Swimming : Team’s Specialty Is Going the Distance

A U.S. national team of distance swimmers broke the Long Beach-to-Catalina channel relay record Aug. 11, taking one-hour shifts and completing the channel swim in 7 hours 2 minutes 45 seconds.

Jay Wilkerson, Jim McConica, Martha Jahn, Karen Burton, Chad Hundeby and Erica Reetz shattered the previous record of 12 hours 22 minutes.

So, which is more of a surprise? That the record was broken by more than five hours or that there is, indeed, a national team of distance swimmers?

“People really don’t know what we’re doing in distance swimming,” U.S. Coach Penny Dean said. “Since we set the record as a U.S. team, I’ve had 15 or 20 athletes contact me saying that they would like to be considered for the national team for the World Championships. These are athletes who didn’t even know we had a team.”

Actually, the team is still forming.

To select a team for the Catalina crossing, Dean held a 25-kilometer qualifying race and then kept the top three men and the top three women. She worked with that group for a week, taking them to different beaches in the Los Angeles area, teaching them to deal with kelp and with swimming in the dark--things that lap swimmers don’t have to worry about.

But there are other U.S. swimmers training for distance and there are several more who would like to be included on the U.S. team that will compete in the distances swims scheduled to be included with the swimming events at the World Championships in Australia in 1991.

FINA, the international governing body for swimming, will be meeting then and might vote to include distance swimming as an Olympic medal event in 1992.

According to Dean, FINA could decide to add the 800-meter freestyle relay for women to the pool events as well as adding a 16-mile swim (not a relay) for individual men’s and women’s medals, even though it would probably be a competition that the men and the women swim concurrently.

Dean, who currently holds the individual records for both the English Channel swim and the Catalina Channel swim, has had to retire from distance swimming because of a problem with her left arm. She is the women’s swim coach and water polo coach at Pomona College.

A team of women representing the Dolphin Club of San Francisco set the women’s relay record for swimming the English Channel last week. The Channel Swimming Federation confirmed their time of 10 hours 49 minutes.

Karen Drucker, Susan Cobbe, Carol McGrath, Joani Beemsterboer, Susan Allen and Lisa Smith raised the money for the trip and for the official pilot and pilot boat (about $2,000) and set out on what they considered an adventure and a longshot at the record. Karen Drucker in her phone call home to Los Angeles to announce the successful crossing said that it was “interesting.”

USC will be the host of a college invitational swim meet, the Grand Prix, Dec. 1-3 at the Belmont Plaza Pool in Long Beach. Darrell Fick, the USC women’s coach, said that he expects to have 10 schools each in men’s and women’s competition.

So far the men’s teams committed are USC, UCLA, Stanford, California, Arizona State and Cal State Long Beach, and he expects to add Michigan and Texas. The women’s teams committed are USC, UCLA, Stanford, California, Arizona State, Michigan, Tennessee and Colorado State.

Fick is attempting to put together a 50-yard match race between Tom Jager and Matt Biondi, but he has a mountain of red tape to work through on that project.

The Stanford women’s swim team will include Janet Evans, who has made several appearances at the Belmont Plaza pool in the past as a Placentia El Dorado High School swimmer.

Evans’ sweep at the Pan Pacific Games in Tokyo last month followed by her sweep in the Alamo Cup competition against the Soviet team in Atlanta stretched her victory streak to 25. She hasn’t lost a national or international race (the only ones U.S. swimming is counting or the list would be longer) since August of 1987 when she lost the 800-meter freestyle in the Pan Pacific Games in Australia.

Evans lowered her world record in the 800 during the last Pan Pacific Games, swimming an 8:16.22. Her world record was the second for the U.S. team on the day that the swimmers set an unprecedented four.

There have never before been four world records set on one day, although there were three set July 19, 1976, during the Olympic Games in Montreal.

Mike Barrowman started it when he lowered his own world record in the 200-meter breaststroke to 2:12.89. David Wharton got his world record back with a 2:00.11 in the 200-meter individual medley, and Jager got his world record back when he swam a 22.12-second 50.

Jager had lost his world record to Matt Biondi during the Olympic Games last fall in Seoul when Biondi won the gold and Jager won the silver. They have now passed the world record in the 50 back and forth five times.

Jager and Biondi have raced only once since the Olympics. They were scheduled to meet in the national long course meet at USC last month, but Jager was disqualified for a false start and had to leave the starting blocks to the boos and angry chants of a capacity crowd who thought the official had erred.

The disqualification of Jager from the 50-meter freestyle at the national long course meet in Los Angeles last month brought to mind a similar unpopular false start call against Mark Spitz--who was disqualified from a much-anticipated 100-meter race against Frank Heckl the last time the national meet was held at USC in 1970.

The U.S. team victory over the Soviet team in Atlanta last month ran the U.S. team’s record to 6-0 over the Soviets in dual meets. The series dates back to 1971. In the Alamo Cup, the U.S. men won their competition, 91-78, and the U.S. women won, 106-56.

Hired to attract corporate sponsorship and sell advertising in the official program, the Mazza Marketing Group generated $20,850 in connection with the Phillips 66/U.S. Swimming Long Course National Championship swim meet held at USC last month. Most of that money will go to the swimming program at USC.

There has been some controversy in the past weeks over whether USC is required to open the pool on its campus to the public. The pool was built by McDonald’s on USC land for the 1984 Olympic Games, and, at the time, there was the understanding that although USC would control use of the pool after the Games, there would be some public use. No one has been able to find that stipulation in the contracts.

USC has made the pool available to many local swimming organizations for both training and meets and does allow serious lap swimmers use of the pool from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. However, there is no recreational swim time. Swimmers must provide proof that they are 16 or older and they must pass a swimming test.

Dr. Jim Dennis, vice president of student affairs at USC, explains that the pool does not meet standards for a public recreational-use pool. There is no shallow area. It is a 50-meter pool that ranges in depth from 6-feet-7 to 17 feet. And the lane markers are almost always in place. Users are required to pay $25 a semester to help cover the cost of operation.