Swimmer of Past in Wave of Future : Comeback: Thirty-plus Sandy Neilson-Bell seeks another Olympic medal, cash purses for swimmers.

It was a joyous interlude in an otherwise tragic event. The Munich Olympics, forever remembered for the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes, also were the Games that brought swimmer Sandy Neilson’s tears to millions of living rooms.

After upsetting world record-holder Shane Gould of Australia in the 100-meter freestyle, Neilson, then 16, climbed to the top step of the medal platform and waited for Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee, to hang the gold medal around her neck.

And as she waited, she cried.

Half her lifetime later, Sandy Neilson-Bell is often reminded of that day. But now, the reminders are likely to be colored by a different kind of irony because Neilson-Bell has dedicated herself to erasing the last vestiges of the anachronistic amateurism the late Brundage had so long personified.

“Swimmers have always had to choose between swimming and making a living,” Neilson-Bell says. “I want to help pave the way for other athletes to make a living from swimming; to help swimmers catch up with other sports.”

It’s an imposing task. When tennis players fought to turn professional, the battle divided the sport. When a maverick pack of distance runners challenged the amateur rules governing their sport, it took years of legal arguments to solve the issue. Toward their goal, Neilson-Bell and her husband have studied the processes by which such sports as track and field have permitted cash prizes.

“Sandy would like to see swimmers coming right out of college and getting paid. And she’s got a point,” says Ingrid Daland, director of the Daland Swim Center in Thousand Oaks and a former West German national swim champion. “The top West Germans are getting 1,200-1,600 marks (about $715-$950)a month. Even swimmers at just the national level get free transportation to events, free sweats . . . .

“Amateurism is out the door in Europe. Why should we have amateurism?”

The fact that a new era of athletic perestroika has taken root in Europe, dragging even the Olympic movement itself into the 20th Century, has convinced Neilson-Bell it’s only a matter of time before U.S. swimming is forced to change.

Time is another concept Neilson-Bell has decided to challenge. Rather than trying to champion the idea of diving for dollars from afar, she is testing the waters herself as part of a comeback she hopes will lead to a berth on the 1992 Olympic team.

She’ll be 36 then, and while thirtysomething might be a trendy age for television, for swimmers it conjures up images of rocking chairs and denture cream.

Consider:

* The 1984 U. S. women’s swimming team was the oldest ever--with an average age of only 18 1/2.

* No U. S. swimmer older than 27 has ever won a gold medal, and that swimmer, Frances Schroth, got hers on a relay team in the 1920 Games, when the Olympics were little more than a dual meet between the United States and Great Britain.

* Before Neilson-Bell, no woman older than 30 had ever ranked among the top six in the world in any event.

Neilson-Bell isn’t the only relative old-timer working toward a berth on the Olympic team. Mark Spitz, 39, who set seven world records in Munich, made a splash when he announced his comeback plans last fall.

But while Spitz’s “grab” start once made him the quickest swimmer off the blocks, he hit the water second this time.

“Sandy came first,” protests her husband, Keith Bell, a sports psychologist. “I don’t know whether Mark noticed it or not, but Sandy paved the way.”

It was Bell, a former Division III All-American swimmer at Kenyon (Ohio) College, who first convinced Neilson-Bell she wasn’t washed up. The pair first met at a coaches’ convention nearly eight years ago, where Bell had come to deliver a motivational talk. Later, they talked before a national Masters meet, where Bell brought up the idea of a serious comeback.

“He encouraged me to get back into it again,” remembers Neilson-Bell, who lives in Ventura. “He said, ‘I think you should go for ’88.’ Actually, he said he thought I could win (the Olympic Trials).”

Apparently, Bell was off by an Olympiad because if Neilson-Bell’s comeback continues apace, she could enter the 1992 Trials as the favorite in the 50-meter freestyle. In 1984, she just missed qualifying for the Trials and four years later, she was a Trials finalist, finishing seventh in 26.04.

And although she missed the team to Seoul by .54 seconds, Neilson-Bell’s time at the Trials was faster than some of the Olympic finalists’.

“Nobody in the world is as efficient in the water,” Bell says. “She’s got a perfect stroke.” And while a perfect stroke might be bad news to some senior citizens, it’s a priceless plus to a senior swimmer.

Experience, though, not form, could be Neilson-Bell’s biggest asset.

