The new star of French swimming could have stopped everything very quickly.
Being a top athlete is a passion, but it also involves many sacrifices on a daily basis. Whatever the discipline, there are obviously advantages, but above all there are constraints, particularly on the pace of life, marked by a specific diet, daily training, weight training sessions, etc.
In swimming, this constraint is very high. Even if we love contact with water, doing one lap after another, including in winter when it’s cold, is not always easy and the constant search for performance can be destructive for many swimmers.
For several years, the list of athletes who become depressed, who want to stop everything, has continued to increase. We remember at the time Laure Manaudou who decided to stop everything overnight. We also remember his brother who decided to take a break to take up handball. But we also remember international stars like the British Adam Peaty, breaststroke legend, who had to take a break because of his mental fragility, Caeleb Dressel, Kristof Milak or even Michael Phelps, who explained that he was close to suicide at numerous times.
This mental load must therefore be understood by the swimmers and our French star, Léon Marchand, huge favorite during the Paris 2024 Olympics, did a lot of work on this aspect after a complicated period where he was burned out and close to stopping everything. . But should we compare it to others? No for his mental trainer. “Léon works on himself, he takes ownership of the training. He is not going to blindly follow the instructions. He wants to be master of his destiny.”
However, in 2020/2021, “Léon was burned out,” explained Thomas Sammut at the time. “He contacted me, he was at an impasse, on the verge of quitting. He was able to put pressure on himself to achieve results. At one point, it’s extremely tiring nervously. The performance must revolve around the individual, depending on their personality.”
To get rid of this depression, Léon Marchand now devotes 50% of his working time to his mental workload, but not only that. Unlike Michael Phelps, the swimmer spends time doing other things and is not in the pools 24/7. “Michael [Phelps]when he was swimming with Bob [Bowman], that’s all he did. A bit like what we did during an internship in Colorado in May: eat, sleep, recover, all the time. This year, I had a good balance between my friends that I saw every day, my classes and training,” explained Léon Marchand in 2023.
In order to break his routine and avoid getting into an oppressive daily life, Léon Marchand also made several changes before the start of his races. “I liked to play the same music all the time at the edge of the pool, I had to have the green cap, not the white one, lots of things like that,” Léon Marchand smiles today. “Now there is nothing. It’s simpler. It’s just swimming, you don’t have to worry about all that.” And for the moment, this approach is paying off!