Janet Evans - Career

Career

In 1987, she broke the world records in the 400 m, 800 m, and 1,500 m freestyle races. At the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, she won three individual gold medals, and she also earned the nickname "Miss Perpetual Motion".

In these Olympics, Evans set a new world record in the 400 meter freestyle event. This record stood for 18 years until Laure Manaudou broke it in May 2006.

Evans held the 1,500 meter freestyle record, set in March 1988, through June 2007, when it was broken by Kate Ziegler of the USA with her time of 15:42.54.

Evans held the world record in the 800 meter freestyle, 8:16:22, that she set in August 1989, until it was broken by Rebecca Adlington of Britain in August 2008. Adlington set the new record with her time of 8:14.10 in winning the race at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Evans's 800 meter record was one of the longest-standing ones ever in swimming, and it went unbroken through four Olympic Games (1992 - 2004).

Only the 100 meter freestyle swimming record set by the Dutch swimmer Willy den Ouden stood longer -- from 1936 through 1956. It should be noted that there was not much swimming competition between 1938 and 1946 because of World War II, and the Summer Olympics were cancelled twice.

Following her outstanding performance of 1988, Evans continued to dominate the world's long-distance swimming competitions (400 m and above). Evans became the first woman to win back-to-back Olympic and World Championship titles in any one swimming event by winning the 1988 and 1992 Olympic gold medals and the 1991 and 1994 World championships in the 800 meter freestyle race.

Evans won the 400 meter and 800 meter freestyle swims at the U.S. National Championships 12 times each, the largest number of national titles in one event by an American swimmer in the 100-year history of the competition.

Evans ended her swimming career, for all practical purposes, at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. She did not win any medals, but she did add one more highlight to her life. She was given the honor of carrying the Olympic torch in the opening ceremonies, and she handed the torch to the American boxing legend Muhammad Ali to light the cauldron.

In the swimming pool, Evans finished ninth in the preliminaries of the 400 meter freestyle. She did not qualify for the finals (nor the B finals), as only the top eight finishers advance to the next level. In the final swim of her career, Evans finished in sixth place in the 800 meter freestyle.

At the Atlanta Games, American swimming officials criticized Ireland's Michelle Smith about her unexpected gold medals, suggesting that she might have been using performance enhancing drugs in the Olympics. When asked about the accusations, Evans said that when anyone like Smith showed such a significant improvement, "there's always that question." American sportswriters sympathetic to Smith took this comment to mean that Evans was accusing Smith of steroid use as well, and they attacked Evans as being a sore loser. Evans later insisted that she meant no such accusation and that her remarks were taken out of context. "They had to make me the scapegoat," she said in a 1998 interview. In 1998, Smith received a four-year suspension for tampering with a urine sample.

At the end of Evans' swimming career, she held seven world records, five Olympic medals (including four gold medals), and 45 American national titles — third only to Tracy Caulkins and Michael Phelps.

In June 2011, it was announced that Evans was in the process of a comeback and has been training for six months with the goal of competing at the 2012 Olympic Trials. At the 2012 Olympic Trials, she ended up finishing 80th out of 113 swimmers in the 400-meter freestyle and 53rd out of 65 swimmers in the 800-meter freestyle.