U.S. Swimming Long Course Championships : Evans Has Gotten Bigger, and, She’s Hoping, Better

Janet Evans showed up at the Phillips 66/U.S. Swimming Long Course National Championship meet at USC Monday afternoon smiling, as usual, and wearing her new school colors, the cardinal and white of Stanford University, in big, bold stripes.

A year after winning three gold medals in Seoul, Evans has bulked up to a mighty 5-foot-6 and 110 pounds, but she’s not losing her enthusiasm or changing her style.

“If anything, I feel stronger,” Evans said.

She hasn’t targeted any specific times and she isn’t promising to lower any of her world records this week, although she has been known to surprise herself with record times when all she’s seeking to do is, as she puts it, “See how fast I can go.”

There hasn’t been a world record set by anyone, anywhere this year. But this could well be the meet where a record or two could fall as U.S. swimmers peak for their best times of the season.

Evans chose not to swim the 1,500-meter freestyle, one of the two events held on the first day of the meet. The women’s 1,500 and the men’s 800-meter freestyle are not Olympic events, and Evans is concentrating on her Olympic swims.

But Julie Kole of the Foxcatcher Swim Club, who won the women’s 1,500 in 16 minutes 14.12 seconds Monday, 22 seconds off Evans’ world record of 15:52.10, and Dan Jorgensen, who won the men’s 800-meter freestyle in 7:56.61, did qualify to swim the events at the Pan Pacific Games in Tokyo Aug. 17-20.

This meet, the premier U.S. competition of the year, is the selection meet for both the Pan Pacific and the U.S.-Soviet dual meet in Atlanta Aug. 24-26.

Evans will swim one of her Olympic gold-medal events today when she opens with the 400-meter individual medley. She will swim another of her gold medal events Wednesday, the 400-meter freestyle. And she will swim her final gold-medal event, the 800-meter freestyle, on Friday. She holds world records in both the 400-meter freestyle and the 800-meter freestyle.

Swimmers are allowed to enter four events in this meet, and Evans has not yet decided whether her fourth event will be the 200-meter individual medley Thursday, which would give her an event a day, or the 200-meter backstroke, which she prefers but which will be contested just minutes after the 800 Friday night.

“There isn’t even a men’s event in between,” she pointed out. “I’d just have a few minutes to swim a warmdown after the 800. But I could probably do it. The 800 doesn’t hurt until the next day.”

Also on Friday night, gold medalist Matt Biondi and silver medalist Tom Jager will race in the 50-meter freestyle. Biondi set the world record at the Olympics at 22.14, a time not likely to fall with Biondi just getting back into sprint training after several months with the national water polo team. But it’s not out of the question.

David Wharton of USC, who will be swimming for the Germantown Academy, would like to regain the world record in the 400-meter individual medley that he held briefly in 1987. Wharton won the silver medal in the 400 medley in Seoul, finishing behind Tamas Darnyi of Hungary, who set the world record in that swim at 4:15.42. Wharton will swim the 400 medley on Wednesday.

Mike Barrowman holds the U.S. record in the 200-meter breaststroke and could threaten the world record of 2:13.34 that Victor Davis of Canada set in this pool during the 1984 Olympic Games. The men’s 200-meter breaststroke will be held Thursday.

Preliminary heats are scheduled for 8:30 a.m. each day with finals beginning at 5 p.m.

Swim Notes

There were 10 world records set in this pool during the 1984 Olympic Games, all in men’s events,and two still stand--the 100-meter breaststroke record set by Steve Lundquist and the 200-meter breaststroke record set by Victor Davis. . . . A surprise entry in this week’s meet is 1988 Olympian Betsy Mitchell. She has not competed since finishing fourth in the 100-meter backstroke in Seoul and then scratching from the medley relay. Mitchell holds the world record in the 200-meter backstroke, but she scratched from the 200 during the Olympic trials in 1988.

Among the challengers to Matt Biondi and Tom Jager in the 50-meter freestyle on Friday will be Brian Jacobson of the Bellflower Aquatics Club. Jacobson, 15, is the youngest qualifier in the men’s 50. He won the 50 in the recent L.A. Invitational, where he also broke the Southern California 15-16 100-freestyle record with a 52.93 swim. Jacobson’s time of 23.80 in the 50 broke the Southern California 15-16 record by half a second and is a fifth of a second away from the national record. . . . The swim complex on the USC campus has permanent seating for 1,000 spectators in addition to the bleachers that seat 1,500 coaches and competitors on the deck.

Winners in each event here are getting berths on the Pan Pacific team. The team will include 20 men and 20 women, so it will be filled out with second-place finishers, depending upon how many double winners there are.