Feat Lacks Magical Feel but Still Is World Record

Until Thursday morning, when he broke the world record in the men’s 200-meter breaststroke during a qualifying race of the U.S. Swimming Long Course National Championships, Olympian Mike Barrowman assumed that there must be something really special about a world-record swim.

Now the mystique is gone.

Barrowman set out to break the USC pool record, and he did it, using the same lane that Victor Davis of Canada had used to swim a 2-minute 13.34-second race and win the gold medal in the 1984 Olympic Games. That time stood as the world record for five years, until Barrowman swam 2:12.90 in an early heat Thursday.

There was nothing mystical about it. “To tell you the truth, it was just an average swim,” Barrowman said.

On second thought, it felt bad.

“I dove in and my goggles slipped off, and I thought I was going to have a terrible swim,” Barrowman said. “My stroke wasn’t quite right. But right about the third wall (the final turn), I heard people starting to scream.

“I thought, no way. I couldn’t be going that fast. But I figured if they were screaming, I’d better do something. So I picked it up in the last 50 as best I could.”

He even waited a second or two at the finish before he turned to look at his time. He was a little bit afraid that the crowd was kicking up that kind of a fuss because he had lowered his American record.

“When I turned around, I just couldn’t believe it,” he said.

He needed the world record to block out the memory of that awful videotape he had finally viewed in April. The one in which he finishes fourth, out of the medals, at the Olympic Games in Seoul; the one that shows his coach, Joszef Hagy, wearing that terrible look of disappointment.

“I didn’t want to see the videotape of my swim,” Barrowman said. “I didn’t want any part of it. They zoomed the camera in on Joszef sitting up there on the rail, just hanging over with that look of pure disappointment. Everything I do is 50% for me and 50% for him, and to see the man I trained with everyday with that look, I said, ‘I have to do something about that.’

“And here it is.”

Barrowman came back in the finals Thursday evening to beat a very strong field for the title. But his 2:14.74 didn’t approach his earlier record. Again in the evening, he had trouble with his goggles. They filled with water on his dive, and he almost crashed into the wall.

He was still too happy about his record to have any regrets about how the second swim of the day went. Even though he’s sure he has a faster performance in him somewhere.

The record made everything right.

“This summer was so hard because everybody hated me,” Barrowman said. “My girlfriend hated me. My mother hated me. My father hated me. Because I was doing nothing but swimming. Nothing else mattered.

“I owe a lot of people this. That’s pressure I didn’t need. Now that I have cleared that out of the way, I can swim for me.

“I’ve also paid back my coach. That’s really important.”

Hagy is from Hungary and was available to work with Barrowman at the Curl Swim Club because his wife is temporarily on assignment at the World Bank in Wasington, D.C.

According to Barrowman, Hagy is quite a taskmaster. “He never points out what’s done well. Everything I do is bad,” Barrowman said. “Everything I do, 100 people have done better. I’ve worked with him for three years and he’s told me I’ve done a good job, maybe, four times. Ever.”

Thursday morning, Hagy was happy with him. Even after Barrowman pulled him into the pool--stopwatch, split notes and all.

Barrowman is in no hurry to set another goal for himself, but he promises that he is not finished. At 20, he should still be going strong when the ’92 Olympics in Barcelona come along. “What I did today is a major thing, but it’s nowhere compared to what I could have done in Seoul,” Barrowman said.

Barrowman, who will graduate from the University of Michigan in 1992, lists his hometown as Rockville, Md. But he was born in Asuncion, Paraguay.

Janet Evans won her third national title of the meet, coming from behind in the women’s 200-meter individual medley to win the sprint home (the freestyle), as Summer Sanders finished second and Mary Ellen Blanchard finished a close third.

Evans, who won her gold medals and holds her world records in distance freestyle events, had never before competed in a national final in a 200-meter race. Evans said that she would rather have competed in the mile (1,500 meters), but she chose not to because of the meet schedule.

“I didn’t want to swim the mile on the first day and have it hurt all my other swims,” she said. “I think they’re going to move it back to the last day. Then I would swim it.”

Evans is the overwhelming favorite in her final event today, the 800-meter freestyle. There are no preliminary heats in the 800. The final standings are determined by best times during the evening.

Dan Jorgensen, who swims for the Blue Fin Swim Team, won his second national title of the meet, adding the 400-meter freestyle victory to his earlier victory in the 800. Jorgensen’s 3:50.88 was a record in his home pool. He will be a senior at USC this fall.

Tracey McFarlane of Longhorn Aquatics also set a pool record with her 1:09.88 in the women’s 100-meter breaststroke. McFarlane, 23, was an Olympian in ’88 and said that she had considered retiring. She said that she was worried about how well she would swim here. After the victory, she said: “Maybe I’ll stick around.”

Pamela Minthorn of Gaithersburg, Md., beat ’84 Olympian Jenna Johnson in the women’s 100-meter butterfly. And Melvin Stewart of the Mecklenburg Aquatic Club, another ’88 Olympian, beat USC’s David Wharton of Team Foxcatcher in the men’s 200-meter butterfly.

Swim Notes

Tiffany Cohen, a 1984 gold medalist, said Thursday that she was sorry published reports concerning her eating disorder during her years at the University of Texas had left the impression that she blamed her coach, Richard Quick. “When someone has an eating disorder, it comes from within them,” Cohen said. “The pressure after the Olympics made me put that kind of pressure on myself. . . . It’s a secretive thing. With Richard, weight was important, and when he put pressure on me about it, I just cracked. But he didn’t know how bad it was. It wasn’t like it was his fault. He didn’t cause me to have an eating disorder.”

Dan Jorgensen led the men’s individual point standings after the fourth day of competition with 120 points. Dave Wharton was second with 114. Jorgensen is expected to win the 1,500 on the final day and Wharton is expected to win the 200 individual medley on the final day. With a record, though, Wharton could get the points to move into first place. . . . A fourth national title for Janet Evans today, in the 800-meter freestyle, would give her the women’s high-point trophy. It would also give her a total of 21 national titles.