After Records, Thompson, Diebel Make Team : U.S. swimming: Her preliminary time of 54.48 seconds in the women’s 100-meter freestyle sets a world mark.

The quandary for Jenny Thompson and Nelson Diebel was that, though they electrified the Indiana University Natatorium crowd Sunday morning with respective world and American records, they still had not earned berths on the 1992 U.S. Olympic team.

To their credit, Thompson and Diebel withstood the pressures of a six-hour wait between preliminaries and finals and repeated their winning efforts on the opening day of the Olympic trials.

“It did run through my mind a couple million times,” Thompson said of the possibility she would not make the team despite her world-record 54.48-second swim in the 100-meter freestyle.

The freshman from Stanford was not quite as fast in the final, touching in 54.63, well ahead of Nicole Haislett’s 55.15.

Thompson, who celebrated her 19th birthday Wednesday, became the first American woman to hold the world record in the 100 freestyle since Helene Madison in 1933.

Since 1973, the mark has been owned by a succession of swimmers from what was East Germany. The latest was Kristin Otto who stroked to a 54.73 in 1986.

Thompson, 5 feet 10, reached the halfway mark in 26.82 seconds, a tenth of a second behind Haislett, the former American record-holder.

“I knew if I went out really fast, with all my energy and excitement, that I would die at the end, so I just kept saying to myself before the race ‘calm down, calm down, hold something back,’ ” Thompson said.

Surging off the wall, Thompson passed Haislett and used a tremendous kick in the final 15 meters.

When she saw her time on the scoreboard, she leaned into the wall and wept.

“It was the first time I’ve ever cried of happiness,” said Thompson whose previous best time was 55.84. “I never thought this would happen to me. Other people get world records, not me.”

Stanford Coach Richard Quick said: “She’s trained at that level all year long, and she’s thought at that level all year long.”

Diebel clocked a 1:01.40 in the finals of the 100-meter breaststroke, slightly faster than the preliminary mark of 1:01.49, which broke Steve Lundquist’s 1984 record of 1:01.65.

In the 400 individual medley, Summer Sanders took the top spot and runner-up Erika Hansen downed Placentia’s Janet Evans, the American record-holder and 1988 Olympic gold medalist, for the other berth on the U.S. team.

Sanders was on world-record pace through the first three legs of the race, but the Stanford sophomore ran out of steam in the final leg, the freestyle, clocking a 1:08.7 for a cumulative time of 4:40.79.

Hansen, a Texas junior, closed fast with a 1:02.9 in the freestyle for a 4:41.06 total. Evans was next in 4:45.55.

“I was disappointed, but I’m looking forward to my freestyle,” said Evans, an overwhelming favorite in the 400 and 800 freestyle events on Tuesday and Thursday, respectively.