Paris 2024, "not its peak": Léon Marchand aims ever higher at the World Swimming Championships

It's an understatement to say his water line will be under the spotlight this Wednesday, July 30, in Singapore. One year after glamorous Paris 2024 with four individual gold medals, Léon Marchand is preparing to do it again at the World Championships, held in the city-state's waters.

However, with a more modest menu since this week, the Frenchman plans to compete in only two distances: the 200 and 400 m individual medley. "It was the right time to lighten up a little after the Games and get back into it slowly," the Olympic hero explained to the world's media on Saturday, the day before the start of the competition. "I'm trying to stay calm. The approach will be a little different this time […], it will allow me to breathe a little."

Although the program may be lighter, ambitions remain high for the Toulouse native who, after the 400m medley, dreams of taking the world record for the shorter distance. "Of course I want to beat the 200m medley record. I don't know if it will be in a few days or in a few years, but my curiosity pushes me to compete in these races, to try to go faster," the Frenchman admits.

In Paris, Marchand narrowly missed American Ryan Lochte's time (1 min 54 sec 00) by just 6 hundredths of a second. Analyzing his race, he concluded that the final length had cost him the record. "What made the difference was my crawl. So I really worked on it."

At the beginning of the year, Bob Bowman 's student flew to Australia, where he soaked up the advice of another figure in the pool, Dean Boxall, an illustrious swimming coach known for his expertise in crawl. Back in the United States and despite injuries that cut short his return to swimming , the Frenchman was able to see his progress in this area. "Today, I am more powerful, more stable, I take on more water, my head spins less ," he says. "I hope to be able to use all that in my 200m individual medley."

In addition to the crawl, the four-time Olympic champion also identified his backstroke as a relative weakness. "Léon continues to improve ," said his Toulouse coach, Nicolas Castel. "These are things that I noticed quite quickly during the training camp in Jakarta."

"There was a technical evolution. In backstroke, I find that he has a more solid boat, a more fixed head, which gives him better alignment, better efficiency. And we find these qualities in crawl , analyzed Castel, who has followed him since he was a child. I can say that he has progressed in these two strokes, but he has not just worked on these two: he has also continued to work on the butterfly and breaststroke."

At 23, Léon Marchand has significant room for improvement, his coaches believe. "Paris isn't his peak ," says Castel. "He can still improve on lots of little things: transitions, swim starts... It's very subtle today, but he continues to gain power and speed. He's improving. He remains curious, he wants to try new things, to explore other avenues." The first glimpse of the 2025 prototype will be this Wednesday morning, during the 200m medley heats, starting at 11 a.m. (5 a.m. Paris time).