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The best male swimmer in the world and the best female swimmer in the world have several things in common. Both are the children of Olympians. Both have mastered what is considered the hardest event in the sport—the 400-meter individual medley—to the point of establishing seemingly untouchable world records. Both will head to the Summer Olympics as burgeoning heroes in their respective home countries.
Those countries are France (for Léon Marchand) and Canada (for Summer McIntosh). And that brings up the other commonality they share: Both have been coached and trained in America to beat Americans in Paris.
“There are three really, really tough things American swimmers are facing,” says NBC analyst and Olympic gold medalist Rowdy Gaines. “One is Léon. Two is Summer. And three are the Australian women. They’ve all three got the potential to win gold medals in events the Americans could win, if not for them.”
The Aussies are at least a foreign threat of their own making, incubated and built on their continental landmass on the other side of the globe. Marchand and McIntosh, not so much. The 22-year-old Marchand swam collegiately for Bob Bowman at Arizona State, then recently followed Bowman as a professional to Texas. McIntosh, just 17 years old, trains with the Sarasota Sharks club team in Florida.
The two also spent considerable time with their respective teams doing altitude training at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo. They were putting in work to beat Americans at facilities that were created to help Americans win.
Both Marchand and McIntosh are prohibitive favorites in the 400 IM and gold-medal contenders in multiple other events (the exact number remains to be seen, depending on how many they decide to swim). Marchand arrives as arguably the biggest home-country hero of the Olympics. But by the end, the Summer Games could be the Games of Summer.
They represent the two-edged opportunity that is inherent in the U.S. swimming machine. It’s the best place on the planet to excel at the sport, which is why it draws so much international talent—then that international talent disperses to home countries and tries to break the machine.
The inherent conflict is not new, nor is it isolated to swimming. The best basketball players from across the globe flock to the U.S. for prep, college and NBA opportunities (though they rarely come back to beat the Stars and Stripes come Olympic time). The same could be said in many other sports.
But the international invasion at the very top end has never been this pronounced in the pool. This appears to be the first Olympics in which male and female swimmers with legitimate claims to being the best in the world simultaneously were trained in the U.S. but compete for foreign nations.
“I don’t think that’s happened before,” says Joel Shinofield, managing director of sport development for USA Swimming. “Especially when they’re competing against some of our top swimmers. But this is a story as old as time—we have some of the best coaches in the world, and we’re the world leader in both higher-ed and swimming. Those two things draw people here.”
Marchand and McIntosh have company. Eight of the 13 individual events at the men’s NCAA swimming championships in March were won by athletes who will be competing against the U.S. in Paris—three by Marchand, three by Canadian sprinter Josh Liendo, and one each by Canadian Ilya Kharun and Hungarian distance swimmer Zalan Sarkany.
As an added layer, Marchand and McIntosh have taken their American coaches with them this summer. A staple on American international coaching staffs, Bowman instead will be part of the French Olympic group (while also working with some of his other swimmers who are on different national teams). McIntosh’s coach in Sarasota, Brent Arckey, will be part of the Canadian contingent to Paris.
Is all of this a problem? Depends on who you ask. The average American Olympic patriot might not like it, but most of the swimming community understands.
“That’s just the way of life here,” Gaines says. “We’re the land of the free, people come to America for a lot of reasons. And the coaches have to earn a living—I don’t blame them at all for coaching the international swimmers. But I get it. It’s a bummer that the two best swimmers train in the United States but don’t compete for the United States.”
The reality is this: No coach on the planet is going to turn down swimmers of the caliber of Marchand and McIntosh. Especially when they just sort of show up and ask to come in.
Marchand arrived in Bob Bowman’s life via cold-call email. The teenager from Toulouse, France, inquired in 2020 about attending Arizona State to swim for the man who coached Michael Phelps to immortal status.
Bowman knew the last name sounded familiar—Léon’s father, Xavier, had swam for France in the 1996 Olympics. His mom, Céline Bonnet, competed for France in the '92 Summer Games. On genes alone, Bowman was interested. And when he investigated Léon’s times, he went from interested to intrigued. The Sun Devils were by no means a powerhouse at that point, and Marchand was a welcome addition.
Nevertheless, Marchand arrived in Tempe in 2021 as a largely unknown commodity in the U.S. He swam for France in the Olympics that summer but was not a medal threat, finishing sixth in what was a stunningly slow 400 IM and 18th in the 200 IM. He came to America as a promising medley swimmer who needed the greatest of all men’s IM coaches to bring out his best.
The alchemy was quickly evident, as Marchand morphed into a college swimming star. In three seasons, Marchand destroyed the NCAA record book and lifted Arizona State to its first national championship this past March. He ended his college career with NCAA records in the 400 IM, 200 IM, 500 freestyle and 200 breaststroke—all by wide margins—and the second-fastest 200 freestyle ever.
