Editorial content for the 2023 World Aquatics Championships is sponsored by FINIS, a longtime partner of Swimming World and leading innovator of suits, goggles and equipment. Leon Marchand to Kick Off World Championships in World Record Pursuit Leon Marchand will be chasing history, and everyone inside the Marine Messe venue on Sunday evening will be aware of the situation. The last surviving Michael Phelps world record could go down. The swimming community has awaited this moment since last June, when Marchand turned into the final 100 meters of his 400 IM final more than one second under world-record pace. He could not match Phelps’ blazing finishing freestyle speed, but Marchand still clocked a time of 4:04.28, a best time by almost five seconds and the second-fastest time in history behind Phelps’ 4:03.84. In one race, Marchand jumped ahead of the likes of Ryan Lochte, Chase Kalisz, Kosuke Hagino, Daiya Seto, Laszlo Cseh and Tyler Clary. This year’s World Championships final, in which Marchand will be a heavy favorite to defend his title, comes just over a month after Phelps passed Mary T. Meagher for the longest tenure as world-record holder in one event. We are weeks shy of the 21st anniversary of Phelps breaking the 400 IM world record in Fort Lauderdale for the first of eight new standards he would establish in the race. Now, here comes Marchand, four months after his last taper meet where he annihilated the all-time records in three short course yards events, including a 400-yard time of 3:28.82 that sits a whopping four seconds clear of any other man in history. Yards times hold little value internationally, and Marchand’s talents are certainly well-suited to short course, but his 400-yard IM time was more than five seconds faster than he swam last year. Translation: he has improved. This year in Fukuoka, it’s very possible that Marchand cannot reach Phelps’ record-setting pace in three of the four strokes. And there’s no shame in that: Phelps held world records in freestyle and butterfly, and at the time he swam his final medley world record, he was ranked No. 2 all-time in the 100 backstroke and No. 3 in history in the 200 back. But Marchand is among the world’s best breaststrokers, and his 1:07.28 breaststroke split last year was the fastest in history by far. Kalisz, who won 2021 Olympic gold in the 400 IM largely thanks to his breaststroke split, went 1:08.45 in that race. When Phelps swam that world record at the Beijing Olympics, he had his quickest-ever breaststroke split at 1:10.56, still elite but nowhere close to Marchand. Leon Marchand — Photo Courtesy: KMSP/Stéphane Kempinaire Now, let’s compare Phelps and Marchand in the other strokes: Out of these three strokes, Marchand is the closest to Phelps on the butterfly leg, not a huge surprise considering that Marchand was the Worlds silver medalist in the 200 fly last year, and in the absence of Kristof Milak, he will contend for a world title in 2023. Backstroke and freestyle do not match up, but Marchand has shown improvement in those strokes after almost two years working with Bob Bowman, Phelps’ longtime mentor at Arizona State University. Imagine that in this year’s Worlds final, Marchand goes out in 55.2 after butterfly before perhaps trimming two tenths off his 2022 backstroke split. He might still turn second behind American Carson Foster at the halfway point, but the breaststroke split beckons. In this hypothetical scenario, Marchand exactly matches his historic breaststroke split from last year, opening up a lead of more than two seconds on the field. And you have to think his freestyle has improved: his split on the 800-yard free relay at the NCAA Championships jumped by one-and-a-half seconds from 2022 to 2023. Perhaps he covers his closing 100 meters in 57.7. Well, there you go. If that transpires, the world record will belong to Marchand. Improve just a fraction more on any of those splits, and a 4:02 is in order. At a pre-meet press conference, Bowman said without prompt that he didn’t know if Marchand could break Phelps’ record but admitted potential for an improved performance. “On every stroke he can do something a little better. Probably freestyle he could improve a little bit. And he has this year. He’s worked on it,” Bowman said of Marchand. “He kind of has a look when he’s ready to swim, and he has that, so I feel like it’s pretty good. We won’t know until he swims.” Phelps retired after the 2016 Olympics as the owner of three individual world records. The two butterfly marks were broken at the 2019 World Championships. Caeleb Dressel’s record-setting effort in the 100 fly was not much of a surprise given that Dressel had been nipping at the mark for several years, but Milak’s record in the 200 fly came out of nowhere and set the teenager on a path toward stardom. The Frenchman’s reign as the world’s individual medley king began last year with his dual world titles, but kicking off these World Championships with his first global standard would cement Marchand’s legend.
