Swimming / Tracy Dodds : Janet Evans--Now 5-3, 90 Pounds--Just Keeps Getting Bigger, Better

Janet Evans of Fullerton Aquatics has been described as looking like “one of those wind-up bathtub toys” or as “a windmill in a hurricane” as she strokes furiously through the water, a little girl trying to keep pace with the women in the pool.

She was just 5 feet tall and weighed only 80 pounds when she competed in the Goodwill Games last summer, at 14. She was just too cute, making all those finals and collecting those bronze medals.

Last month, at the U.S. Swimming Open in Orlando, Fla., she surprised everyone with dramatic drops in her times and almost as dramatic gains in height and weight. She’s up to 5-3 now and weighs 90 pounds. And now that she’s 15, some people are seeing that cute little girl as a potential nightmare.

One of the East German coaches observed in Orlando: “She will be an awful lot of trouble for us in 1988.”

At the U.S. Open, Evans took four seconds off her best 400-meter freestyle time and won the gold in 4 minutes 11.06 seconds. She took more than six seconds off her best 400-meter individual medley time and won the gold in 4:45.81. And she took five seconds off her best in the 800-meter freestyle, winning in 8:32.85.

She expected a good meet, but those drops are nearly incredible. Her coach, Bud McAllister, admitted that she surprised him, too. “I never know with her,” he said. “I’ve been coaching for 11 years, and she’s the hardest swimmer to predict I’ve ever seen.”

Janet is in Europe now with a U.S. national team of 24 swimmers--including Debbie Babashoff of Mission Viejo and Julie Martin of Cypress--to compete in Paris, Berlin and Bonn.

McAllister isn’t predicting great times for her on this trip, considering that she has a cold, the Americans aren’t tapered and shaved for this trip and the East Germans will be geared up to look good in their own meet and try to make up for the way they were embarrassed in Orlando. Still, you never know.

McAllister said: “She could win something. I’m just not expecting the kind of jumps she made at the last meet. That has got to level off sooner or later. She’s approaching some record times.”

She’ll probably be passing them, too.

Although Evans is getting a little bigger, McAllister does not expect her to turn into a giant too big to be effective. Doctors who have studied her X-rays and those who know her diminutive mother expect her to stay pretty small.

But with the way McAllister is training her, concentrating not on the distance freestyles, which are her forte, but on the individual medley and, specifically, her butterfly stroke, she is adding muscle in her shoulders. She’s getting stronger without adding much more to drag through the water.

McAllister might not know, from meet to meet, what kinds of times Evans will turn in. But he figures that she’s destined for some great times. “She loves workouts,” he said. “She trained better than ever after the U.S. Open meet. She had her best times in workouts. She has always been consistent, and now she’s starting to get fast, too.”

Janet is a sophomore at El Dorado High School in Placentia. She competes for her school team, but she works out 11 times a week with McAllister. Although she has been swimming since she was 4, she is showing no signs of either tiring or burning out. She’s coming of age, physically, with plenty of energy left, emotionally.

McAllister said: “I don’t worry about her burning out at all. She loves to swim and she loves to come to workouts.”

And then there are the trips to Moscow, London, Paris. . . .