Léon Marchand Reflects On Life After Olympic Glory In ‘Beyond Gold’: “Who Am I When I’m Not Racing?”

EXCLUSIVE: What do you do after winning five medals and becoming the face of your home Olympic Games? That’s the question we find Léon Marchand grappling with at the start of a three-part doc about the swimming prodigy. A generational talent, the young athlete seems lost as we pick up his post-Olympics story in Léon Marchand: Beyond Gold.

“At the beginning of the movie, we can see it, I’m confused, I don’t know where I’m going,” Marchand tells Deadline in an exclusive interview. “Paris was so big. It was a dream and a goal for French athletes and athletes around the world. So, when you do well, what’s after that? I realized later that there’s so much more. But it took me a long time to process it.”

Marchand did better than ‘well.’ The superstar swimmer won four gold medals and a bronze. The doc shows him searching for meaning after the Paris success and ultimately rediscovering motivation and purpose.

“After Paris, a lot of people probably thought I had reached a destination. In reality, I found myself asking new questions: who am I when I’m not racing, when I’m not in the pool, and what remains when everything slows down?”

Beyond Gold is both a coming-of-age story and a sports film. “I didn’t want to make a documentary just about swimming. A goal of the documentary was to show the hidden side of elite sport, and also to go behind the success at the Olympics,” he says of the series which is produced by Quad Lab and the Marchand family’s prodco Clox.

“You see that it’s a kind of a therapy for Léon,” says Yann Le Bourbouach who produced Beyond Gold. “Most of the time, when we do [documentaries on] celebrities, it’s after their careers. But here it’s a very clever young man, telling us [filmmakers]: ‘I want you to explain what’s in my mind after winning everything. Did I win anything as a human being?’”

Quad co-produced Netflix’s Tour de France: Unchained series, which showed the human stories and drama behind the bike race. With Beyond Gold, the recipe is similar. “The most important thing is that it’s not a sport documentary,” says Le Bourbouach. “When we do Tour de France: Unchained or when we do Liliane Bettencourt (in Netflix’s The Billionaire, the Butler & the Boyfriend), it’s always a human story.”

Marchand’s father, Xavier, is a filmmaker and a former elite swimmer. He filmed his son for Beyond Gold and co-directed with Sacha Vucinic. “You always want to put the best version of yourself forward, so having my dad behind the camera was a great strategy and way for me to be more honest about what I’m doing, and just have a normal, natural conversation. I think you can really feel that when you watch the documentary,” the younger Marchand says.

The series shows Marchand in the afterglow of making Olympic history as he hangs out with Formula One drivers, models for luxury brands and becomes an international star. Amid that, there is a young man looking to relight the fire that drove him to gold and balance this newfound fame with being one of the best athletes in the world. “If you party after the F1 on Saturday, Monday morning, you’re not gonna be ready to swim fast,” is his take.

Away from the media shoots and glitz, elite sport means hours of dedication in the pool and gym, which we see. Marchand travels to Australia to train with coach Dean Boxall. He then heads to the U.S. to work under legendary coach Bob Bowman, and the doc offers a window into the sheer grind of training twice a day.

As the story unfolds and the star swimmer goes from France to Australia to the U.S., the motivation in the pool slowly returns. “Changing the coaching [methods], changing the environment, going to a different country really helped. We can see throughout the movie that the energy is coming back,” the Marchand says. “The swimming passion is also coming back.”

Next up is the European Aquatics Championships, taking place in Paris this summer, and a homecoming for Marchand. His series is for France Télévisions, the country’s public broadcaster, which will put it on the france.tv platform in July and air it on the France 2 channel later.

Studio TF1, distributor of big-ticket docs including Gisèle Pelicot doc Drugged and Abused: No More Shame, is bringing it to the international market.

Marchand is part of a golden generation of French athletes that includes the NBA’s Victor Wembanyama and rugby star Antoine Dupont. Rodolphe Buet, Chief Distribution Officer at Studio TF1, believes that broader generational story is part of the series’ appeal.

“Beyond Gold is the story of an iconic sports star, but what’s more important for us is that Léon’s story reflects a new generation, which is extremely talented, but questioning themselves and life, and considering what’s going on around them.”

In terms of selling the series, a marquee sports star gives channels and platforms a head start, he adds. “People are looking for great stories, and they are looking for brands and IP that are driving the algorithm. There are very few names like Léon Marchand, who can potentially drive the algorithm, create a TV event and be on the front page or the recommendation list of the platform.”

With filming wrapped and the doc soon to hit French TV and come to the international market, has the period of reflection altered Marchand’s view on sports – and life? “It definitely changed me,” Marchand says. “I didn’t get answers from my questions, but I found myself actually talking and speaking about things, and improving the questions.”

In terms of sporting ambition, he says the fire is fully reignited. “I just want to get better and better. I just want to break records. I want to focus on LA28, I want to try different events, I want to train as hard as I can. There are so many things that I still want to do in the sport.”