The Long And Short of It

By John Skow

Fullerton, Calif., mid-July. Bud McAllister sits hunched against the early morning chill, his conversation teleporting from East Germany to Seoul, his eyes fixed on Lane 1 of the big outdoor pool at Independence Park. It is 7:15 or so, and Janet Evans, the slight, frail-looking 16-year-old swimmer he coaches, has been churning up and down since 5:30. McAllister glances at his stopwatch. Evans, he says, looking a bit startled, has just swum an exhausting set of 20 400-meter freestyle segments, one after another. "That's a real big, tough set." What jolts him is that her last 400, done after 7,600 meters of swimming at race speed, is fast enough by several seconds to qualify for the U.S. Olympic swim team. A training performance of this kind is eerie. Later she is asked how she felt after this effort. "Really tired," she answers, looking drained. "I think you should be. If you don't feel tired, you weren't working enough."

Evans, who holds world records in the 400-meter, 800-meter and 1,500-meter freestyle, has a lot of natural talent. This means that she has "good feel for the water," her coach says; "the water doesn't slip off her hands." But what makes Evans a once-in-a-generation rarity is her astonishing endurance. It is hard to see where she gets all of this gristle. Swimmers tend to be sizable, but last year, when she began setting world records, she was only a smidge over 5 ft. tall, and would have had to bounce to get a scale to read 95 lbs. Since then she has grown all the way from tiny to small, to about 105 lbs., and stretching to 5 ft. 5 1/2 in.

McAllister believes if Evans' best event, the 1,500-meter free, were scheduled for Seoul (alas, it is not), "she would beat everyone by 25 seconds." He adds that if Evans could be persuaded to enter the very long races that are scheduled occasionally -- a 16-miler, say -- "she would beat the men." This may be true. The gender game doesn't prove much; other top women swimmers now equal men's records of 20 years ago. But it is interesting to learn that Evans' 4:05.45 world record for the 400-meter free beats Mark Spitz's 4:07.7 world record of 1968, and that her 800-meter free record, 8:17.12, would have won any men's race until 1973.

She begins hauling herself up and down Lane 1 again, this time using hand paddles to build arm strength, with a small inner tube around her ankles, immobilizing her legs and increasing drag. At 8:30 a.m. she will hoist herself out of the pool, wave to her mother Barbara, towel off and ride with Barbara back to their home in Placentia, half an hour away. (Her father Paul, a veterinarian, does the 5 a.m. run to the Fullerton pool.) Later, after an hour in the weight room, she will return to the pool and chug through more distance sets until she has ticked off 15,000 yds.

Trainers in the Soviet Union, East and West Germany and Australia brood about Janet Evans. McAllister's bad news for them is that she is getting better. "She's intense," he says. "Every week there'll be some set that she'll do faster than she's ever done before." The fact is that she is as close to a lock as bettors could ask in the 400- and 800-meter free events, and probably, despite a relative weakness in the butterfly, will take the 400- meter individual medley (100 meters each of backstroke, breaststroke, fly and freestyle).

Peeled out of her dark swimmer's goggles and the rubber cap that says FAST (for Fullerton Aquatics Swim Team), wearing jeans and a T shirt, she does not look like a pool shark or an athlete of any kind. She is pretty in a way that looks younger than 16-going-on-17, with short, dark hair and dark brown eyes. One more California mall rat, you might think, and that is what she desperately wants to be. McAllister has just told her to take a morning off from her six-day-a-week, twice-a-day workout schedule, as she tapers off before the upcoming Olympic trials. Her face lights up with mischief. "We can go shopping!" she tells her mother, who pulls a face and says, "I thought she would come up with something like that."

Janet laughs. She has a lovely, shy-sly smile, a look that says, "Yes, I'm trying that idea out; I'm trying out a lot of things; I amaze myself . . ." She and her parents seem to be close, and Barbara Evans says when the proposal was made three years ago that Janet, or she and Barbara, board at Mission Viejo, near San Diego, so that Janet could enter the prestigious swimming program there, no one in the family was in favor of the plan. Janet stayed home and enrolled at El Dorado High School, a few blocks away. Her mother says all of Janet's highly focused activity is self-motivated. No one has to tell her to do her homework or even to get up at 4:30. "She knows what she wants, and she's a pretty determined little girl," says Barbara Evans. "It's weird now," her daughter muses. "Little kids at meets ask for autographs. I still feel like a little kid myself."

Berkeley, late July. Big Matt Biondi flips himself out of the pool at the Spieker Aquatics Complex and towels off. Jaws drop. This man is huge. He has everything except 18 wheels, air horns and a sleeper cab.

Biondi admits to being 6 ft. 6 in., but no one believes him. A realistic guess is that he is close to the 6 ft. 7 1/2 in. of his rival, Michael Gross, the remarkable West German swimmer called "the Albatross," who dominated the 1984 Olympics at Los Angeles, and who is expected to flap his great wings again at Seoul. Matt, who won a gold in the 400-meter freestyle relay at the '84 Games as a raw 18-year-old, is heavier through the chest and shoulders than memory recalls of Gross. He has big hands and size 14 flippers. Such men are a foot closer to the finish line than ordinary racers as soon as they fall into the water. Their long arms drive through water with abnormal leverage.

