SWIMMING / WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS : Evans Is Pushed but Repeats as Winner of the 800 Freestyle

With one leg remaining in the 800-meter freestyle, Janet Evans usually is so far ahead of her closest pursuers that she could relax in a deck chair for a moment or two before returning to the pool to win. But when she made the turn to start the final 50 meters Saturday night in swimming’s World Championships, she realized she was being gained on.

Was it by her age? After all, she recently turned 23 in a sport in which many of the women are no more than girls.

Or was it by the rest of the world? Such as the Chinese, who won two more races Saturday night and set two more world records. Or the improving Australians? Or even the young Americans, such as the one in her event, 14-year-old Brooke Bennett?

Those are questions that Evans no doubt will ponder this fall when she returns to her role as an assistant coach at USC. But while she was attempting to summon every ounce of speed in her tiring body so that she would be the first one to reach the other end of the Foro Italico pool, all she was concerned about was the fast-approaching Australian, Hayley Lewis.

Evans held her off, winning the 800 meters for the 21st consecutive time in a major competition since 1987 and adding a second world championship to the two Olympic gold medals she holds in the event.

But her time of 8:29.85, more than 13 seconds off her world record, beat Lewis’ 8:29.94 by only nine-hundredths of a second. The slimmest margin of victory previously for Evans was the 1.79-second difference between her and East Germany’s Astrid Strauss in the 1988 Summer Olympics. When Evans repeated as the Olympic champion four years later, she beat silver-medalist Lewis by almost five seconds.

So, even if no one else is gaining on Evans, the 20-year-old Australian believes she is, predicting a victory in next summer’s Pan Pacific Championships in Atlanta.

“Janet has been that elusive person in my mind,” Lewis said. “But this is the closest I’ve come to her. I’ll definitely beat her at the Pan Pacs. I’ll get her there.”

Bennett is not so bold, even after her surprising third-place finish Saturday night in a personal best 8:31.30, but already she is known within the U.S. swimming community as “The Next Janet.”

Evans, however, proved that all comers still have to deal with the current Janet, although that did not seem so certain after her fifth-place finish Wednesday in the 400 freestyle.

She thought a lot about that performance over the next three days before deciding to blame it on the Chinese. That is not because she competed against the one who won the 400 freestyle, but because she watched the two who went under the previous world record in the first event, the 100 freestyle.

“I have to think about my swimming and concentrate on me,” she said. “I think a lot of people saw those two swimmers in the 100 free and started thinking, ‘How can I compete against that?’ They started concentrating more on (the Chinese), myself included, in the 400 free.”

There is no question that the Chinese women have been at the center of everyone’s thoughts here after winning nine gold medals in 13 events and setting four world and seven meet records.

And just when it seemed that their success was so routine that they no longer were capable of astonishing, they swam a 400-meter medley relay that was filled with superlatives.

That should have been predictable after the morning qualifications, in which their anchor, Shan Ying, swam the second-fastest 100 freestyle split of all time, 54.19.

Shan, however, was not fast enough to earn a berth on China’s team for the final because of the presence of 100-meter world record-holder Le Jingyi, who proceeded to become the first woman to break 54 seconds, finishing in 53.81.

She had to do something to top teammate He Cihong, who swam the 100 backstroke in 1:00.16. As that was the leadoff leg, it counts as an open record, beating the previous mark of 1:00.31 set in 1991 by Hungary’s Krisztina Egerszegi.

As a unit, the Chinese finished the relay in 4:01.67, shattering the old world record of 4:02.54 held by the U.S. 1992 Olympic team. This U.S. team was almost five seconds behind the Chinese with a second-place time of 4:06.53.

It is those kinds of performances that have caused coaches from other countries to join in a chorus of complaints about alleged drug use by the Chinese. On Saturday night, the Chinese struck back when their assistant coach, Zhou Ming, angrily addressed the controversy at an impromptu news conference.

Insisting that the Chinese success is a result of superior training methods and not banned substances, he said: “In the sports world, it is always the domain of the Western people. They just can’t take it, Asian people being good in sports. We are very angry about this.”

He also warned that Chinese men, who have yet to even reach a final here, will be as dominant as the women before the turn of the century.

“There was a time when you said the Chinese women were not as good in long-distance swimming,” he said. “Now, we beat Evans, and nobody can say anything about that any more. It will be the same thing with the Chinese men.”

He was only half right. Although a Chinese women did beat Evans in the 400, their best finish in the 800 was Luo Ping’s fifth in 8:33.09.

Meantime, with one day remaining, Evans’ gold was only the third for the U.S. team, the first for the women. The Americans, however, did have their best night, winning six medals. In addition to Evans’ gold and Bennett’s bronze in the 400 freestyle and the silver by the women’s relay team, silvers were won by Gary Hall in the 50 freestyle, Allison Wagner in the 200 individual medley and Jeff Rouse in the 100 backstroke.