University at Buffalo - Division of Athletics Event Information

National Girls and Women in Sports Day

Keynote Speaker: Janet Evans

Photo of Janet Evans Janet Evans is a couple of inches taller than when she first rose to prominence in the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and heavier by nearly 20 lbs. of hydrodynamic muscle. This is a change in body mass from waiflike to slim, but it explains why Evans has competed unsuccessfully for so many years against an elusive sprite named Janet. At Seoul she entered three races - the 400 free, the 800 free and the 400 individual medley (backstroke, butterfly, breaststroke and free) and won three golds.

No one who knew swimming doubted that if her best race, the 1,500 free, had been offered, she would have won that as well, churning the final lap, as she customarily did, utterly alone. In the 400 free at Seoul, perhaps her best race ever, and one that would haunt her, Evans hollowed out East Germany's big, powerful Heike Friedrich with an astonishing 4:03.85, an entirely unexpected clocking that knocked 1.6 sec. off her own world record. Her time in the 800-free victory that followed was a mere Olympic record of 8:20.20 -- 3 sec. short of the world record that she had set some months earlier. In 1989, she did lower her 800-free world record to 8:16.22. And that was it for supernatural performances. Since then no one, not Evans and not anyone else, has lowered any of her three great records.

At the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, the winning time for the women's 400 free was 4:07.18, nearly 4 sec. slower than Janet's time at Seoul. And the winner was not Janet Evans. She came in second in 4:07.37, behind a relatively unknown German, Dagmar Hase. This was not just surprising; it was troubling, as if the sun had reversed course one fine morning and gone back down in the east. A few days later Evans won the 800-m free in unexciting time and so left Barcelona with what almost every other athlete there would have rejoiced to own: one silver medal and another gold to go with the three from Seoul. But she was depressed and ashamed, and she quit swimming. That lasted three months. Then she moved her studies from Stanford to U.S.C. and hooked up with coach Mark Schubert, who suggested that 1) being one of the two or three best distance swimmers in the world was not disgraceful; and 2) it might be possible to train seriously and still have, of all things, a life. It worked. Swimming became fun again, Evans says now. By last year she had begun to win meets, in times appreciably better for the 400 and 800 free than she had clocked at Barcelona.

Her world records no longer haunt her. "I'm not quite sure how I did what I did then," she muses, "but the records are mine; they're nice to have." But at the U.S. trials in Indianapolis, Indiana, with only the first two places counting for a spot on the team, Evans came from behind to beat lanky Cristina Teuscher in the 400 free. To be continued, at least through the Games in Atlanta. After which those unearthly world records of Janet Evans, set way back in 1988 and '89, may have been broken. Or, as seems more likely, they will be someone else's albatross.