Biondi, who holds world records in the 100-meter free, the 400-meter free relay and the 400-meter medley relay, and who won seven medals at the World Championships two years ago at Madrid, believes his size "is definitely beneficial," and belief, mixed with protein, wins races. The big Berkeley graduate (he majored in political economics of industrial societies) is no flake, but he is convinced that swimming with dolphins in the Bahamas last year has helped his technique. Sports Scientist Albert Stevens used an underwater swim cage and a video camera to photograph Biondi hitching a ride with a 450-lb. male to show how the two species moved. "The dolphins," says the two-legged swimmer, "have helped me be aware of how water moves over my body. I have a tendency to fight the water, so I lose a little at the optimum level. Now when I push off the wall, I have a mental picture of how it's done best."

Swimming is a sport that U.S. fans rediscover every four years, and in between Olympic meets, Biondi can wander comfortably around Berkeley in relative anonymity. Probably another basketballer, a passerby thinks (he used to play pickup hoops), or maybe an escapee from the water polo team (right again; he is a four-time All-American). He likes water polo because it's fun, and "all you have to do is show up and play. Swimmers are into their heads more. There is more aloneness. In swimming, you have to think about your race a lot more, and how it will work out." His prerace preparation, he says, "is like daydreaming, which I've done since I was a kid, only you think about all the ways possible that a race could go. Sometimes I see myself winning, sometimes losing, sometimes false-starting. If you see all the different ways it might end, then you can adapt. We're all fearful of losing the things we really want," he continues, with a serenity that seems deeper than the win- some-lose-some shrug traditional for athletes. His expectations are his own. His parents (Nick Biondi is an insurance executive, and his wife Lucille is a secretary) didn't push him toward athletics, and he didn't reach his full growth, or world-class swimming, until his late teens. But competitors who expect any lack of resolve in this outsize philosopher should listen hard to his self-assessment: "I'm mature enough to give 100% of myself now."

Austin, late August. The 43 members of the U.S. swim team are winding up practice at the University of Texas and heading for Hawaii. Onward by easy stages toward Seoul and the first Olympic meet since the Montreal games of 1976, as McAllister points out, "when all the countries were there, all the swimmers were ready and tapered, and nobody had any excuses." McAllister sounds like a poker player holding aces.

The six-day team trials just completed here started tentatively. No world records were set till the third day, though there were several American records, including one by Evans as she churned home alone by four seconds in the 400-meter individual medley. The problem, said those who admitted to being knowledgeable, was that the team needed a leader. Most of the gold medalists from 1984 were looking shaky. And in the end, Rick Carey, Rowdy Gaines and Pablo Morales didn't make the team, though Veterans Mary Wayte, Susan Rapp and Mary T. Meagher did. Morales' case was especially troubling. The world-record holder in the 100-meter fly, he is 23, and had trained hard. "But swimming is fickle," he said later. "You don't always get back what you put in." When he failed narrowly to qualify, he took his world mark with him; neither he nor anyone else at Austin could touch it. Were things looking glum for Seoul?

Not a chance. Big Matt, to no one's surprise, took over the meet, shattering his own world record in the 100-meter free by an impressive three-tenths of a second, to 48.42. Earlier, after setting a new American record for the 200- meter free in the first day's prelims, Biondi had faded in the final and was beaten by a tick by Troy Dalbey, a largish blond fellow who looks like Actor William Hurt. No matter; Biondi was the meet's dominant swimmer. He finished the week with two wins and two seconds, thus qualifying for four individual events and at least two relays. Evans, as she was supposed to do, wore out the water with two more wins, in the 400-and 800-meter frees. Evans watchers were fascinated by her stroking, which is a kind of furious bashing -- if she weren't going so fast, you might consider throwing her a life preserver -- and by the way she surges ahead at odd moments during her races by taking several consecutive strokes without breathing, then hits the finish line after six or eight strokes in no-breath hyperdrive. "I don't really have a breathing pattern," this pool hustler apologizes, sandbagging with the smallest of grins.

But the odd-duck-technique sensation of the trials was 100-meter Back Specialist David Berkoff, a slim-to-skinny anthropology major from, of all places, Harvard. Backstrokers coil their bodies against the side of the pool before the start, then shove violently backward with their legs, hands together, streamlined, above their heads. They go underwater this way, then pop to the surface in five meters or so and begin stroking. Except Berkoff. He stays 5 ft. underwater, on his back, wriggling along with a legs-together dolphin kick, like that used by butterflyers. This is astonishing not to see. Most of the lanes are filled with thrashing swimmers, and Berkoff's is placid. At 35 meters (or 32 kicks, as he counts underwater), Berkoff pops up, half a body length ahead of everyone else. Not, he says, desperate for air, but "quite comfortable." Apparently so. He beat Soviet Igor Poliansky's 100- meter world record by five one-hundredths in the prelims, and then cut off another four ticks in the finals, for a world mark of 54.91. Another submariner, Jay Mortenson, qualified second, and everyone agreed that the strategy, which Berkoff adapted four years ago from experiments by U.S. Swimmer Jesse Vassallo, was the no-wave of the future.

A couple of weeks after the trials, news turned sour. The team's freshest ) and most promising woman sprinter, a square-rigged stormer named Angel Myers, from Americus, Ga., who had qualified in ba timlibthree events, was banished for a drug violation. She claimed that tests misread a birth-control drug as a steroid. But she was out, replaced by Butterflyer Janel Jorgensen and Freestyler Jill Sterkel (who thus made her fourth Olympic team).

The Myers fiasco was a personal disaster, and there was no question that a likely gold medalist had been lost to the team. Still, at Seoul, the U.S. would have the smallest world beater in Evans; one of the largest and most awesome in Biondi; and, unless one of the East Germans has managed to grow gills, by far the spookiest in Berkoff, the vanishing backstroker. Bring on that Korean water!

With reporting by D. Blake Hallanan/Berkeley