NANTERRE, France — For just a moment, there’s silence. Tense. Thick. Absolute. And then the buzzer sounds, and before the swimmers at La Défense Arena have even touched the water, the noise explodes all around them, louder than you’d believe possible, louder than humans ought to be able to scream.
But then, Leon Marchand has a way of inspiring others to transcend their limits. He's already done it himself so many times at these Games.
As Marchand knifes a relentless, perfect butterfly stroke through the water, the 17,000 at La Défense cheer in both hope and expectation. Marchand has already won two gold medals at this Olympics, and this crowd wants to see a third right here, right now.
Marchand touches the wall to end his butterfly stroke just two one-hundredths of a second behind China's Wang Shun — far shorter than an eyeblink. As the field makes the first of three turns in the 50-yard pool, the audience locks in. This is the moment that the crowd — the entire nation of France — has awaited for so long.
If you’ve watched any of these Olympics, you already know the broad strokes of Marchand’s story: raised in Toulouse, educated in America at Arizona State under Michael Phelps’ old coach Bob Bowman, returning to Paris this summer as a hero conquering everyone in his path.
Marchand inspires borderline-feverish fandom wherever he goes. All over Paris during these Games, when Marchand swims, action stops. At cafes, at shops, at other Olympic venues, people want to see him swim, see him win. That's how the Olympics works — when he wins, all of France does, too.
Butterfly leads straight into backstroke in the Individual Medley, and before Marchand has taken more than a few windmilling, relentless strokes, he's caught Wang. By the end of this 50-meter stretch, he will have flipped a 0.02-second deficit into a .20-second advantage.
Wherever Marchand goes in La Défense — really, even before he steps onto the deck — the chants follow. Sometimes, it’s “Le-On!”, clap-clap-clap. Others, it’s clap-clap, clap-clap-clap, “Le-On!” Whatever strikes the crowd at the moment, and with Marchand, there is always a feverish inspiration. He walks with a combination of humility, looking like he can’t quite believe this is his life, and the well-earned confidence that comes from being quite literally the greatest in the world at what you do.
Halfway home, Marchand rolls over and flips into the breaststroke, and it's here where the crowd's fevered unity truly takes hold. Every time Marchand's head pops up out of the water, La Défense rattles with a simultaneous "Hey!" Sixteen times Marchand's head rises above the waves, sixteen times he hears the crowd bellowing in exultant celebration. And when he hits the wall, his lead over Great Britain's Duncan Scott is now 1.73 seconds.
Not one of the 10,000 athletes at the Games arrived here with a heavier national burden on their shoulders. Paris Olympics organizers and Paris city officials have been fighting a seven-year public relations battle, and until the Opening Ceremony, victories were tough to come by. There was the debacle of the Seine cleanup, the questions about disruption to daily life, the fears and nervousness about security. Combine that with general French pessimism about any kind of big swings like this, and nearly two-thirds of the country was either indifferent, concerned or angry about the Olympics as of just weeks ago.
Marchand has changed all that. Not alone, true, but the impact of a French athlete dominating a French Olympics is undeniable. Even President Emmanuel Macron is in attendance tonight, and he’s losing his mind at Marchand’s domination, along with almost everyone else in the arena. The thousands of French fans in attendance — and the millions more watching on TV — will long remember this moment, this feeling, this pride.
When Marchand begins his freestyle stretch run, the cheering turns to something else. Have you ever been at a concert so loud that the music blasted past the upper edges of your hearing and just became static and noise? That's what happens in Le Défense, an overwhelming mass of sound inspired by Marchand, created by his fans.
If the noise lasted any longer than 1 minute, 54.06 seconds — a new Olympic record, by the way — we would be looking at a whole lot of Parisian hearing loss. Marchand touches the wall more than a second ahead of Scott, and there it is — gold medal No. 3.
He climbs out of the pool as the arena descends into cacophony. Without Marchand’s stroke to guide them, fans dissolve into various chants — some Le-Ons, some “Seven Nation Army,” some just delirious wailing. Marchand stands up, raises his hands to the sky in exultation, and then spreads out his hands to take in the entire arena. He clasps his hands together in gratitude, then points to one section high above the pool deck.
Camera operators spin around him, boxing out his fellow swimmers who come to congratulate him, but they’ve been giving him love all week.
“He's had an unbelievable week,” South Africa’s Chad le Clos said a few days ago. “He's an unbelievable asset to France and I can't help but cheer for the guy, being at home here in France.”
“He is a generational talent,” Australia’s Kyle Chalmers added. “I'm lucky to share the pool deck with him."
“It's an honor for me to be able to race in the same generation as him,” says Carson Foster, just minutes after finishing in fourth place, 2.04 seconds behind Marchand.
About an hour after his swim, Marchand walks out to the small medal stand at one end of the pool. As he sings along the words to “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, someone holds up a singularly appropriate scarf behind him, the familiar slogan “Ici c'est Paris” — “This is Paris.”
Nearby, though, the simplest sign says the most. Scrawled on cardboard are the words “Le Roi Leon” – “King Leon.”
On this night, at this Olympics, for all of France — Leon Marchand rules.
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