Janet Evans

Janet Evans

Personal information
Full name	Janet Beth Evans
Nationality	United States
Born	(1971-08-28) August 28, 1971 Fullerton, California
Height	5 ft 5 in (1.65 m)
Weight	119 lb (54 kg)
Sport
Sport	Swimming
Strokes	Freestyle, individual medley
Club	Golden West Swim Club
College team	Stanford University
Medal record Women's swimming Representing the United States Olympic Games 1988 Seoul 400 m freestyle 1988 Seoul 800 m freestyle 1988 Seoul 400 m medley 1992 Barcelona 800 m freestyle 1992 Barcelona 400 m freestyle World Championships (LC) 1991 Perth 400 m freestyle 1991 Perth 800 m freestyle 1994 Rome 800 m freestyle 1991 Perth 200 m freestyle 1994 Rome 4x200 m freestyle Pan Pacific Championships 1987 Brisbane 400 m freestyle 1987 Brisbane 400 m medley 1989 Tokyo 400 m freestyle 1989 Tokyo 800 m freestyle 1989 Tokyo 400 m medley 1989 Tokyo 4x200 m freestyle 1991 Edmonton 400 m freestyle 1991 Edmonton 800 m freestyle 1991 Edmonton 4x200 m freestyle 1993 Kobe 400 m freestyle 1993 Kobe 800 m freestyle 1993 Kobe 4x200 m freestyle 1987 Brisbane 800 m freestyle 1991 Edmonton 200 m freestyle World Championships (SC) 1993 Palma 400 m freestyle 1993 Palma 800 m freestyle

Janet Beth Evans (born August 28, 1971) is a former American competition swimmer who specialized in distance freestyle events. Evans was a world champion and world record-holder and won gold medals at the 1988 and the 1992 Olympics.

Biography

Born in Fullerton, California, Evans grew up in neighboring Placentia, where she started swimming competitively as a child. By the age of 11, she was setting National Age Group records in distance events. After swimming as a teenager for Fullerton Aquatics (FAST Swimming) and graduating from El Dorado High School, Evans attended Stanford University, where she swam for the Stanford Cardinal swimming and diving team from 1989 to 1991. When the NCAA placed weekly hours limits on athletic training time, she quit the Stanford swim team to focus on training. She later attended the University of Texas at Austin before graduating from the University of Southern California in 1994 with a bachelor's degree in communications.

Evans was distinctive for her unorthodox "windmill" stroke and her apparently inexhaustible cardio-respiratory reserves. Slight of build and short of stature, she more than once found herself competing and winning against bigger and stronger athletes, some of whom were subsequently found to have been using performance-enhancing drugs.

Janet Evans was the 1989 recipient of the James E. Sullivan Award as the top amateur athlete in the United States. She was named the Female World Swimmer of the Year by Swimming World Magazine in 1987, 1989, and 1990.

After retiring from competitive swimming, Evans worked as a motivational speaker and corporate spokesperson for companies such as AT&T, Speedo, Campbell's, PowerBar, John Hancock, Cadillac, and Xerox. In 2008, Evans competed on the NBC show Celebrity Circus.

In 2010, Evans returned to competitive swimming in Masters swimming.

Evans married Bill Willson in 2004, with whom she has two children. As of June 2012, the family lives in Laguna Beach, California.

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. She would astonishingly go undefeated in all of the 400, 800, and 1500 freestyle events for over 5 years, only being broken with her shock defeat to Dagmar Hase in the 400 freestyle at the Barcelona Olympics, where she led all race but was narrowly caught at the end.

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 Ceremony, 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 [the press] 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, at the age of 40, 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. When she was introduced for both races she was given a standing ovation by the capacity crowd at the pool in Omaha, Nebraska.

See also

• List of multiple Olympic gold medalists
• List of multiple Olympic gold medalists at a single Games
• List of Olympic medalists in swimming (women)
• List of Stanford University people
• List of University of Southern California people
• List of World Aquatics Championships medalists in swimming (women)
• World record progression 400 metres freestyle
• World record progression 800 metres freestyle
• World record progression 1500 metres freestyle

External links

• JanetEvans.com – Official website of Janet Evans
• Janet Evans – IOC profile
• Janet Evans – Olympic athlete profile at Sports-Reference.com
• Janet Evans (USA) – Honor Swimmer profile at International Swimming Hall of Fame
• Janet Evans at IMDb
• Janet Evans on Twitter