“Léon is probably the greatest training partner I’ve ever had,” says Hungarian backstroke/butterfly standout Hubert Kós, a medal threat in Paris. “I’ve been able to swim with [Kristóf] Milák (the world-record holder in the 200 butterfly) and people in Hungary who are really, really good swimmers, but Léon is just so much better than that in training.
“He just pushes himself to the limit, and past the limit a lot of times. I trained with a lot of people who don’t show the same kind of potential in practice that they do in meets, but Léon is quite the opposite. So he has crazy practices that, come meet time … I don’t think anyone on the team is really surprised at the times he is swimming.”
Marchand’s appetite for work matched Bowman’s ability to lay it on. Their partnership has been a spectacular validation of Marchand’s drive and talent, and a reaffirmation of Bowman’s acumen. The Frenchman sent the email to the right guy.
“He’s just impeccable in terms of his training volume, intensity and work ethic,” says Marchand’s former Arizona State teammate, Grant House. “Everybody breaks down at our practices eventually, and I’ve only seen him break down about three times in three years. When he does it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, he’s human after all.’ ”
For Bowman, it had been a while since Phelps ended his unparalleled career on a high note in 2016. Then he had Michael 2.0, and he set his new star pupil on a path to erase the old star from the record book.
At the 2022 world championships in Budapest, Marchand served notice in the 400 IM by rattling Phelps’s last standing world record. Marchand’s time of 4:04.28 was a five-second improvement over his lifetime best to that point, and he won the event by more than two seconds. That put him within a half-second of Phelps’s revered mark of 4:03.84, which he set in leading off his eight-gold-medal masterpiece at the 2008 Olympics.
Heading into last summer, all eyes were on Marchand’s attempt to take down Phelps’s final record. The natural question for Bowman: Was this at all awkward, coaching someone to break the last mark held by someone who was like a son to him?
Bowman declared last year that he had a free pass of sorts, since Phelps had just broken the mark for the longest period of time for a swimmer to hold an individual world record. (Phelps owned the 400 IM mark from 2002 onward.) “It’s not a problem now that Michael has the longest record ever,” Bowman said last summer. “We thought that [Marchand] might break it [at French national trials before Phelps had the longevity record], and that would be a thing. Michael knows he’s good enough to do it. It won’t be a shock.”
Some still doubted Marchand’s ability to take it down at the world championships in Fukuoka, Japan, after he swam a pedestrian 4:10.88 in the preliminary heats. But Kós said he was certain. “Just watch,” he told his Hungarian teammates.
Marchand delivered, blowing away Phelps’s record with a 4:02.50 clocking. He delivered a powerful series of underwater explosions off the start and turns, an area where he’s the world’s best. Marchand hammered out eight dolphin kicks off both the start and turn in the butterfly leg; eight and then nine on the backstroke leg; then six and a staggering 11 on the freestyle. It was a triumph of technique and stamina that left no doubt the record was going down.
“It’s gone,” Phelps said on a live broadcast of the race with 100 meters still to go. When Marchand finished and saw his time, his response spoke for most of humanity: “What the f--- is happening?”
Marchand followed that up by winning the 200 IM and the 200 butterfly, a dazzling trifecta. This summer, on the biggest stage and performing in his own country, he’s pursuing an even bigger splash by entering four individual Olympic events.
In addition to the two IMs and the 200 fly, Marchand is also entered in the 200 breaststroke. The hardest part about that? Both the 200 fly and 200 breast are on the same days, with prelims and semifinals July 30 and the finals July 31. If Marchand follows through with it, that would require four swims on the 30th (with the semis 65 minutes apart) and two on the 31st (92 minutes apart).
July 25 is the scratch deadline, so they have some time before committing to the full grind. In the meantime, speculation simmers about how low Léon can go in the IM events.
Ryan Lochte has held the 200 IM world record of 1:54.00 since 2011 — he and Phelps have the seven fastest times in the event in history. Marchand’s best is 1:54.82. (China’s Shun Wang dropped a 1:54.62 last fall and also could have a shot at the record, as could Americans Carson Foster and Shaine Casas.)
As for the 400 IM, it seemingly would be pushing the bounds of human performance to break 4:00, right?
“With him, it’s not a matter of if it’s possible, it’s a matter of when and by how much,” House says. “There is not a doubt in my mind. With full confidence, I’d put my mortgage on him going under four minutes.”
Summer McIntosh went south from Toronto to Florida in early 2022, following a route familiar to many snowbirding Canadians seeking warmer weather. In this case, she and her family were searching for looser COVID-19 restrictions as her home country slowly came out of the pandemic.
Some of McIntosh’s teammates had relocated to the Selby Aquatic Center in Sarasota, where the Sharks trained in a spacious, two-pool outdoor complex. The place had become a hub of sorts for winter and spring training trips by high-level clubs from outside the state, and demand was never higher.
