Did Léon Marchand deliver a humiliating snub to Quels Jeux!? Let’s delve into the story that has scandalised the whole of France, if by “scandalised” you mean “mildly diverted” and by “whole” you mean the sort of people who frequent the gossip columns of downmarket newspapers and like to make snap judgments about people they’ve never met.
Quels Jeux!, the live late-night chatshow on France 2, has been one of the television smashes of the Games, capturing audiences of up to three million in its post-watershed graveyard slot. Filmed in the Club France headquarters in La Villette, it is where a procession of medal-winning French athletes have taken their curtain call, answering lighthearted and embarrassingly personal questions in front of a screeching and probably drunk studio audience.
But not Marchand. Despite being perhaps the most famous man in France right now, with four gold medals and the adoration of a nation, the swimmer has thus far refused to participate on the grounds that – according to Le Parisien – the show “does not correspond to his values”. Marchand, the newspaper reports, is a “reserved” person by nature and prefers his interviews to take place “off-set” and to be “mainly devoted to sport”.
Remember that this the pinnacle of Marchand’s sporting career, a two-week haze that will define his life, whatever he goes on to achieve in or out of the pool. Never again will he be this famous or in demand. Never will he have a better opportunity to cash in on his exploding fame, to catch the wave and surf it for all its worth. Television. Commercial endorsements. Social media stardom. A tie-in memoir. A charitable foundation.
“Enjoy the moment,” former Olympians always counsel their successors, a piece of advice where the unspoken subtext has essentially been to say yes to everything. But then you read an interview with Marchand – which presumably took place off-set – when he says he is “trying to remain rare in terms of partnerships” and “does not want to be a walking advertisement”.
After winning his fourth gold he lamented he was “going to need a little time to get my feet back on the ground” and that while “swimming is not my life, maybe it will become so now”. For, at heart, this is a quiet guy from Toulouse who has never really craved fame or any of the mania being directed at him. He spends most of his working day surrounded by water, likes flying planes and playing video games, and went to Arizona to study. Is it not abundantly clear that this is somebody who wants to be alone?
But this is the paradox of Olympic fame: it casts its light suddenly and abundantly, indiscriminately and disproportionately, takes largely normal people into deeply abnormal places, for better and for worse. The same hand that offers you the world also quietly wraps its fingers around your neck. Literally, in some cases.
After winning a bronze medal in the judo, Romane Dicko found herself being consoled by Emmanuel Macron, who clasped his little technocratic hands around her face and wiped away her tears on live television. At which point it would have been lovely if the old skills had kicked in, Dicko had swept a leg around the president and thrown him to the ground for a perfect ippon. Instead, she later confessed the whole mise-en-scène made her feel “a little embarrassed”, an embarrassment she will inevitably be forced to relive until she retires.
For Antoine Dupont or Victor Wembanyama or judoka Teddy Riner, Olympic mania has largely manifested itself as the intensification of a phenomenon with which they are already familiar. But what of the overnight stars, such as Félix Lebrun, the 17-year-old table tennis player who captured the nation’s hearts on the way to a bronze medal? What of the numerous medallists from fringe sports once the Champs-Élysées parade is packed up, the circus moves on and they have to get on with the rest of their lives? How do you go back to anonymity when you can no longer be anonymous?
One of the more bizarre side-effects of the London Olympics was the way it created an army of decorated athletes from minor sports catapulted to overnight stardom but without any real outlet for exploiting it in a landscape that had quickly diverted its attention away from their eight fleeting minutes in the spotlight.
Naturally, they ended up populating the netherworlds of corporate speaking, questionable brand endorsements or low-budget television. So we had Hannah Cockroft on Celebrity Mastermind (specialist subject: McFly). Lutalo Muhammad on Bargain Hunt (where he talked a Lincoln antique dealer into selling him a Victorian riding crop for £65 and a feel of his bronze medal). Jade Jones becoming the face of Cashino slot machine shops. Barely a day going by between 2012 and 2014 without Greg Rutherford turning up on some reality TV show and declaring that he was “here to win it”.
What they all pretty quickly discovered was that the love and acclaim they had inspired during that halcyon summer was – ultimately – not really for them. Nor was it for the feats they had achieved or the sports they had perfected. In a way, they had simply been props and stooges in a grand national psychodrama. Their names and faces were largely interchangeable. All that mattered was how they had made us feel then, the way they had briefly allowed us to project our own desires on to them. Ultimately, it was only ever about us.
Perhaps, on some level, Marchand already senses this. In his interviews you can glimpse a glint of discomfiture, an unease at the size of this great wave and where it could carry him. For the rest, the long slow descent from the summit has begun. Perhaps you already need to look up their names. The woman who won the triathlon, the mountain biker, the naked blue guy from the opening ceremony: legends for a lifetime, but stars for a fortnight. The Olympics makes beautiful memories. But it forgets them just as quickly.
