Physical preparation, rest management, and new sports challenges … Léon Marchand opens up before his return.

Four-time Olympic champion swimmer Leon Marchand will compete in the French championships in June and the European championships in Paris in August.

Leon Marchand, a four-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer, has been relatively quiet since the 2024 summer Olympics in Paris. He granted us an interview from his home in Austin, USA, outlining his two major goals for this season: the French championships at the end of June, in Saint-Etienne, and most importantly, the European championships in Paris in August. This will be the first time the Toulouse native will return to swimming in France since his Olympic achievements.

He eagerly anticipates this opportunity and has been putting in a lot of effort with rigorous training sessions in recent weeks. “This is the first time March has been so challenging in terms of volume, intensity, and the difficulty of really chaining the sessions together,” the swimmer said. “After that, the schedule was really the same, we had nine training sessions a week, three weightlifting sessions, it’s really what we’ve been doing for years, but I feel like it has still increased the difficulty a bit, so it was still a big challenge, especially the last three weeks.”

Describing his typical day and week, Marchand mentioned, “We did a really solid series, focusing on butterfly strokes, 72 times 50 meters in a large pool, starting with one crawl, one butterfly, two crawls, two butterflies, until it reached eight, with starts every 40-45 seconds, meaning you touch the wall in about 30 seconds if you have swum well, and you have 10 seconds to start again, and that’s 72 times.”

Although still very young, the Toulouse swimmer, who will turn 24 on May 17, acknowledges that his body no longer reacts the same way as it did in his early days facing such a heavy workload. “Mentally it’s okay, physically, it’s just tough. It was really complicated because I’m not 18 anymore. My body adapted really well three or four years ago, and now I react in a completely different way, so I had to adapt my way of recovering, doing things around the pool a bit better than before, but it’s not easy.”

Approaching the European championships in August, near Paris, Marchand specifies his ambitions for his return to France: “The idea is to break my records. The program is not completely set yet, but I know that I will, for example, swim the 400 meters individual medley on the first day of both the French championships and the European championships. If I qualify, I want to beat my record in this race.”

Aware of being more than just an athlete, but a true star on a global scale, and even more so in France, he calmly approaches his return to competition at home. “I don’t think I’m afraid of my return to France. In terms of popularity, I don’t think it has faded. I’m not sure what to expect; we’ll see,” the swimmer explains.

Balancing between studies and swimming has always been important for Marchand. Now a graduate, he must create a new life balance. “I’m more into my passions than anything else, so I’m doing a lot of piano at the moment, watching series, movies… My life is quite boring, I must say, because apart from training, unfortunately, we don’t have energy. So, in general, we’re not very productive. And then I manage my professional career, so it also takes time.”

The French swimmer has been seen a lot in recent months with Victor Wembanyama in the NBA, but also with the French national football team when they toured the USA last March. “I was invited to watch the Bleus’ match in Boston against Brazil,” he recalls. “It was quite strange for me because I usually see the French football team on TV, but I don’t see them in person. So suddenly, I found myself in a discussion with Didier Deschamps and Kylian Mbappé, the president of the Federation, it was pretty amazing.” Marchand is now entering a pivotal season and aims to confirm his status while continuing to reinvent himself, both in and out of the pool.