Four-time Olympic gold medalist Janet Evans visited with the Pine Crest Swimming club team on Tuesday night to provide inspiration and perspective on her career. Pine Crest head coach Mariusz Podkoscielny, who shared the pool deck at many competitions with Evans in his career, most notably the 1988 & 1992 Olympics, reached out to Evans to see if she would be interested in doing a short Q&A session with the team to which she quickly accepted.
Evans highlighted her 1988 Olympics experience, giving a play by play breakdown of how she won the 400 freestyle over East Germany’s Heike Friedrich as well as going over how she was able to beat the East Germans despite her own small stature and the fact she was still in high school.
“You will never be the perfect swimmer… too tall, too short, too big, too small… I never listened to that,” Evans told the group. “My mental game was more important than physical.”
Janet Evans also touched on her silver medal winning performance from the 1992 Olympics when she was out-touched by Germany’s Dagmar Hase, getting her five-year winning streak snapped in the process. Oddly enough, Evans said that medal was her favorite of the five she won because the lessons she learned after that were more valuable than any of the gold medals she won.
She was famously known for her “unorthodox” windmill freestyle which has hardly been emulated since. Evans’ legendary coach Bud McAlister told her “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” and thus she kept her freestyle intact that worked so well for her as an age group swimmer, and is what continues to keep her famous in swimming circles today.
Evans was also the last person to hand off the Olympic torch in 1996 to Muhammad Ali in one of the most famous Olympic moments in history, and she reflected on how that was a huge moment of reflection for her. 1996 was the first and only time she walked in the Opening Ceremonies, and there she was able to see just how many athletes had qualified for the Olympic Games, realizing that only a small percentage of them would walk home with medals, and that many were just happy to be there. It played into the real nature of what the Olympic Games is all about: celebrating sport and friendships.
Janet Evans is generally regarded as one of the best female swimmers of all-time, having held the world records in the 400, 800 and 1500 free simultaneously for nearly 17 years. She won four Olympic gold medals in her career with three of those coming at the 1988 Seoul Games just after her 17th birthday. Evans won the 400 & 800 free and the 400 IM in Seoul and repeated in the 800 four years later in Barcelona in 1992. Evans was four-time World Swimmer of the Year by this publication from 1987 – 1990. She was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 2001.
Evans currently lives in southern California and is still very much involved in sports. She is currently serving as the chief athlete officer for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games.