Vive Léon Marchand: even his watch flex confirms he's an absolute ...

It doesn’t happen at every Olympics but when a homegrown athlete galvanises the host nation with a couple of golds to get the crowds firing, there’s really nothing like it. Ian Thorpe did it at Sydney 2000. Mo Farah at London 2012. And no doubt about it, Paris 2024 belongs to Léon Marchand.

Known as ‘La Baguette’ for reasons I believe are as basic as ‘because he’s French’, the 22-year-old bagging four individual swimming gold medals this week more than vindicates the pre-games comparisons with the one and only Michael Phelps, who has 23 Olympic medals hanging up in a room somewhere.

Zoom in on Léon Marchand atop a Paris 2024 podium though (not the baguette area, SVP), and it appears he has more in common with Phelps than a greedy obsession with gold medals. He likes watches too – specifically Omega watches. Indeed, the duo actually teamed up for Omega’s Paris 2024 campaign. Entitled ‘Legends Inspire Legends’, it really could have jinxed things had Marchand not delivered, but who am I kidding – Omega is known for ensuring precision at the Olympics (it's been doing so since 1932), so once the Swiss watchmakers called it, Marchand reaching legend status was never in doubt.

While Phelps has been known for wearing versions of the Omega Seamaster over the years, Marchand seems to fancy himself as a master of something else: speed. On all four medal ceremonies inside Paris’s electric swimming arena, the Frenchman has rocked an Omega Speedmaster Chronoscope.

“Perhaps you would expect a swimmer of his calibre [watch pun alert] to wear a Seamaster 300M, or Planet Ocean, but instead he chose the Speedmaster Chronoscope,” says Fratello’s Robert-Jan Broer, a man who knows a lot about Omega watches.

Omega’s official watches of the Paris 2024 are a pair of 43mm Speedmaster Chronoscopes in steel and gold. Dating back to the 1880s would you believe, the model’s concentric triple-chronograph scales on the dial have always grabbed the headlines but the newbies boast hand-wound movements. Marchand isn’t wearing one of these though – perhaps too obvious a choice, or maybe it was a superstitious thing? Instead, he’s wearing a nearly identical steel version worth £8,900 – the main difference being the red markings on the subdials, bezel and seconds hand, and a transparent caseback so you get to peek at the inner workings of the movement instead of a solid Paris 2024 one.