You can’t miss Léon Marchand in Paris, his picture runs right up along all 200m of the only skyscraper in the city limits, the Tour Montparnasse. Marchand is 22 and has never won an Olympic medal, but he is one of the three French faces of the Games, along with Antoine Dupont and Victor Wembanyana. It means that for the first time since Michael Phelps set himself the impossible job of winning eight gold medals at Beijing in 2008, a swimmer is the star turn at the Olympics. It’s no coincidence that last year Marchand finally beat Phelps’ last surviving solo world record, in the 400m individual medley.
Marchand goes in four separate solo events in seven days, the 200m butterfly and 200m breaststroke, with the finals just an hour and a half apart on Wednesday evening, the 200m later in the week and the 400m medley, which is the first event up, on Sunday evening. That night he will share the top of the bill with Adam Peaty, who is trying to become the second man, after Phelps, to win the same event at three consecutive Games. There was a time Peaty was the nearest thing to a sure thing in sport, but he has had a rough three years since Tokyo, and, while he has set the fastest time in the world this year, he is still searching for his very best form.
He will need it, because he is racing against China’s Qin Haiyang, who won the world championships last year. Qin is a key character in the other great story of these Games. He is one of 11 Chinese swimmers competing here who tested positive for the performance-enhancing drug TMZ, but were cleared of any wrongdoing on the grounds that it was apparently caused by cross-contamination in the kitchen of a team hotel. The scandal has split the sport into two rival sides, one of them coalesced around the US, whose own national anti-doping association has been leading the calls for further investigation.
Several of the USA’s most high-profile athletes have already said they don’t feel sure they are taking part in a clean competition. Caeleb Dressel and Katie Ledecky, who have won seven gold medals each, have spoken out about it. Dressel gave a blunt “no” when asked if he had any confidence in the World Aquatics’ ability to police the sport, which was awkward given that the president was sitting three spots along at the same press conference. The Chinese, meanwhile, feel aggrieved that they are being accused even after they have been cleared of wrongdoing by the World Anti-Doping Agency. Qin himself has spoken about an “American plot” to unsettle the team.
The governance in swimming has been lousy for decades, the Rio and Tokyo games were both overshadowed by the maladministration of doping cases. It’s become something of an Olympic tradition (there are others: Bert le Clos, better known as Chad’s Dad, arrived in Paris on Friday ready to see his boy compete again). While the current regime is trying to reform the sport, the efforts have been somewhat undermined by the fact that the man leading them, president Husain al-Musallam, was previously named by the US department of justice as a co-conspirator in a Fifa corruption scandal and is under investigation by the ethics commission of the Kuwaiti Olympic Committee.
The Olympics, then, isn’t just about the old rivalry between the USA and Australia – which will reach a height in the women’s 400m freestyle on Saturday night when Ledecky goes against reigning Olympic champion Ariarne Titmuss and the Canadian phenom Summer McIntosh – but also an even bigger one between the Chinese and the western teams. Marchand, and Great Britain’s Duncan Scott, will both need to beat another of the Chinese 11, Wang Shun, in the men’s 200m medley, in one of the big races of the week.
For the British team, everything will depend on the ability of Peaty, Scott, and their teammates to peak under the utmost pressure. They did it in Tokyo, which was the team’s most successful Games. But swimming, as GB’s performance director, Bill Furniss, often says, is a “fingertip sport” and wildly unpredictable. Tom Dean, the Olympic champion in the men’s 200m freestyle, didn’t even make it through the British trials. The man who beat him, Matt Richards, is another who will be in contention for a medal if he can peak at the right time.
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Great Britain will hope to pick up medals in the relays. They will be favourites for the men’s 4x200m freestyle, and have a shot in the men’s 4x100m, men’s medley and the mixed medley, too, but they will still do well to match the eight medals they won in Tokyo. That said, Furniss does seem to have the knack of bringing the best out of them at these championships, and if Peaty and Scott can rise to the occasion, they may well inspire other contenders, like Ben Proud in the 50m freestyle, Freya Colbert in the two medleys, and Laura Stephens in the 200m butterfly, to do the same. Whatever happens, and whoever wins, it is going to be compelling viewing.