This is a third coronation for the 21-year-old Frenchman at the World Swimming Championships in Fukuoka (Japan): for the second year in a row, Léon Marchand won the title of world champion in the 200 meter medley. By winning in 1 min 54 sec 82/100, he set a new European distance record and became the only French swimmer to hold five world crowns.
After the 400m medley at the start of these Worlds and the 200m butterfly on Wednesday, Marchand added a fifth gold medal to his list, a year after his first two titles, already in the 200m medley and the 400m 4 swimming. He won ahead of two Britons: Duncan Scott, second and relegated by more than a second, and Tom Dean.
Once again, the Toulousain, a pupil of Bob Bowman, the former mentor of legend Michael Phelps, made the difference thanks to supersonic flows, where he each time created impressive gaps with his competitors. He took advantage of this final to beat, for the fourth time in his career, the French record for the distance, and also seized the old European record of Hungarian Laszlo Cseh.
Marchand was four hundredths better than the 1 min 55 sec 22/100 achieved by Cseh at the 2008 World Championships in Rome fifteen years ago.
