The blond-haired, blue-eyed, boyish face of the Paris Olympics is hiding amid a sea of broad-shouldered college students, at a publicly accessible pool, in plain sight.
Léon Marchand knows that spotlights will trail him this summer. But for now, he is trotting down a nondescript flight of Midwestern stairs, his hands stuffed inside coat pockets, his 6-foot-2, 170-pound frame indistinguishable from hundreds of others gathered here in central Indiana for the NCAA men’s swimming championships.
He has spent the past three school years in Tempe, Arizona, and even there, he says, strangers rarely recognize him.
“We’re undercover,” adds Hubert Kos, an Arizona State teammate and fellow world champion.
They are, in a way, just kids who play "Call of Duty" and go to class. Marchand is majoring in computer science. He has lived in dorms and dined at dining halls. With sharp French cheeks, a curly mane and a skinny build, he is often anonymous.
Until, that is, he dips into chlorinated water and explodes.
Marchand, 21, has also spent the past three years obliterating vaunted records.
He chased down Michael Phelps’ last and longest-held mark in his signature event, the 400-meter individual medley, last summer. He has set and re-set several NCAA records. On Thursday in Indy, swimming his third-best stroke, he smashed the 500-yard freestyle mark — his own from earlier this month — by an eye-popping 3.87 seconds.
He will likely win three individual events here by week’s end. He might lead Arizona State to its first national title. And then, discreetly, he will turn his unflinching focus to Paris. He will enter the 2024 Olympics as a gold-medal favorite in multiple events on home soil. To the half-dozen French reporters who flew to Indianapolis, and scrambled around the IU Natatorium for glimpses of him, Marchand is a megastar in the making.
But no, he won’t be leaning into spotlights.
And no, he hasn’t visualized himself atop a Paris podium, "La Marseillaise" filling his ears, his nation teeming with pride.
This mild-mannered kid from Toulouse, a modest southern French city, doesn’t even have a fairytale to tell about how the 2017 announcement that Paris would host the Games kindled his Olympic dreams.
“Not really,” Marchand says. “Because at the time, I was not really good at swimming.”
He was born into a family of French swimming royalty — to a father, Xavier Marchand, and mother, Céline Bonnet, who were both Olympians — but in his early years, Léon Marchand didn’t exactly cannonball into the sport.
He tip-toed in, and shivered. He was cold. He was bored. So he quit.
He also dabbled in rugby and judo as a child. His parents never pushed him toward the pool. But after roughly two years away, he found his way back to Dauphins du TOEC, the swim club where his dad once trained. And he made friends with the water.
He was not, however, a 12-year-old prodigy like Michael Phelps was. He was “tiny,” he remembers, and “I was not really a racer. I didn't want, really, to win. I was just swimming — every day, a little bit, to have fun.”
He began to get serious when he began to grow. As a teen with precocious technique, he committed to the sport. At 17, he won a French championship in the 200-meter butterfly; he set a national record in the 400 IM; and he decided to leave home.
College competition, academics and community pulled him across the Atlantic.
