Barrowman Revives With a World Record in 200 Breaststroke

Mike Barrowman was disappointed with his performance in the 1988 Olympic Games at Seoul. So disappointed, in fact, that he couldn’t bring himself to look at the videotape of his swim until April. His fourth-place finish, out of medal contention, looked as bad as he remembered it.

“When I saw that, and I saw the man that I had trained with every day being that disappointed, I said, ‘I’ve got to do something about that,’ ” Barrowman said Thursday morning after breaking the world record in a preliminary heat of the Phillips 66/U.S. Swimming long course national championships.

Barrowman’s world mark of 2 minutes 12.90 seconds in the 200-meter breaststroke was the first in this meet, the premier U.S. event of the season. It was also the first world record set this year.

Barrowman, 20, will be a junior this fall at the University of Michigan. He is swimming here for the Curl-Burke Swim Club near his home in Rockville, Md.

Although Barrowman had set a U.S. record, 2:13.74, in the University of Texas pool last summer during the Olympic trials and had tied it in the finals, he had never held a world record.

The record that he broke Thursday morning of 2:13.34 was set by Victor Davis of Canada when he won the Olympic gold medal in 1984.

In fact, Barrowman broke the record in the same lane of the pool on the USC campus that Davis had used in setting it.

There was no one near him during his morning swim. It was Barrowman against the clock, doing exactly what he had set out to do when he started his long-course training.

Barrowman was the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. champion in the 200-yard breaststroke for Michigan. And he placed second in the 100-yard breaststroke. But he chose not to swim the 100-meter event in this meet because his coach, Joseph Nagy, wanted him to concentrate on the 200.

Nagy, who is from Hungary, but is in the United States because his wife is on temporary duty with World Bank in Washington, D.C., also prepared Barrowman for the Olympic trials and the Olympic Games.