2020 Swammy Awards: Male Open Water Swimmer of the Year Marc-Antoine Olivier

To see all of our 2020 Swammy Awards, click here.

2020 Male Open Water Swimmer of the Year: Marc-Antoine Olivier, FRA

The coronavirus pandemic made for a relatively light year for swimming competition in all forms. But Marc-Antoine Olivier won a pair of key races despite the pandemic restrictions.

The FINA Marathon Swimming World Series was canceled after just one stop. But Olivier dominated that single stop. In Doha, Qatar, Olivier swam a 1:49:46.60 for the 10K race, beating the entire field by more than twelve seconds. That’s a huge margin compared to the women’s race, which had three swimmers within two-tenths of a second at the finish.

The 24-year-old French open water specialist also won his home nation’s Open Water Championships in September, once again crushing the Olympic-distance 10K. Olivier beat the field by about four seconds in that one. After taking second in the 10K at the 2019 World Aquatics Championships, Olivier was locked into a berth at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and has continued his rise, looking like a true medal threat for the Tokyo Olympics, now postponed one year to the summer of 2021.

Previous Winners:

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About Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson swam for nearly twenty years. Then, Jared Anderson stopped swimming and started writing about swimming. He's not sick of swimming yet. Swimming might be sick of him, though. Jared was a YMCA and high school swimmer in northern Minnesota, and spent his college years swimming breaststroke and occasionally pretending …

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