The French Swimmer Who Is Carrying His Country on His Back

The French swimmer Léon Marchand understood that he would be his country’s marquee athlete at the Paris Games, and he surely is. Event workers stop him to sneak in selfies. A giant photo of him on the starting blocks adorns a skyscraper. Cameras are trained on him everywhere he goes.

But Marchand’s star turn didn’t begin just this week. Even in the months leading up to the Games, his growing fame was evident thousands of miles away in Arizona, where he was swimming for Arizona State. After a road meet at the University of Arizona, fans lined up to have him sign whatever they had handy — a swim cap, Nike Jordans, a scrap of paper.

He was asked if this happened at every meet.

“Just this year,” he said.

Marchand, 22, has ascended to the top of the swimming world just in time for his home country to host the Games, and as one of France’s best — and earliest — hopes for Olympic gold.

Carrying the weight of a nation’s hopes can be an uncommonly heavy burden for any athlete, and Marchand will not bear it alone, of course. Victor Wembanyama, the 7-foot-4 sensation who just completed his rookie season with the N.B.A.’s San Antonio Spurs, will lead France’s men’s basketball team. Teddy Riner, one of the best judokas in history, will look to claim a medal at a sixth straight Games. The World Cup winner Thierry Henry is coaching France’s men’s soccer team, and the pressure to deliver will be just as intense in a handful of sports — rugby, cycling, tennis — that France loves the most.

But swimming is one of the Olympics’ marquee events, and that is turning a different kind of spotlight on Marchand, whose profile has grown exponentially since the day last summer when he broke Michael Phelps’s last remaining world record by more than a second. He is entered in four individual events in Paris, and is a threat to win a medal in all of them.

His first chance could come Sunday in his signature event, the one he used to knock Phelps out of the record book: the 400-meter individual medley.