Jorgensen Family Joins Forces to Train for the Olympics : Swimming: Lars Jorgensen skips fourth season at USC to prepare for the Olympics under the direction of his father, Niels, and alongside his older brother, Dan.

Perhaps the lanky blond swimmer sitting quietly on the couch in the family den best personified how failure in this sport affects Niels Jorgensen.

“See this young lady,” said Jorgensen, deflecting a hand in the direction of Rancho Bernardo High’s Amy Avicola. “I spend more time with her than she does in school. Yes, you develop a certain love for them . . . like they are your own children.”

Avicola missed qualifying for the Olympic trials in the 1,500-meter freestyle at the Junior West Olympic Long Course Championships in Mission Viejo earlier this month.

Jorgensen’s swimmers don’t bear their burdens alone.

“You work so hard all year, you lose the race, and it hurts,” Jorgensen said. “You learn to live with things like this. But it hurts, just like it’s your own child.”

His two children, Dan, 23, and Lars, 20, have experienced their fair share of success, but Lars, after a disappointing college career, has decided not to return to USC, and now he’s calling on his father to put him back on course.

Both Dan and Lars highlighted their illustrious swimming careers by participating in the 1988 Summer Olympics. Dan has also set a U.S. record, won a world championship and two individual NCAA titles.

But Dan’s success has not been matched by Lars, who has been mostly on a downward spiral since Seoul.

Until last week.

Amid a diluted field--Lars didn’t qualify for the World University, Pan Am or the Pan Pacific Games, which played host to many of the nation’s top swimmers--Lars won three gold medals at the National Swimming Championships in Ft. Lauderdale.

“I had a really good summer,” said Lars. “My goal this whole summer was to get better and better, which I did. I know I have to go faster to make the Olympic team, but I also think I have a lot left in me to get better.”

Lars left Florida with victories in the 400, 800 and 1,500-meter freestyle, but the 1,500 is his staple. His time of 15 minutes, 22.75 seconds at nationals was well off the 15:10.17 PR he established in the 1988 Olympic trials. But he’s not panicking yet.

“At nationals, I could have been a lot better if other people were there, like my brother,” said Lars, who likes to think he’s on pace to swim a 15-minute flat at the trials in March. “I wasn’t expecting to do incredible times, I just wanted to show I’ve gotten better and progressed. As long as I keep getting better I think I can make the Olympic team.”

In any other distance, that might be wishful thinking. Swimmers at the short to middle distances whose times have slowed since high school aren’t usually considered legitimate challengers at the trials. Lars’ best times in college were a full 20 seconds slower than some of his times in high school, yet U.S. Swimming spokesman Jeff Dimond said the 1,500 is anyone’s race.

“Sure he has a chance,” said Dimond, reinforcing the notion that men’s distance swimming in the United States is in a relatively sad state of affairs. “Distance in our country, for the men anyway, is wide open. No one’s a shoo-in. Lars is just as much a candidate as anyone else. No one’s going to forget him.”

He’s certainly given them ample opportunity. Besides the Olympic trials, Lars has done little since he graduated from Mt. Carmel High in 1988 and followed his big brother’s footsteps to USC, where Dan graduated this spring with a degree in public administration.

Collegiately, under the tutelage of USC Coach Peter Daland, Dan churned out NCAA individual championships in the 500-yard freestyle and the 1,650-yard freestyle his freshman and sophomore years. Lars, in turn, did no better than second in the 1,650 at the 1990 Pac-10 championships.

“I never swam well at NCAAs,” he said. “I never really swam well in a college season. Things just didn’t work out well for me there.”

He is no longer there. Instead, Lars is here, under the watchful and sometimes tyrannical eye of a Father Who Knows Best. Rather than begin a fourth season at USC, Lars will train full-time for a shot at the 1992 Summer Olympics.

So Lars moved back home, Dan moved up the street with his girlfriend, 1984 Olympian Carrie Steinseifer (the relationship started at a swim meet in Tokyo in 1989) and like the good old days, Dan and Lars are training together with the Blue Fin Swim Team, over which Niels is lord. Dan’s biggest weapon is the 400, Lars’ the 1,500. And if they make the ’92 team, they will be the first brother duo to make back-to-back Olympic teams in U.S. swimming history.