“I personally believe you have an advantage in that you are training smarter,” Daland says of older competitors. “You don’t make excuses. You just do it.

“Basically, we know we aren’t going downhill physically. At least not until age 35. We’re at our physical peak. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be swimming at that age.”

Well, maybe one reason. Money.

“Swimming’s always been a young person’s sport,” Bell says , “but I always thought that was for financial and sociological reasons. It’s hard to support yourself and continue swimming when you get out of school.”

As evidence that age is not the ultimate factor, Neilson-Bell continues to improve on personal bests set 17 years ago.

She shattered the Olympic 100-meter record of 58.59--and came within .09 seconds of the world record--in her Munich win before retiring at age 16. But since starting her comeback, she has lowered her 100 best to 57.3, and has clocked 26.0 in the 50 free, an event that made its Olympic debut in 1988.

“I feel so much stronger now than I did when I was 16,” she said.

The reasons Neilson-Bell left competitive swimming in the first place were more mental than physical. Which is why her husband has been so important to her comeback.

“After ‘72, I had trouble setting goals,” she said. “So many people were saying, ‘What can you possibly do after three gold medals?’ It seemed like whatever I would do, I had to top that. And that was a lot of pressure.”

After graduating in the top 5% of her class at El Monte High, Neilson-Bell enrolled at UC Santa Barbara as a physical education major with plans to swim for enjoyment rather than medals. When the coach there pressured her to return to serious competition, she responded by taking up the least serious sport she could find--inner-tube water polo.

But she was never far from competitive shape. In 1977, she won national collegiate championships in the 50- and 100-yard freestyles. And in 1981, the first year she was eligible for Masters competition, she won three national age-group titles. Next came the meeting with Bell, which really set the comeback in motion.

“I see my role with Sandy as convincing her how good she is,” says Bell, 41, who has written six books and more than 75 articles for professional journals on sports psychology. “A lot of it is just keeping her head in the water.”

One way Bell does that is by making swimming seem like fun instead of work.

“We never talk about ‘working out,’ ” says Bell. “We talk about ‘playing’ swimming.”

The word “pain” is strictly prohibited around the pool, where workouts have been replaced by practice. Obstacles and roadblocks are referred to as “challenges,” and one doesn’t make sacrifices for sport, but “choices.”

“Swimmers train harder than any other athletes in the world,” Bell says. “The training is so intense it tends to be viewed as the dues people have to pay; as a necessary evil. And it doesn’t have to be that way.”

In one of their first training sessions together, Neilson-Bell took a look at the workout. . . er, practice Bell had planned for her and flinched.

“I don’t know if I can do all that,” she said.

“Out of the pool,” Bell snapped back. “The practice is over.”

“No, wait, I’ll swim,” she said. “I’ll try it.”

“Then try it tomorrow when you can do it with a positive attitude.”

A positive attitude should help Neilson-Bell in her effort to reform swimming because it doesn’t figure to happen overnight. In fact, some say she’s doing little more than tilting at windmills, though recent developments have encouraged her.

Last December, Olympians Matt Biondi and Tom Jager staged a prize-money match race over 50 yards at the Belmont Plaza pool in Long Beach, marking the first time swimmers openly competed for a cash purse in this country.

“I don’t see why swimmers can’t not only defray the costs of their training and travel, but also make a living from swimming,” says Neilson-Bell, who ran up a debt of nearly $40,000 training for her shot at the 1988 Games.

Jeff Diamond, the information services director for US Swimming, the sport’s governing body in the United States, agrees. But he is not optimistic the situation will change soon.

“Unfortunately,” he says, “there’s not a great pinata in the sky that everyone can take a whack at.”

US Swimming operates on a $5 million annual budget which, with nearly 200,000 registered competitors nationwide, gives it the leanest staff-to-athlete ratio of any Olympic sport. But while swimming has taken off as a participant sport, it has suffered as a spectator sport, limiting its ability to generate much income from gate receipts and making it difficult to negotiate sizable TV contracts.

Athletes and coaches, however, blame the bureaucrats for not doing more to promote the sport.

“It’s basically the U. S. swimming governing body that has been slow to change,” says Neilson-Bell, who is also coach of the Pleasant Valley Swim Club in Camarillo.

Slowly but surely, however, Neilson-Bell is convinced swimming’s era of inertia is over. She swam for the gold once and it brought tears to her eyes. Now she wants a chance to swim for the green.