The American mastermind behind France’s Olympic sensation
livemint.comNANTERRE, France—As the Marseillaise blared around the arena and a French swimmer soaked in the adulation of his home crowd, a middle-aged American stood off to the side of the starting blocks beaming with pride. He may not have been applauding a countryman, but he was reveling in his handiwork. Bob Bowman is the most successful coach in the history of U.S.
swimming. He’s the man who discovered Michael Phelps and molded countless other Olympians. And over the past five Summer Games, he’s overseen a period of American swimming supremacy in which Team USA has amassed a combined 67 gold medals.
But at La Défense Arena this summer, he’s representing a slightly different shade of red, white and blue. For the 2024 Olympics in Paris, Bowman is on the coaching staff for Team France. “It’s a little weird for me," Bowman said in an interview.
“But it works out OK." It definitely worked out on Wednesday night for Léon Marchand, who became the first person in nearly half a century to win two gold medals in a single evening on Wednesday night. How a 59-year-old from Columbia, S.C., who speaks only un petit peu de français and lives closer to Paris, Texas, than Paris, France has found himself in charge of the country’s most precious resource is a complicated story. “This whole meet is about me fulfilling a promise I made to a kid three years ago," Bowman said on Wednesday.
Until recently, Bowman combined his duties as a coach for the U.S. national team with coaching at Arizona State, where the swimmers under his supervision included Marchand and about a dozen current and former members of Team USA. That was a perfectly acceptable state of affairs until last summer’s world championships, when it suddenly became clear that Bowman’s
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