Fish Isn’t Quite Out of the Water : Olympic Festival: Barrowman did it all in the breaststroke. Now he’s paddling a kayak, with 2000 Games as his goal.

These days, you can find Mike Barrowman on the water instead of in it.

After winning the gold medal and breaking the world record in the 200-meter breaststroke at the 1992 Olympics, Barrowman said he was ready to have some fun.

“From here on out, I’ll be playing,” he said at the time.

Why not? He had done about as much as he could. The three-time U.S. swimmer of the year went to two Olympics and got a gold medal and a world record to show for it.

But he’d had enough of being too tired to wash the smell of chlorine off himself at the end of each day. When he looked in the mirror, the chlorine kept his eyes bloodshot--goggles aren’t perfect--and his brown hair had bleached streaks that bordered on green.

“I spent 20 years competing,” Barrowman said, “and I’ve said before that swimming was just a vehicle through which to compete. It was great for me, I enjoyed it and it was good to me. But I have no more aspirations in that sport.

“Once I left swimming, I realized that I never enjoyed going back and forth in the pool. I stay pretty far away from the pool. I love to swim, but there’s nothing spectacular about the black line. It just doesn’t appeal to me.”

You would think he was still pruned.

“But that fire [to compete] was still burning inside. I wasn’t ready to go get a job, try and start a family and all that,” Barrowman said.

So Wednesday and today, he is here at the U.S. Olympic Festival doing sprints . . . as in sprint kayaking.

Yup, kayaking.

He can thank his own flippancy for that.

“Someone at Barcelona asked me what I was going to do next,” he said. “For some reason, in the back of my mind I had a picture of a kayak, so I said I might try this kayak thing.

“I forgot about it, but someone printed it, and two years later the USOC called and asked if I would like to try kayaking for real.”

Barrowman asked: “What the heck, where’s a good place to do it?”

Newport Beach, he was told.

“Hey, I’ve always wanted to live there,” he replied.

But life at the beach hasn’t always scratched his itch since then.

Barrowman does not receive funding to support this adventure, except for the money from his swimming endorsements. Trying “this kayaking thing” meant he went from the 5 a.m. alarm-swim-eat-swim-sleep life to the luxury of a 5 a.m. alarm-kayak-eat-kayak-sleep life.

So much for playing from here on out.

“Well, as for staying with life as an athlete, I don’t know how long I will,” he said. “It’s not a tough life, but it’s a little lonely since you don’t have a lot of interaction outside of the four or five people you train with. Sometimes I long for the real world. It’s a 50-50 argument in my mind.”

The athletic half is still winning.

Kayaking has been a chance for him to enjoy a new challenge. Barrowman, 5 feet 11 and 170 pounds, is competing in the 500-meter and 1,000-meter single kayak races, plus the two-man and four-man events.

“That’s why I chose the kayak,” he said. “It was something completely different. It’s a chance to climb the ladder again. For five years, I was on top of the world and that was the most wonderful feeling . . . but so is climbing the ladder to get there.

“You go out there and realize, if you mess up you’ll be swimming again.”

And he doesn’t mean in a pool.

Barrowman concedes that qualifying for the 1996 Olympics is a pipe dream of sorts, but 2000 is within his mind’s grasp.

“Atlanta is a very unrealistic goal, but not impossible,” he said. “It’s just real far out there. Of course, I would love to make the team, but it’s a huge step and I think it would be really obnoxious for me to say, ‘Yeah, I think I have a chance,’ I mean, I’m here to get experience and watch how the good ones do it.”

His coach, Ivan Isakovic, also head coach at the Newport Aquatics Center, is impressed with Barrowman’s progress.

“It’s only been a year and a half and he’s already in the top 15 in the country,” Isakovic said. “He has that great determination--he always wants to be first. That’s a gift that he had in swimming and it is something he can use in this sport. He does not cheat himself [in training] like some others do. He does exactly what he needs to do.”

The top 15 is great, but at most, the top 10 will go to the Atlanta Games.

Assuming he sticks to it, Barrowman was asked what might be next after kayaking.

“Oh I’m pretty sure what I’ll do next,” he said. “Rowing . . . I’ll be that guy in the back who yells--the coxswain. They get the gold medal too, if they win.”

You can almost hear the USOC calling to see if he’s serious.

He is, but not about rowing. About competition.

Olympic Festival Notes

Mike Barrowman capsized in the third heat of the K-1 1,000 race Wednesday and was disqualified. He and his partner, Wyatt Jones, finished third in the second heat of the K-2 1,000, good enough for fourth overall. . . . Tim Wiley, an alternate member of the U.S. luge team at the 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics, has also switched to kayaking. Like Mike Barrowman, he said he needed a new challenge. . . . Although no official statement was released, USOC spokesman Mike Moran told some reporters that, as expected, the decision not to hold an Olympic Festival in 1997 has been confirmed. Earlier, LeRoy Walker, USOC president, had said that a 1997 Festival was not likely. . . . A petition is reportedly being circulated in the athletes villages to urge the USOC to reconsider. The petition reportedly says that the athletes have no other multisport event to prepare them for the Olympics or Pan-Am games. Leslie Milne, an Athletes Advisory Council representative for the Denver village, is said to have written the petition and plans to give it to Walker after the Festival ends on Sunday.