A day after Antoine Dupont, the world’s best player, inspired a crowd of 70,000 to raise the roof at the Stade de France with a virtuoso display in the men’s Rugby 7s final, the host nation serenaded another sporting hero at the Paris La Defense Arena, venue for the Paris 2024 swimming. Leon Marchand smashed Michael Phelps’s Olympic record while winning the men’s 400m individual medley by an astonishing margin of 5.67 seconds from Japan’s Tomoyuki Matsushita.
The hardest event in the pool, which tests your ability at all four strokes, has seen some all-time greats win gold. Hungary’s Tamas Darnyi won back-to-back titles in the event, as did the USA’s Tom Dolan and Phelps. But so good is Marchand at both butterfly and freestyle that he was well clear by just the 50m mark. The USA’s Carson Foster took bronze, but at no point did it feel like we were watching a race.
But while Marchand is an Olympic great in the making, one of the titans fell two-hundredth of a second short in his bid for an extraordinary three-peat. Great Britain’s Adam Peaty was untouchable in the 100m breaststroke in both Rio and Tokyo. But after going through some tumultuous times in his personal life, Peaty didn’t come to Paris as the overwhelming favourite he once was.
But when he streaked clear after the turn, the date with destiny seemed to be on. As he had in the semi-final, Peaty lost steam over the final 20m, allowing Italy’s Nicolo Martinenghi to edge him to the wall. The USA’s Nic Fink also caught him at the finish. The two finished in a dead heat and both took home silver. China’s Qin Haiyang, who had led at the turn, faded badly to finish seventh.
The only women’s final of the night in the pool saw a huge upset as Torre Huske produced a storming final 20m to catch and overhaul Gretchen Walsh, the red-hot favourite and world-record holder. Huske, whose mother is Chinese, was born in Virginia, and she could scarcely hide the disbelief or tears as she pulled off one of the upsets of the Games so far.