary booth at the moment in which her name disappeared forever from world records. Swimming does not forgive, and seven years after the withdrawal of the Baltimore man, the youngsters have taken away the marks with which he won 28 Olympic medals. If the Hungarian Kristof Milak became the king of the 200 butterfly, now the Frenchman has been crowned in the Fukuoka World Championships in the 400 styles.
Marchand had already warned in the past World Cups in Budapest, in June 2022, when he achieved the second best mark in history and was only four tenths behind Phelps’s record, established in 4:03.84 obtained in the Beijing Games, 2008. In the preliminary, the Frenchman, trained by Bob Bowman at the University of Arizona, experimented with a first 200 at full speed and a more relaxed second, to measure his strength, gauge how far the lactic acid would reach him. An essay that in the final led him to a barbaric record.
With the American Carson Foster in street 4 and setting a high race pace (in fact, he was already silver in the past World Championships with 4:06.56), Marchand completed the first 100 butterfly with a mark of 54.66, three tenths faster than Phelps in Beijing 2008. The backstroke was the discipline in which he was somewhat more hesitant (although he improved by two seconds compared to the previous year), if this qualifier can be used for a swimmer who made the fastest race in history. He completed this partial in 1:01.98 to 1:01.54 of the already retired swimmer. Then came the breaststroke section, the one that dominates the most. “Only a swimmer who masters the breaststroke can beat Phelps’s record…”, say the experts. And this man was born in Toulouse and his name is Marchand.
Bowman’s current pupil completed the breaststroke in 1:07.64, with Phelps’ record already at his feet and with a deafening noise in the pool, which collapsed with the moment they were about to live. Phelps, in his best race, ran 1:10.56, bringing Marchand swimming to almost three seconds short of the world record. He completed, already dying but with the goal between his eyebrows, the freestyle partial in 58.22, to Phelps’s 56.79. Marchand was better than the American in two sets, the butterfly and the breaststroke, but what really catapulted him beyond the breaststroke was his mastery of the underwateralways rushing the 15 meters, as he had warned in a recent interview: “I’m looking at Dressel’s turns and submarines.”
Marchand was already a finalist in Tokyo 2020, when he was still a swimmer to do, and after his arrival in the United States to put himself in the hands of the guru Bowman, he has made a leap in the styles tests. It has gone from being a great promise to being the best in history. He could not have a better epilogue to the test than Phelps, calm, excited, handing over the medal to Marchand. Both of them, who have shared this process and are WhatsApped, have a character in common: Bowman. The sculptor of vintage swimmers.