Janet Evans life and biography

Janet Evans, born August 28, 1971 in Fullerton, California, United States is an American swimmer.

Outside the glistening new natatorium the spectators walked through Olympic Park, heading home beneath a bright, full moon that shone down from the heavens above like a big gold medal. This was late September, 1988, and the place was Seoul, South Korea. Inside the building of the swim races Janet Evans, a slightly-built, 17-year-old from southern California, was packing her bags with her swimsuits, preparing for the long flight home. A senior at El Dorado High School and a resident of Placentia in south suburban Los Angeles, Evans had just won her third gold medal in her third race in the Summer Games of the 24th Olympiad.

For a little more than a week, from the other side of the Earth, Evans had been one of America's most publicized people, appearing on national television, magazine covers, radio reports, and the front pages of daily newspapers. Now, she said, she was homesick. She wanted to go back to her boyfriend and her classmates and be "Just Janet" again. "What do you think it will be like back at school?" she asked Tom Millich, coach of the El Dorado Golden Hawks, who was there with the best swimmer on his team. "I hope it's not different." "No," Millich reassured her. "It won't be." That seemed to satisfy Evans, who had voiced concern that she was behind in her homework and that her friends would treat her differently. As Evans headed for the door she asked her mother for the three gold medals Mrs. Evans had been keeping safely in her purse. "Why?" Barbara Evans asked daughter Janet. "You'll just lose them! What do you need them for tonight?" "I won't lose them," Janet replied, an insistent tone in her voice. "I want to sleep with them under my pillow."

In one sense, the success of Janet Evans in the 1988 Olympics was a dream come true, the fulfillment of the fantasy of every young athlete. In reality, her first-place finishes were fashioned through more mundane stuff: practice, practice, and more practice, to obtain the maximum results from enormous natural talent. "I'm proud of myself for not giving in," Evans said of her training habits. "I didn't skip workouts. I couldn't have won a gold medal if I did that. Not to be boastful or anything like that, but you have to be proud of yourself if you win an Olympic gold medal. To know all the work paid off. I accomplished my goal." Throughout her high school years, Evans had awakened at 4:45 a.m. most days to train in the Independence Park Pool in Fullerton, near her home. She would swim as many as 10 miles a day, six days a week. The first of two workouts lasted from 5:15 a.m. until 7 a.m., when she would get ready for school.

After that it was back to work, as described by Phil Hersh of the Chicago Tribune in an article published shortly before the Summer Games: "At 1:45 p.m., Janet walks home and does homework until 2:30 or 3, depending on whether it is one of the three days she works on Nautilus machines or one of the days she goes straight to the pool. The afternoon workout lasts until 6 p.m. Evans does another 9,000 meters, or nearly six miles, in a variety of strokes. Then she comes home, eats dinner, does homework and is in bed by 8, or 8:15 at the latest, except on Saturday, when she stays out until 10 p.m. because she has no Sunday workout." Evans said the schedule suited her. "If you go to bed at 8," she explained, "it's not so bad getting up at 4:45." Such training habits may seem rigorous to average people, but they are not that unusual for some athletes, especially world-class athletes in individualistic sports as demanding as swim racing. Besides, she always had been an active child. Her parents said she walked at eight months, swam at 13 months, and, at the age of two, used a Hula Hoop for 20 minutes at a time.

What made Evans special at the Olympics, even for a gold medalist, was a combination of things. At 5-foot-4 and 101 pounds, Evans was considerably shorter and lighter than most other swim racers at Seoul. "Evans went from a tiny prodigy who could swim the width of the pool at 2 to a swimmer who seemed laughably small at 14," the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted. "When the public address announcer introduced her at the 1985 U.S. Nationals, Olympic champion Tiffany Cohen chortled at the sight of what was a 5-1, 87-pound tadpole with a mouth full of braces. Evans later admitted, 'That made me so mad.' When she was warming up at the 1986 Goodwill Games in Moscow, the Soviet women pointed at Evans and guffawed."

Her style may be related directly to her size. That was the interpretation of Jill Lieber, who described it in the Sports Illustrated Olympic preview. "In the pool," Lieber wrote, "Janet compensated for her size by taking more strokes than her competitors---36 to travel 25 yards [short course] and 62 to go 50 meters [long course]; a top female distance swimmer typically takes about 50 strokes for 50 meters." Dr. John Troup, the director of sports medicine and science for U.S. Swimming, Inc., told Sports Illustrated that Evans is "the most energy-efficient machine in the water today, male or female. Janet uses less oxygen, or less energy, to swim at a fast pace than anybody I've ever seen," he said. "I'll stop short of saying Janet's a fish, but physiologically she's very similar. Both have muscles with a high anaerobic capacity, which means great endurance as well as big bursts of speed at the end of a swim." Nort Thornton, coach of Matt Biondi, told Time magazine: "You think Janet doesn't have the body? She's a heart and lung pump, an incredible aerobic machine. Her chest expansion is six inches, and that's two or three inches more than any other woman on the team."

