High performance takes a lot of work both in and out of the pool. At an Olympic Games, there are added factors like media obligations, drug testing, and odd eating hours that can make getting the proper recovery challenging.
This didn’t seem to be a problem for Leon Marchand in his home country of France, where he won 4 gold medals at the 2024 Paris Olympics. His coach, Bob Bowman, revealed that the Flying Frenchman actually slept for 11 hours the night before his final individual race, the 200 IM.
6 hundredths too many
Must be nice when your government systemically undermines your competition by making the living conditions absolute hell
I still can’t fathom the death toll from athletes in Paris. Truly staggering.
I agree, the complete lack of Covid precautions, the horrible conditions of the Village, everything was just an absolute mess. Heartbreaking for those of us who know the level of dedication, discipline and sacrifice that it takes to compete at an international level, let alone the OLYMPICS! France should be ashamed.
Yup the Italian medalist even had to sleep in the park
That’s because he wasn’t in the noisy, uncomfortable Olympic village, but probably in a posh private Villa with a high end mattress,white noise, room darkening shades and a working AC that kept a cool room temperature of 65 degrees. It’s no coincidence that he performed at his peak. I’m sure his accommodations were planned for months ahead.
That sounds like any college apartment in the United States, so nothing new for Marchand. I hope they have normal (by American standards) accommodations in LA 2028
by the sounds of it, Marchand was having his 11 hour sleep a lot closer to the pool than the 45 minutes or so it took the others to get there from the village.
While Ryan Lochte got wasted until 5 hours before his Shanghai 200 IM final
I haven’t been able to sleep 11 hours SINCE I retired from swimming-and that was in 1988-
I wish I could sleep 11 hours
JLo is jealous. She sleeps for 8 hours only.
This might be inflammatory, but sleep has never been a priority with age group and college swimming. Doubles are just deadly for health and performance. Good for Marshand for being able to log 11 hours, because obviously he needed it.
Name one good swimmer who doesn’t do doubles
Michael Andrew
I said a GOOD swimmer
Turns out that was not inflammatory
I think most people (not all people) agree with the sentiment with where we’ve progressed as a society in 2024.
I think the bigger problem is ‘what can we do with that belief?’
The cost of building more pools to get everyone on their ideal sleep cycles is a big hurdle to overcome.
Fair enough, although I think there are other ways to get around that hurdle if the goal is more sleep; not going into detail, America is easily the most stacked country when it comes to pools.
I think there’s something to be said about the majority of the US national team actively pursuing a diploma/degree. I feel like there are some factors we could look at such as education and marital status, income from non-active sources (ie sponsors, not Youtube @CodyMiller), possibly location, and what effect those have on outputs like body composition, sleep and time improvements.
I hypothesize you’d find a lot of top-level swimmers that only focus on swimming, and have passive income to support that lifestyle, and… Read more »
Mandating swim lessons in our schools would likely make the need a reality. Back to encouraging more sleep by way of reducing double workouts, there was a team in Fullerton that couldn’t find a way to to hold doubles, and was a very successful club in spite of limited pool time.