French star swimmer Leon Marchand is expected to race at the World Aquatics World Cup circuit this fall – in a big departure from his coach Bob Bowman‘s prior superstar athletes, who mostly eschewed the money-heavy fall tour.
Bowman said in a press conference Friday that after the Olympics, Marchand would remain home in Europe and focus on training for the World Cup.
The pared-back tour will this year feature three meets in Asia.
- Shanghai, China, 18-20 October
- Incheon, South Korea, 24-26 October
- Singapore, 31 October – 2 November
All three meets will also be in the traditional short course meters format.
This is a tour that Michael Phelps, who Bowman coached, never leaned fully into. He swam two meets in 2009 and two in 2011; in 2009, he struggled, only picking up a few medals and no wins. In 2011, though, he showed off how good he could have been in this format, winning four individual events across the two meets and picking up enough points to finish 5th overall in the standings of the then-seven meet series.
Phelps was a great short course swimmer, though he was almost-wholly focused on long course throughout his career. Marchand, meanwhile, is now the fastest man ever in the 500 free, 200 breast, 200 IM, and 400 IM in yards, and is a five-time World Champion in long course. That includes breaking the World Record in the 400 IM at the 2023 World Championships – a record that previously stood for over 20 years.
The World Cup last year offered around $1.1 million in prize money, with the maximum for any one individual being $136,000, plus a $10,000 bonus for breaking a World Record or winning the same event at all three legs of the series.
Additionally, if Marchand’s Olympics go the way he’s hoping them to, with 3-4 individual gold medals a real possibility, it would be an opportunity to spread his brand in the world’s most-populated. After his record-setting 8 Olympic gold medals in 2008 in Beijing, Phelps’ popularity in the country got mixed reviews from American media. The New York Times ran a headline that “Phelps’s Splash Fails to Stir Chinese” on the same day that ABC News ran a headline of “Chinese in Awe of American Swimmer Michael Phelps“.
In the interim, China’s interest in the Olympic Games generally, and swimming specifically, has grown substantially. The same is true in Singapore thanks to the country’s first-ever Olympic gold medalist Joseph Schooling in 2016.
Marchand plans to return to Austin to begin preparations for next summer’s World Championships in January, painting a new model for modern pro swimmers where the fall can be an opportunity to hone racing and earning money before the spring turns to a long course focus for the big meets in the summer. It is sort of an abbreviated rewrite of the American collegiate system, where swimmers focus on racing (a lot) in yards until March before shifting focus to the bigger pool.
That is a model that has worked well for Marchand so far.
