Junior Olympics Swimming : Strauss, 14, Sets Record in 100-Meter Freestyle

Noel Strauss just has to be the most peculiar ol’ boy to come charging out of Arkansas since, oh, farmers started hawking night crawlers.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Strauss, himself, you understand. It’s what he does, though, that is so rare. You see, Strauss won the men’s 100-meter freestyle final Wednesday at the Mission Viejo International Sports Complex.

That in itself isn’t exactly something to haul out the large headlines over. Even if he did swim the event in 51.59 seconds in the preliminaries--bettering the two-year-old junior national record of 51.97 seconds--and even if it was during the western Junior Olympic Championships.

What makes this different isn’t even the fact that Strauss skipped the fifth grade, will be a junior next fall in high school when he should be a sophomore, and has a grade-point average of 3.916.

No, what makes it all so downright peculiar is that Strauss has too much going against him to be able to have pulled off something like this.

First of all, he comes from a state where--according to his Little Rock team coach, Paul Blair--there are only about 750 registered swimmers and not a single high school around Little Rock that can boast a 25-yard short-course pool.

And Strauss will tell you himself that “it’s kind of weird” he somehow sprouted to about 5-feet 11-inches, even though his father is only 5-6 and his mother 5-3.

But the craziest thing about Strauss setting this record is that he’s only 14, supposedly about four or five years too young to be physically able to swim that fast.

“I think it’s pretty special for a youngster to be able to swim that well in an event that, age-wise, he isn’t suited for,” Blair said. “Most other sprinters don’t reach a peak like that until they’re 19 or 20.”

Bud McAllister, the Fullerton Aquatic Swim Team coach who oversaw pupil Janet Evans recently setting a world record in the 800-meter freestyle and is no stranger to speed, was impressed by the kid he saw during a training camp at North Carolina last winter.

“We switched groups every day, and one day I had the sprinters. He was just phenomenal,” McAllister said of Strauss. “He has got one of the best kicks I’ve ever seen. One of the coaches up there (at the camp) thinks he’s going to make the finals of the Olympic trials if he’s not too naive to get psyched out. Most of the time you don’t go that fast until you go to college.”

Strauss did, though, and broke the record in the morning preliminaries, swimming the event 2.2 seconds faster than he ever had. Although his time in the evening final was a slower 51.73 seconds, it was still good enough to have broken the old record. Not to mention a national age-group record as well.

“(Breaking the record) gave me a lot more confidence,” said Strauss, who was fully rested for this meet. “I was pretty sure I would have a real good race tonight (in the final).”

And that made his coach happy, because the whole reason Blair brought Strauss to the meet was to give him a shot at qualifying for the Olympic trials, which he did, and giving him some further experience in the 100 meters.

He’ll get even more today when he competes in the 200-meter freestyle, though Strauss says it’s not his best event. Other events scheduled today in the meet, which continues through Saturday, are the 400-meter individual medley and the 800-meter freestyle relay.