Hansen will accept this victory

INDIANAPOLIS -- Let’s be clear: Brendan Hansen has a history with the venerable (read: aging) Indiana University Natatorium.

He didn’t like it in 2000 when he missed making the U.S. Olympic team, finishing in third place in the two breaststroke races. Seven years did not alter the feelings of the world-record holder.

On Tuesday night, Hansen called it the “House of Doom.” This was after Hansen won the 200-meter breaststroke at the USA Swimming National Championships in 2 minutes 9.91 seconds. The win was one thing but the time was more than a second off his world record, 2:08.50.

“It was still a solid swim,” Hansen said. “You can’t complain when you don’t swim what you think is the best and you still go [nearly] the fastest time in the world this year.”

He was dead-on about the air quality of the indoor pool.

“They refuse to lighten it up, the air quality here is horrendous,” Hansen said. “When you train so much, you expect to come to a really good facility, and you’ve got guys saying, ‘Don’t go to the warm-down pool because you won’t be able to breathe.’ ”

Hansen offered a solution, nominating last year’s host of the nationals.

“Let’s go to Irvine, where’s it’s outside,” he said. “Let’s get a tan, come on. . . . Every time I breathe in right now, I’m going to cough.”

Among the other winners of note on Day 1 at nationals were Rebecca Soni of USC in the 200 breaststroke (2:23.62), Eric Vendt in the 1,500 freestyle (14:57.01) and Kate Ziegler in the 800 freestyle (8:22.33). The results for Soni and Vendt were meet records.

The B-Final of the men’s 200 breaststroke featured a certain Michael Phelps. Phelps, swimming in the first of seven individual events, was pleased with his improvement. He had a personal best in the preliminaries and bettered it at night, going 2:15.06.

“I don’t remember the last time I was in a B Final,” he said.

Bob Bowman, Phelps’ coach, spoke about the time drop, boding well for the individual medley, which is what the breaststroke was all about. Bowman joked about a line from his predecessor at the University of Michigan, Jon Urbanchek, who called Phelps’ breaststroke, “man-made. . . not god-made.”

lisa.dillman@latimes.com