Success came too quickly for the French swimmer Camille Muffat, who broke British hearts by ending Rebecca Adlington’s reign as Olympic champion and winning the 400 metres freestyle at the 2012 London Olympics.
She entered the limelight in 2005 at the age of 15 when she unexpectedly beat Laure Manaudou, the queen of French swimming, in a 200 metres medley. But the shy, tall teenager from Nice was intimidated by the manufactured media rivalry with Manoudou — a glamorous world record holder whose soap-opera love life drew as much interest as her sporting exploits. “I wasn’t at all ready for that,” Muffat said just before the London Games, where she also won a silver medal in the 200 metres freestyle and a bronze in the 200 metres relay. “Because it was Laure, all the media got carried away. It was difficult to be compared to her all the time. They pitted her against me. I was three years younger. I thought that one day she was going to insult me.”
Further greatness was expected of Muffat, who was awarded the Legion of Honour at the age of 23. However, the pressures on Muffat, whose father was a sports-mad physiotherapist and whose mother swam competetively, caused her to retire last summer at the age of 24.
She said she wanted to spend more time with her boyfriend, the golfer William Forgues, and to use her celebrity to build a new career. The move dismayed the world of French swimming, which was counting on her to defend her title at the 2016 Rio Games. She partly blamed her strained relationship with Fabrice Pellerin, the coach who had trained her since the age of 11.
Muffat had made clear in recent months that she felt liberated after 15 years devoted to one of the most gruelling training regimes in a sport that requires much self-sacrifice. “It did not frighten me to emerge from the ultraprotective bubble of high-level sport,” she said in the autumn. “In becoming Olympic champion, I achieved the best that there was to achieve and I wanted to get on with another stage in my life.”
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Her power, grace and efficient style was refined by the Stakhanovite regime imposed by Pellerin, who also produced Yannick Agnel, 22, France’s other swimming wunderkind. In the year before the London Games, Pellerin made Muffat swim ten miles a day, seven days a week. The regime, which required her to be in the water for six hours a day, had already taken its toll on her studies, causing her to drop out of a Nice business school shortly after she earned a science baccalaureate.
Pellerin always insisted that Muffat wanted to be trained like a boy. “She swims just as fast as they do. She doesn’t give a hoot about the feminine condition,” he said in 2012.
Her parents grew uneasy over the distance that Pellerin put between them and their daughter. However, the swimmer defended the coach even when relations were strained. “Things are both good and bad between us,” she said when she retired. “He will be the only coach in my life.”
Muffat had recently been speaking of the happiness she had found after retiring. She was earning an estimated half a million euros a year endorsing beauty products and appearing at celebrity events. She recently tweeted a picture of herself playing with her British bulldog, Brioche.
She was recruited at the last minute to compete in Dropped, the reality show in whose chartered helicopter she died. Le Monde said that “France has lost one of the greatest swimmers in its history”.
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Camille Muffat, swimmer, was born on October 28, 1989. She died on March 9, 2015, aged 24