What Brent Arckey encountered was a prodigy, just 15 years old but already coming off a fourth-place finish in the 400 freestyle at the Tokyo Olympics—a swim that validated her escalating hype. What McIntosh encountered was “a rising-star coach who can coach the events she’s good at,” Shinofield says.
The first stay in Sarasota only lasted a few weeks, but McIntosh returned that summer. She was coming off a breakout performance at the world championships in Budapest, winning gold medals in the 200 butterfly and 400 IM, and kept on improving in Florida.
“She swam fairly fast,” Arckey says. “At the end of the summer they asked if she could stay.”
McIntosh’s mom, Jill, swam in the 1984 Olympics for Canada and then collegiately at Florida. She knew the terrain of the sport in general and in Florida specifically, and the work Arckey had done to that point with Emma Weyant stood out. Weyant won a silver medal in Tokyo in the 400 IM as a 19-year-old while also excelling at mid-distance and distance freestyle—two things in McIntosh’s wheelhouse.
But the McIntosh family had other considerations—Summer’s older sister, Brooke, is a high-level pairs figure skater with her own Olympic aspirations. Florida was not the place to pursue that dream. So the family arrived at a compromise: Jill moved to Florida with Summer, while father Greg stayed in Toronto with Brooke.
Jill is the schedule master, sending out a family spreadsheet weekly to keep everyone updated on activities and obligations. That includes home-schooling for Summer and a variety of sponsor and endorsement opportunities. (Already a well-established professional, Summer has shown no interest in swimming collegiately, according to Arckey.)
“They’ve managed what could be a really crazy 17-year-old life,” Arckey says. “She is a kid, and it’s very refreshing, to be quite honest. It can become serious too soon, and she values her time away from the pool.
“When she’s in the pool, she loves to work hard. She has a smile on her face while doing the work, and it didn’t matter how hard the work was. That was probably the most astounding thing to me.”
By 2023, the McIntosh-Arckey alchemy was fully underway. She defeated Katie Ledecky in the 200 freestyle early that winter in Fort Lauderdale, the first time Ledecky had been beaten in the U.S. at a distance of 200 meters or more since ’14. Then at Canada’s national team trials that March, McIntosh broke two world records—first in the 400 freestyle, then in the 400 IM. She became the first swimmer in history to hold both those world records at the same time.
Australian Ariarne Titmus regained the 400 free record from McIntosh at the ’23 world championships, but McIntosh defended her titles in both the 200 fly and 400 IM. That was the springboard into what could be a Summer blockbuster in Paris.
At the Canadian trials in May, McIntosh blew away her own world record in the 400 IM, dropping it to 4:24.38. Only one female in the world has been within four seconds of that time in 2024, and that swimmer (Australia’s Kaylee McKeown) is not entered in the event in Paris. None of her Olympic competitors has ever gone faster than 4:30, a barrier McIntosh has broken seven times.
So that event doesn’t figure to be close. Expect McIntosh to build a considerable lead in the butterfly leg and put the race out of reach after the backstroke. Arckey’s other prize IM pupil, Weyant, will be battling fellow American Katie Grimes and others for silver and bronze.
“Summer is way above average in three strokes and still an A-plus swimmer in her weaker stroke [breaststroke],” Arckey says. “She’s top two-three in the world in fly and free, top five or 10 in back. She has so much easy speed the first half, especially the butterfly. She gets to go out in her best stroke and just keep going.”
The greater challenge will be handling the workload that comes with four individual events and likely relay duties. McIntosh has dropped the 200 free but still is entered in the 400 freestyle, 200 butterfly and both IMs, which could necessitate 10 swims across eight days. Relays will add more, with Canada a medal contender in several of them.
For Marchand and McIntosh, they are their own competition in the 400 IM. Can they beat their own world records? How far can they push the boundaries of what a swimmer is capable of in the most demanding event?
“Their commonality is to just eat up a huge training capacity,” says Russell Mark, the performance and education advisor to the American Swimming Coaches Association. “And then they’re also at the forefront of a technical evolution. Strokes have gotten tighter, more streamlined. They’re an awesome, perfect evolution of how swimming has progressed, and the 400 IM captures everything they’re capable of doing.”
The French man and the Canadian girl came to the U.S. to perfect their craft. Now they’ve exported that expertise to compete for their home countries against the Stars and Stripes. For Arckey, the great-grandson of Italian immigrants who went through Ellis Island and settled in Pennsylvania, this is part and parcel of the American dream.
“Our country has always been built on trying to attract the greatest minds and people to continue to raise the bar,” he says. “Being exposed to rising tides raises all ships.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Made in America: How the U.S. Forged the Olympic Swimmers Competing Against Them in Paris.
