In Beijing, Laure Manaudou will not be competing in the 200m freestyle, for which she still holds the world record. She will race in the 400m freestyle and the 100m and 200m backstroke, as well as the 4x100m medley relay. If things go well, she will return to France as just an ordinary champion. By Siegfried Mortkowitz.
If French swimming star Laure Manaudou’s career once resembled a fairy tale, it has slowly turned into a soap opera, most of it painful and much of it — far too much of it — played out in public.
In 2004, after she became the first-ever French woman — and the first French, man or woman, in 52 years — to win a swimming Olympic gold medal, she received a nation’s adulation. She was only 17 years old.
One year later, she reprised her Olympic gold medal performance in the 400m freestyle to win the World Championship in the same event in Montreal. In May 2006, at the French Championships at Tours, she beat Janet Evans’s 18-year-old world record for the 400m freestyle by nearly a second, then lowered it by nearly another second in August 2006 at the European Championships in Budapest, where she won four titles.
At the 2007 World Championships in Melbourne, she won golds in the 400m freestyle and 200m freestyle, setting a world record in the shorter discipline; silver medals in the 800m freestyle and 100m backstroke and a bronze in the 4x200m freestyle relay.
Tall, attractive, with a winning, photogenic smile, Manaudou embodied the French ideal of physical beauty and precocious success. When she returned home from Melbourne, she was greeted as a national heroine, with the popular weekly Paris Match putting her on its prestigious cover.
The director of the sports marketing company SportLab, Gilles Dumas, said at the time: “The French are almost unanimous about Laure — she is adored here just like Zinedine Zidane is.” She was a star and, just as important for the French, she was in love and flaunted it. Her romance with Italian swimmer Luca Marin was the talk of the Melbourne championships, with photos of the couple kissing or embracing being published around the world.
Following the Melbourne competition, Manaudou announced that she was leaving the “Svengali” who had discovered her at the age of 14 and coached her into a champion, Philippe Lucas, to join Marin in Turin and train there. “I am choosing love,” Manaudou said. “I want to live with him and have a child with him.”
Then, almost overnight, euphoria turned to nightmare, as everything went incredibly wrong — beginning with her love affair.
At the December 2007 short-course world championships in Debrecen, Hungary, where she won golds in the 400m freestyle and 100m backstroke, she was seen throwing away a ring Marin gave her.
Shortly thereafter, as she was warming up for a race, the couple quarrelled in public. Hours after that, it was revealed that Manaudou had a new boyfriend, French backstroke swimmer Benjamin Stasiulis. And just hours after this revelation, nude photos and a video of Manaudou were posted on the internet.
Marin denied having anything to do with the affair, which caused a storm of outrage in France that went up to the government. “I find this scandalous, hateful, cowardly, pathetic,” raged Sports Minister Bernard Laporte. In the few months since that painful chapter in her life, Manaudou has changed trainers twice. She then suffered an embarrassing defeat in her specialty, the 400m freestyle, at the April 2008 French championships, and broke down in tears in front of the television cameras.
“I’m not a machine, I don’t win all the time,” she told the daily L’Equipe afterwards.
She also admitted to never having experienced as much stress before, and that perhaps her days as the French “wunderkind” of swimming were over. “In 2004, I was 17 years old,” she said. “I did everything without thinking. I didn’t even think about whether I was in pain or not. I just swam. Now I think too much, and that causes me stress. I’ve got to put an end to that.”
In Beijing, Manaudou will not be competing in the 200m freestyle, for which she still holds the world record. She will race in the 400m freestyle and the 100m and 200m backstroke, as well as the 4x100m medley relay. If things go well, she will return to France as just an ordinary champion.
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