Janet Evans Is Making Time for . . . : Records, High School and a Personal Life, Too

Janet Evans stepped up on the starting blocks and glanced at the competition. She looked as if she belonged in this race. Two years ago, when she climbed onto the blocks during the Goodwill Games in Moscow, she was 5-feet tall, weighed 83 pounds and looked like a Pop Warner player filling in on the Rams’ offensive line.

Evans is five inches taller than she was in the summer of ’86 and a lot faster. Three swimming world records fast, to be exact. So the girls lined up for the start of the 500-yard freestyle during the Foothill High School Invitational last Saturday were equals in stature only.

Evans, who is in the middle of heavy-distance training for the 1988 Summer Olympics, set a meet record (4 minutes 44.73 seconds) in the event. Her time after 200 meters would have won the girls’ 200-meter freestyle in the meet. The second-place finisher in the 500, Lorenza Munoz of Capistrano Valley, was more than five seconds behind Evans.

Evans had already churned out a two-hour workout that morning, not to mention the laps she had been swimming in the workout pool before the race to ensure her daily quota of 15,000 meters.

Evans, 16, a junior at El Dorado High School, is focusing her energy on winning a couple of Olympic gold medals in September, and she certainly would be excused for passing up the chance to leave a group of high-school swimmers in her wake. But she swims in these meets because she wants to help her team and, most of all, because it’s fun.

Evans may have to spend a lot of time staring at the bottom of a pool, but she doesn’t have to completely abandon a normal teen-age life.

“I like high school swimming and I like the team atmosphere,” Evans said. “Sometimes I even work out with the team. I like to be with all the guys for a change.”

Evans, who trains under the guidance of Bud McAllister on the Fullerton Aquatics Swim Team in Fullerton, usually works out alone.

“I used to swim with her in practice,” said Mark Jordan, who also swims for FAST and El Dorado’s team, “but it got a little difficult being beaten by a girl every day.”

So how do you think these high school swimmers feel when they have to compete against her?

“I know I can’t keep up with her, so I just do my best,” said Stacy St. Martin of Los Alamitos High. “She gets my pace up a little faster, and sometimes I swim faster.”

When it comes to high school swimming, racing against Evans is a losing proposition. She has never lost a race in a high school dual meet.

“Basically, the kids know they’re swimming for second place, but someday they’ll be able to tell their kids they swam against Janet Evans,” said Ray Bray, Fountain Valley High School swim coach.

“Oh, I’ve had some mediocre swimmers come up to me and say, ‘I swim and I still go out (socially) . ‘ So I say, ‘High school dances are nice, but I’d rather go to Paris . ‘ “

--Janet Evans

They say Paris is awfully nice in the spring, but the next international competition for Janet Evans will be in Seoul, South Korea. Which means she’s going to go the prom this year.

“I don’t get to go to many dances,” she said, smiling, “but, hey, this is the prom .”

Evans is not the first girl to have her life changed at a very early age because of her swimming ability, but she’s one of the few who seems to work almost as hard at maintaining a sense of life beyond the pool as she does at trimming fractions of a second off her best times.

Still, when your week must include almost 40 hours of swimming and several hours of weightlifting, it’s difficult to squeeze much else besides school, homework and sleep into the schedule planner.

“When I’m out of the pool,” Evans said, “I’m a normal high school student with a French test tomorrow and too much algebra homework tonight who’d rather think about having lunch with my friends.

“My friends are really cool about my swimming. They don’t call when they know I’m asleep, and they don’t try to make me feel left out if I can’t do something socially.”

Evans’ high school coach, Tom Milich, says she’s so down-to-earth that her teammates tend to forget that she’s the fastest female distance freestyler on earth.

“It’s nice to have a world-record holder on the team, but Janet’s just, well, Janet,” Milich said. “Nobody thinks of her as a world-record holder. Her feats are amazing, almost impossible to comprehend for some of these kids, but we don’t think of her as super special . . . except when you see her swim, that is.

“This is an Olympic year and you’d figure that there was no way she’d miss workouts for meets, but she makes all the ones we need her for.”

An assembly was held in Evans’ honor at El Dorado the other day, and videotape was played of her setting world records in the 800-meter freestyle (8:17.12) and 1,500-meter freestyle (15:52.10) at the U.S. Swimming Indoor National Championships last month.

Evans, who also holds the world mark in the 400 meters (4:05.45) and is the first American to hold three world records since Debbie Meyer in 1968, received a lengthy standing ovation from the students.

“It was soooo neat,” Evans said. “I didn’t think anyone cared. Some of my friends came up to me and said, ‘God, I was nearly crying.’ Everyone has been, you know, totally cool. I was honored . . . but a little embarrassed.”

“People talk about how rapid Janet’s stroke is and how straight her arms are, but it doesn’t matter what your stroke looks like out of the water ; it’s how efficient it is under water. And she’s been fast since she was 9 and setting all the age-group records.”

--Debbie Babashoff,

1986 World Games bronze medalist

A lot of people may have been astonished by Evans’ rise in the sport--which was almost as rapid as her stroke--but not Babashoff.

“I finished second to her in the two events she set the (world) records at nationals,” said Babashoff, who swims at Fountain Valley High School. “The last time I beat her was 1986, in the world trials.”

From Evans’ perspective, her ascension to the highest level of the victory platform was not all that quick, and it certainly wasn’t easy. She has been swimming competitively since she was 4.

Now, with her name in the world record book three times, she seems just a few months away from realizing her Olympic dreams. She’s no longer a little-known little girl with a funny-looking stroke and something to prove. Now, she’s simply the best.

Evans knows all about life in the pool’s fastest lane, but what will keep her going after Seoul?

“You pay such a price to excel in this sport, and obviously Janet’s done that,” Milich said, “but she doesn’t feel like she’s reached the pinnacle yet. And I believe she’s still got some significant drops (in time) in her.”

Quitting swimming has never so much as crossed Evans’ mind. Sure, the huge improvements were fun, but she knows they can’t go on forever. And she still plans to swim through next year and at least four years of college.

“Everyone starting out has something to prove,” she said, “whether you’re 4-10 or 6 feet tall. I did it for myself. And you can’t keep improving, or all the records would be zero seconds.

“I like swimming. I don’t even mind working out by myself. I train against the clock, and as long as I go fast, it doesn’t matter if the pool’s full of people or empty. I’m not a creature of habit, though. I like the workouts to vary, and Bud does a good job of giving me new challenges.”

As any veteran swimmer will gladly tell you, there are only so many ways you can get from one end of the pool to the other, and they are all boring variations on the same painful theme. Evans, however, somehow has managed to get up most mornings with a fresh spark.

“It’s pretty obvious that Janet’s biggest asset as a swimmer is that she still loves it,” Milich said. “She still has fun with it . . . and not many swimmers can say that after they’ve been at it that many years.”