“It would be wonderful if it happened,” Dan said in a phone interview from the Pan Pacific Games in Canada. “But Lars has his goals, and I have mine. It’s not the goal to do it together. The expectations are there to do well, but if it’s not fulfilled, I can look back and say I did it once.”

Said Lars: “I think I have a better chance now. I’m a little more confidant. Maybe that’s bad, but the first time you’re so scared. I’ve been there before and I know what it takes. When you’ve gone through the experience once, the second time you’re better at it and hopefully it’ll show.”

Niels gives them a 60 % chance of repeating their 1988 family heroics.

“My feeling is, yes, they can do it,” Niels said. “But there are always a lot of things you can’t control. You can fall in the water, or get a bad start. It’s one race, one day and it takes six months to come back and do it over again.”

Despite the outcome, it’s unlikely the brothers ever again will engage in the mental games that surrounded their competition as kids. They have matured.

“When I was growing up, I was a tiger,” Lars said. “Before, I wanted to beat him more than anyone else because he’d been beating me for so long, for 12 years up to high school, in everything. That was my only goal. I didn’t care about anything else. I needed to get back at him.”

At the trials in 1988, Dan could almost taste his younger brother’s fate. Dan already had qualified in the 400, and the 1,500 was Lars’ last chance, but Dan was one of two swimmers Lars knew he had to beat for a top-two finish for an Olympic berth. Lars finished second and earned his spot, and Dan was fourth.

“The trials was the first time I beat him, ever,” Lars said. “That was a bonus--I beat my brother--but I also made the Olympic team. But now, I look at him as a friend more than a competitor. Now, it’s totally changed.”

Dan concurred. “If he beats me, he beats me,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me like it would have four or five years ago.”

For a while, Lars wasn’t sure if his brother had eased up in that race to ensure his spot on the squad or if he had legitimately beaten Dan, to which the oldest son answered, “I just didn’t have it. I gave it an honest effort.”

Those were Lars’ thoughts when he chose not to return to USC this year. He said he didn’t want to see another summer of hard training slowly disintegrate as the season progressed.

“I thought I’d have a good year this past year,” he said. “I thought things would finally come together. I started off the season really well. That first month, in October, I was swimming really fast and I thought, ‘God, I’m going to have a great year.’ But by the time February came around, I was swimming slow, as usual, like the year before. It’s kind of discouraging because I thought, ‘Boy, I could have a good year, finally, but as the year moved along, I went in that same old pattern, and nothing changed.”

When Lars pointed fingers of guilt to explain away his demise, he realized some always pointed back at him. Daland and his staff were competent, he said, but their coaching philosophies didn’t always jibe with what had worked for him for a dozen years before that.

“I only know one way to swim fast, and that’s to work hard,” Lars said. “If I work hard, I’m going to swim good, if I don’t I’m not. There’s no gray area. My brother, he doesn’t need to put in as many miles as I do. He can benefit from a program that doesn’t do as much work. But I didn’t think the training was what I needed. It just didn’t work for me. I couldn’t get by like that.”

Particularly not without his father.

“My father has been a large force in his swimming career, maybe more so than in mine,” Dan said. “Lars still has to learn that one day my dad won’t be there. He’s beginning to understand that, but now is not the time to try something new.”

Especially not in a race as demanding as the 1,500.

“At this point, in the distance freestyle, you have to have a guru,” Dimond said. “It’s that type of race. If you’re going into a race where you’re looking at hurting badly for 15 minutes, you have to have absolute confidence in yourself. It’s as much a faith thing as anything else.”

As his coach-for-life, Niels has provided Lars with absolutes and reassurance that no one else could.

“Ever since age-group (swimming), my dad’s been my coach and has given me a lot of attention,” Lars said. “It’s a tough adjustment for anyone to get away from their coach. You’re so used to having your dad take care or you, having him wake you up in the morning. You have to do things for yourself. You have to balance the checkbook, pay for water bills, the newspaper. For an 18-year-old kid, it’s a big adjustment.”

But one Niels knew his youngest son had to make.

“Lars didn’t always train hard,” Niels said. “But you have to let them make mistakes or they don’t grow up. They just have to go through certain things. You want to teach your children to be more independent so they start to get more mature. In the end, they always grow up.”