‘Dream merchant’ Léon Marchand wins fourth gold medal – Technologist

For once, he had wanted the timer to tick as slowly as possible, letting the fractions of seconds stretch into minutes of eternity, each one worth its weight in gold. Finally, Léon Marchand was able to contemplate his crowning achievement. On Friday, August 2, the once-shy swimmer spread his arms wide as he exited the pool to savor the ovation from the crowd, before listening, with his eyes closed for a brief moment, to the chants of “Marchand, Marchand” that blended into the marchons, marchons lyrics of the French national anthem, La Marseillaise. This was his fourth such ovation in six days. Alongside him, British swimmer Duncan Scott (silver) and China’s Shun Wang (bronze) seemed almost embarrassed to find themselves beside him on the podium for the men’s 200m individual medley event.

“It was my last individual final and I thought, ‘I really have to enjoy this.’ It’s hard to describe the feeling I had. I’m a very reserved person, (…) but I just wanted to let my joy explode,” said the swimmer, almost apologetically, after having taken a lap of honor to greet the crowd at Paris’s La Défense Arena, who didn’t want to let him go.

Two days after his historic 200m butterfly and 200m breaststroke double-bill victory, the 400m individual medley Olympic champion has done it again. At the age of 22, he has already entered the International Swimming Hall of Fame. He has matched American swimmer Mark Spitz’s four consecutive victories in 1972, those of Kristin Otto – the icon of the East German Wundermädchen generation (four victories in 1988) – and the 2004 quartet won by Michael Phelps, who is the only person to have ever achieved five in a row, in 2008.

King Léon

The swimmer, nicknamed Marchand de Rêves – the “Dream Merchant” – was in no hurry to wake up from his own Olympic dream. “For me, it wasn’t even possible to do this kind of thing. I had four chances to win an Olympic medal. [Just] one, that was my dream. I work for it every day, but here I am, doing it four times in total, in front of 15,000 people who chant my name, with a lot of pressure on my shoulders, it’s huge.”

This time, the 400m individual medley Olympic champion took on a distance that was half as long, but not half as easy – on paper, anyway. Of the eight finalists, Chinese athlete Shun Wang hitherto been the fastest swimmer over the double back-and-forth of the pool. Once again, the Frenchman taught everyone a lesson, hitting the wall just six-hundredths of a second (1:54.06) behind the world record.

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