Léon Marchand, Katie Ledecky and a night worthy of Olympic swimming lore

NANTERRE, France — Even Léon Marchand wasn’t sure he could actually do what he was trying to do: win double golds on the same night at the Olympics.

It’d be a “surprise” to him if he accomplished it, he said. And that’s why he wanted to try.

So, he signed up to swim an unprecedented double — the brutally exhausting 200-meter butterfly, and then the arduous 200-meter breaststroke two hours later — to test his body and his mind. That he volunteered to take on a challenge like this in the first place is what makes the young Frenchman impressive. That he overtook the world record-holder to win one final and dominated the field to win the other by nearly a second is what makes him already one of the greatest Olympic swimmers in history.

It is also what we love about sports. We walk into buildings like Paris La Défense Arena on nights like Wednesday never quite knowing what we’ll see. We hope it’s something we’ll never forget.

Some thousands of French fans witnessed one of the best sporting events of their lifetimes. Some thousands of Americans watched Katie Ledecky win the eighth Olympic gold medal of her career in her most dominant event, a feat that ties her with Jenny Thompson for the most gold medals for any American woman. If she wins one more — and she’s the heavy favorite in the 800-meter freestyle event still to come — she will tie Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina for the most gold medals for any female Olympian. Michael Phelps is the only person on the planet who has ever won more than nine Olympic gold medals.

And if that wasn’t enough to justify the price of admission to this one particular night session, how about a world record in the men’s 100 free from China’s Pan Zhanle? His gold medal-winning time of 46.40 seconds was also the first world record set here at the Paris Games, an exclamation point for a night that didn’t even need punctuation.

Home-nation favorite Léon Marchand reaffirmed his star status with an epic double-gold night in swimming not done since 1976. (Christian Liewig / Corbis via Getty Images)

We’d all spent the first half of this week wondering what was wrong with the pool and why times were so slow. The American swimmers have been fielding questions about their piles of silver and bronze, medals that aren’t quite as golden as they typically are.

But this is a sport that always delivers on this stage, and very few nights in Olympic history compare with what unfolded here Wednesday. No Olympic swimmer had won two individual gold medals in the same day in 48 years. No swimmer has ever medaled in both individual butterfly and breaststroke events in the same Games. Until Marchand did … on the same day. Both gold. In Olympic record swims.

No female swimmer had won at least one gold medal at four Olympics, until Ledecky did it here on Wednesday. And she did it in an event in which she has swum the 20 fastest times in world history, the 1,500-meter freestyle.

“I try not to think about history very much,” Ledecky said.

But the rest of us do. We love those history-making moments. We screenshot the screen when Ledecky is the only swimmer on the screen because she’s trounced the rest of the field by 10 seconds or more. We can’t turn away when seemingly an entire country is serenading its 22-year-old hero atop the podium as the national anthem plays. We can’t forget the cheers we heard for Zhanle’s world record or the deafening roar of Marchand’s comeback in the final 50 meters as he matched and then edged past Kristóf Milák.

“I knew it was possible for me to do — to finish the races, but maybe not win them,” Marchand said. “I never knew (if I could win both).”

But he tried. And he did it. This is the magic, and these are the moments that live on forever.