She Still Wants to Make a Splash : Swimming: Foes might believe Evans is close to the end, but she remains driven to prove she’s the one to beat.

It never goes away. And it won’t, as long as Janet Evans remains submerged in a waterworld filled with doubts and doubters.

What would they talk about if Evans weren’t still competing?

Five medals from two Olympics, 45 national titles, six world records and a winning streak as long as Tolstoy in the 800- and 1,500-meter freestyles, and yet Evans is somehow on the defensive, as if her prodigious accomplishments were not enough.

Perhaps this is the burden of success at 16. Then, she won three gold medals at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul and overnight became America’s freshest-faced star. She could have (should have?) walked away, reaping the glory for all its fleeting worth.

But no. She kept going, and the talk started the moment her times slipped. Although Evans has remained one of the world’s best distance swimmers for almost a decade, some would rather see her on the sidelines because she no longer swims as fast as she did in South Korea.

The latest salvo was perhaps the most hurtful, having been fired by a 14-year-old who wants to be like Janet, perhaps not realizing that there is more to Evans than fast times and gold medals.

When Brooke Bennett of Plant City, Fla., won a gold medal in the 400-meter freestyle and a silver in the 800 at the Pan American Games last March in Argentina, she said Evans was no longer her idol.

“I know I can beat her,” said Bennett, who did so in May in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. “There’s somebody behind her, somebody coming to take her place. I think she’s getting a little scared.”

As Evans, 23, prepares to qualify for her third U.S. Olympic team, she is being chased by a new generation of American youngsters that has turned women’s distance swimming into a highly competitive event.

Evans will face two of her toughest challengers, Bennett, who turned 15 in May, and Trina Jackson, 17, of Jacksonville, Fla., this weekend in the Janet Evans Invitational at USC. The 800-meter freestyle, which Evans has not lost in eight years, is scheduled as Thursday night’s only event.

The competition will be the swimmers’ last before the U.S. nationals, starting July 31 at the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center in Pasadena, where Evans will be trying to tie Tracy Caulkins’ record of 48 national titles.

With Caulkins’ record in mind, Evans skipped the Pan American Games last March to compete in the spring nationals.

“What upset me most about the things [Bennett] said at Pan Ams was that she said I was scared of her,” Evans said. “If I was scared, I wouldn’t be doing this. I’d be sleeping in every morning and going to a job I obviously wasn’t scared to go to. By no means am I scared.”

Evans, who understands her place in sports history, acknowledges that Bennett’s remarks hurt. Evans had befriended the youngster last September at the World Championships in Rome. She looked at Bennett and reflected on her own early career as a stick-figure 15-year-old from Placentia shocking the Eastern European women at the 1986 Goodwill Games in Moscow. She wanted to help usher in the next great American distance swimmer, the way Caulkins had done with her. So Bennett’s comments were like a sucker punch.

“I hope I have been doing well in this sport for a long enough time that no one can take my place,” Evans said. “Like, in my eyes, no one can take Tracy Caulkins’ place. I’ve been on the national team since 1986, and no one who can go 4:12 [Bennett’s best for 400 meters], which is fast, but not incredibly fast, can all of sudden take my place.

“I felt like she meant that all of sudden I would be forgotten, that Janet Evans was going to be another flash in the pan. And I don’t like to be thought of like that.

“I’ve been suffering through all these workouts since 1986 and then a 14-year-old thinks she is going to beat me? No. You have a lot of national titles to go, you have a lot of trips, you have 10 years of this to go, so then, maybe, you can say . . . She was, what, 4 when I started to do very well? So she doesn’t understand how long 10 years is.

“She just has a lot to prove. Doing well for three months isn’t [enough]. There have been a lot of athletes who have come up and said a lot of stuff and tried to challenge me and nothing has ever really panned out. And if anything, it makes me more hungry to swim faster. It gives me some incentive. Even if she does win and continue on in her success I think it is great for the sport and I hope no one forgets me.”

Really, now. How could they?

She certainly is on the minds of any woman thinking about winning medals in distance races at Atlanta.

Bennett, who considers Evans a good friend despite the disparaging remarks, looks forward to competitive racing through the Olympic trials. She also hopes all is forgiven.

“She wants me to show her L.A.,” Evans said.

“She’s taking me shopping!” Bennett said, hoping to rekindle the relationship.

Bennett attributed her outburst to a competitive nature.

“I mean, it’s a very competitive sport,” she said. “I just hope I can stick in it as long as she has.”

Trina Jackson, who plans to stay home and swim instead of starting college in the fall, is sometimes overlooked because of Evans and Bennett. She says she doesn’t mind, that she views the crowded distance field as an opportunity.

“It’s a free game right now; everything is open,” said Jackson, whose older sisters competed in the Olympic trials 10 years ago.

But Jackson has raced against Evans for six years and gives the Olympian ample respect.

“I have a feeling if she wasn’t there, everything would be slower because distance swimming isn’t really that fast compared to what she has done in the past,” Jackson said.

Both of the teens’ coaches agree with that. Gregg Troy, Jackson’s coach, and Peter Banks, Bennett’s coach, expect the U.S. Olympic trials next March to be remarkably fast.

“Those girls should never underestimate Janet,” Troy said. “She won’t roll over for anyone.”

After all, as Evans labors through her final year of serious training, she is looking back and forward simultaneously. The views are satisfying if she can ignore the criticisms.

So, when she is told she is setting herself up for failure, that there is a real possibility that Bennett, Jackson and Christina Teuscher, 17, from New Rochelle, N.Y., might outswim her at the trials, she is not concerned.

“If I don’t accomplish everything everyone thinks I should accomplish, I will not be disappointed,” Evans said.

She already has felt that sting. When she missed the gold medal in the 400 at Barcelona in 1992, winning the silver, she was perceived as something of a failure. She came back with an impressive victory in the 800 but was slower than she had been at Seoul, and lingering disappointment eventually sent her into temporary retirement. Evans thought that her slower times in Barcelona would have people forgetting what she did in Seoul.

As she matured, Evans saw the foolishness of such thoughts. Her coach, Mark Schubert, helped her realize that what she has done “is pretty amazing and that no one will ever take that away from me whether or not I have a good season next year.”

The transition from Olympic swimmer to real-world woman has helped. Whereas swimming was once her sole concern, she has blossomed into a busy USC graduate with a communications degree. She lives on the Westside, enjoying the fruits of Los Angeles that are available to every card-carrying member of Generation X.

On the telephone recently, she was telling a friend about a casual date. They ate at a trendy Westside restaurant. Then he wanted to take her to the House of Blues in Hollywood.

“We called there and a punk bank was playing,” Evans told her friend. “A punk band! I wasn’t going to stay out on a Thursday night to see a punk band.”

Later, she said, “My life’s good. I like to go out. I like the L.A. life. But I’m not hard core like [out clubbing in] West Hollywood every night.”

Evans cannot afford to do that, not if she wants to achieve her swimming goals.

“I don’t get up every morning at 5 o’clock [to train] and not expect myself to swim fast,” she said. “I usually train very hard. But in terms of if I have a bad race and letting it ruin the rest of my week, no. There’s no way.”

Still, it never goes away. Lack of respect sneaks up in the strangest places. As Evans methodically swam 100-meter laps at USC recently, a man with the world’s worst stroke wandered into her lane, forcing her to stop abruptly.

After Schubert had asked the man to stay out of the lane, the other swimmer told a friend, “They want me to move to the center of the pool. I guess that woman over there is training or something.”

Or something.