With her Olympic medals and her world records, Evans stood tall above most of the world's elite swimmers. Although Kristen Otto of East Germany won six gold medals and Matt Biondi of the United States won five at Seoul, Evans was America's most successful female and the most popular swimmer among most media at the meet. Coming into the Summer Games she held world records in the 400, 800, and 1,500-meter freestyles. (The 1,500 isn't an Olympic event.) In the Olympic 400-meter freestyle, she clipped 1.61 seconds off her own world record and finished in four minutes, 3.85 seconds. Heike Friedrich of East Germany, who won the silver medal behind Evans, was stunned. "I must say," Friedrich said, "Evans is in another dimension. She is one swimmer in 25 years."

In the 400-meter individual medley---a race that requires four different strokes---Evans won the gold medal with a time of 4:37.76. Although the time was neither a world nor an Olympic record, it broke her previous American record of 4:38.58. In the 800-meter freestyle, Evans finished at 8:20.2, more than three seconds slower than her world record at that distance but still an Olympic record. Her three gold medals were three more than any other American woman took home from individual events.

Evans seemed to win with charm and confidence. Her smile was a bright, white explosion across her face. Details of her personal taste and style became known and publicized. She ate a diet of 5,000 calories a day, much of it from fast-food restaurants. Her favorite rock groups were U2, Depeche Mode, Erasure, and the Cure. She spoke in the loud, exuberant bursts. "I was talking to my friends about meeting me at the airport," she said before leaving Seoul. "And they said, 'When you get off the airplane, there's going to be all kinds of photographers' and I say 'No, there won't' and they say 'Yes, there will!' and I say 'No!' and they say 'Yes there will!' and I think, 'Oh, NO!'"

She seemed impressed, in a humble way, at her own success. "There are so many people out there in the world, and I have a world record. Why me?" she told Dave Dorr of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "It's kind of weird. I try not to think about it too much, but it still boggles my mind." Evans feels the only drawbacks to swimming are the necessity of short hair and the effects of chlorine in the pool water. "The chlorine makes my feet sore and dries all my skin and I hate that," she told Hersh of the Chicago Tribune. "My hair sometimes gets yucky. I always wanted long hair, but I could never have it. I can do everything I wanted to do as a kid after I quit."

Evans projects the worldly innocence of a child-woman, sheltered within the strict discipline of a sport but at the same time exposed to the world on a wider scale than most persons her age. Bud Greenspan, a producer of Olympic documentaries, targeted Evans as one of the major subjects for films he would put together in 1989. "We spent two evenings this week, two of the most gratifying evenings ever, with Barbara Evans and Paul Evans," he said in Seoul, referring to Janet's parents. "And Janet Evans still makes her bed and she gets on the air [network television] and she says to her best friends 'Don't forget to get the notes because I'm four weeks behind in my schoolwork.' And Barbara and Paul were hearing about agents and Paul says 'Really? Agents are going to be calling?' It was the sweetest thing that has happened at the Games."

One of Evans's coaches, Bud McAllister, noted that Evans had a self-centered side. "Her motto should be, 'I may be spoiled, but I get what I want,'" he told a group of reporters. And Time magazine reported that Evans was "teasingly called 'Princess' by the swim-team staff because of her occasionally imperious ways." But her attitude rarely struck people as overly haughty. Matt Biondi, the American swimmer who won five gold, one silver, and one bronze medal, had difficulty with his media attention and celebrity status. He marveled at the way Evans handled hers. "I told her that, if I was her age and I had to go through what she is going through as a senior in high school, I wouldn't be nearly as effective and composed as she is," Biondi said. "So I just wanted to tell her she is doing a great job and keep it up because the U.S. needs that kind of reputation."

Many observers expected Evans to give up her amateur swimming career and accept commercial endorsements after the Olympics. Evans said she wanted to remain an amateur and participate in high school and college meets. She hadn't ruled out the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. She will be 21 then. "I think a college education is more important to me," she said when asked about commercial endorsements. "I don't think it will be a tough decision." The choice between the two options was described symbolically by the Orange County Register, as quoted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "A fairy in a sparkling white gown must be sitting on Janet Evans' right shoulder these days, reminding her of the virtues of being 'Just Janet.' On the other shoulder must be a glitzy starlet, surrounded by the most wonderful things money can buy. She need not say a word; the gadgets and the clothes and the image say it all: Look what you can have. Just say yes."

When Evans returned to home and school in the early autumn, her neighbors on Brower Street gave her a block party with barbecued food, banners, and balloons. It was the first time she had been home in almost two months. "None of us wanted her to come home to nothing after all she had been through," Sharon Holt, a neighbor, told Sarah Ballard in Sports Illustrated. "Janet is such a nice girl." The rest of the week was chronicled by Ballard, who concluded her story with this touching scene of an assembly at her high school. "Janet was up on stage at the west end of the gymnasium," Ballard recounted, "and the 1,450-member student body lined the bleachers on either side. As videotapes of each of her three races flickered on screens scattered around the gym, the audience cheered as if it were watching them for the first time. After each race, the school band played NBC's Olympic theme, and a spotlight shone on a gold banner bearing her name and the event. It wasn't Seoul, but the little girl with the big smile didn't seem to care. She didn't even mind being the center of attention again. She was Just Janet, but different."


AWARDS
Winner of three gold medals (400-meter freestyle, 800-meter freestyle, and 400-meter individual medley) as member of U.S. Women's Olympic swim team, 1988.

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