Swimming A Bigger Splash

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

At the Seoul Olympics there were two U.S. women's swim teams: Janet Evans, who won three individual gold medals, and everybody else, who won none. While the East German women swept to 10 golds and a total of 21 medals, the non- Evans Americans scraped by with a silver and three bronzes.

In no other Olympic sport has the competitive picture been so transformed. East Germany doesn't exist anymore; neither does the steroid program that artificially enhanced its athletes. Meanwhile, so much American talent has ripened that Evans didn't qualify for this year's team in the 400-m individual medley, an event in which she won gold four years ago. Overall, U.S. women stand a good chance of winning a record-tying 11 of 15 events, and eight team members rank as at least co-favorites in one or more individual races. For the first time in decades, the U.S. women are more formidable than the U.S. men, who have long dominated the sport. Says freestyler Jenny Thompson, who may win five medals: "It's O.K. if people expect a lot of us. We expect more."

The resurgence of American women is not precisely a triumph of carefree amateurism over the grim professionalism of the hulking East Germans. While the U.S. athletes are from a land of backyard swimming pools and neighborly recreation rather than national regimens, they too are obsessive athletes. Several were immersed in the sport while still in diapers by eager relatives. Evans, not atypically, swam her first competitive race at age 5. As a child, Janie Wagstaff had to be counseled not to reach into the next lane and grab an opponent's foot. Even now, she admits, "when I'm swimming against someone, I want her to drown."

Most U.S. team members are dedicated to training and resent new NCAA rules restricting collegiate athletes to 20 hours of practice a week. Thompson is so fitness conscious that she "relaxes" from swimming with an aerobics workout. Nicole Haislett idolizes Arnold Schwarzenegger and often poses flexing her considerable biceps. There are even rumors of steroid use among U.S. women. One, Angel Martino, was banned for 16 months after testing positive for nandrolone at the 1988 U.S. team trials. Now she is back in the 50-m freestyle and maybe a relay.

The American women's real secret formula is what it has always been: talent cultivated through hard work. Evans, for example, looked barely pubescent in Seoul. Her small, flat body, coupled with the startling turnover rate of her stroke, yielded textbook efficiency underwater. Now 20 and womanly, 2 in. taller and 15 lbs. heavier, she says, "I really have to be aware of getting my speed up, so I train even longer." Evans probably ranks as the safest bet for gold on this gilded squad. She is returning in the 400-m and 800-m freestyle, not having lost at either distance in five years. True, she isn't close to her best times, but neither is anyone else. As the world's most famous woman swimmer, she has cashed in. After spurning commercial offers in order to maintain eligibility while she swam at Stanford, Evans now endorses Speedo swimsuits, Fuji film, Ray-Ban sunglasses and other products.

Her former role as team baby and mascot has been taken over by this year's huggable 16-year-old, Nadia Anita Nall, a high school junior from suburban Baltimore. Nall's first name was bestowed in honor of Nadia Comaneci, who won Olympic gold as a gymnast in 1976 while Nall's father watched TV awaiting her birth. But the name was dropped from family usage in favor of Anita. So too, when she was seven, was her seemingly foreordained pursuit of gymnastics. She focused on swimming, set age-group records by 12 and notched an adult American record at 14.

Nall's mother joshes her about being a time-warp child of the '60s. She favors tie-dyed shirts and sandals, totes home crumpled paper to ensure that it is recycled, sleeps on a water bed and spurns red meat. Unlike Evans, however, Nall gave up college eligibility to turn pro. She took $30,000 in stipends from U.S. swimming officials, plus $10,000 for setting two world records at the team trials. That money is a trickle compared with what will come if she wins the 100-m and 200-m breaststroke and adds a gold in the medley relay.

The most drama is likely to come in the backstroke, pitting towering Wagstaff (5 ft. 11 in., with men's size 11 1/2 feet) against compact Krisztina Egerszegi (5 ft. 4 in.) of Hungary. Wagstaff fades at 200 m but is a front runner at 100 m, and the Barcelona race may be the first time a woman swims that distance in less than a minute.

Still, grand dame Evans, puppyish Nall and embattled Wagstaff are likely to be overshadowed by Thompson and Summer Sanders, each competing in as many as five events. Sanders, maybe the team's most complete swimmer, is in the 100-m and 200-m butterfly and the 200-m and 400-m individual medley, plus a possible relay. She is likely to win only twice -- teammate Crissy Ahmann-Leighton is the fastest active 100-m butterflyer in the world, and Sanders tends to lose rhythm in the final freestyle laps of the medleys -- yet she could be somewhere on the victory podium five times.

Thompson, who is so tough that she often wrestles male Olympic swimmer Doug Gjertsen to a standoff, is a favorite at all the freestyle distances Evans isn't swimming -- the 50 m, 100 m and 200 m -- and will likely join freestyle and medley relays. She could come close to the tally of her heroine, Kristin Otto of East Germany, whose six gold medals at Seoul are a record for a woman in any sport. Thompson's awe at that feat is tinged with healthy skepticism and a yen for battle. "To take over from the East Germans would be the ultimate revenge," she says. "To do, without drugs, what they did with drugs would be an unreal accomplishment."

With reporting by Brian Cazeneuve/New York