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400m medley (M): the start of Léon Marchand’s odyssey
Swimming star Léon Marchand shone in the 400m medley final. The swimmer easily won ahead of Emilien Mattenet and Jaouad Syoud in 4’10.62. He did not achieve his best time but easily achieved the minimums for his qualifications for the Paris Games this summer.
(France TV)
The world record holder in the 400m medley easily achieved the Olympic minimums over the distance on Monday, during the French championships in Chartres, thanks to a time of 4’10″62.
“Qualifying for Paris 2024, that’s the main thing.” If the Olympic minimums for the 400m medley (4’12”50) were only a formality for him, Léon Marchand above all wanted to reassure himself, Monday June 17, during the French swimming championships. If the man who erased Michael Phelps from the shelves in July 2023 during the World Championships in Fukuoka (Japan) wanted to set a time close to the top 3 in the world, in the Chartres Odyssey basin, it was a little more complicated than expected . He certainly set the best time of his season in 4’10”62, more than enough to qualify for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games (from July 26 to August 11), but this result remains far from his standards.
After having managed as he knows so well during the series in the morning (4’14”88), Léon Marchand started strong, on the butterfly, before giving the impression of sometimes suffering a little from the race as the races progressed. lengths. “At 250 meters, I no longer have my legs, I have difficulty doing my casts, and breathing too,” he conceded with his usual frankness, a few minutes after leaving the pool. While his great rival and training teammate, Carson Foster, had achieved, last night in Indianapolis, the best world performance of the year in 4’07”64, the Toulouse native was keen to “get closer”. It was still too early for Léon Marchand.
“The time is not good, the sensations are bad, but I am qualified for Paris, he reassured himself, before analyzing the reasons. It’s been a week since I returned from the United States, so there’s also the time difference. An evacuation of the last few months… I’m not fully prepared either. I was prepared to do the minimum and that’s what I did in the end even if I hoped to do better.”
