JANET EVANS: ONE LAST SPLASH

The best woman distance swimmer the world has ever seen is lean and serene these days, digging cheerfully just now into her between-workouts morning diet supplement of--yes, cholesterol enthusiasts--hash-brown potatoes. And a fried egg, over easy. And a couple of griddle cakes, each the size of a catcher's mitt. All of which will jiggle around the middle of her breakfast companion, who's having the same. But in the white-hot furnace that drives Janet Evans, it will burn to ash well before her three hours of afternoon tank time are finished and her daily weight-room session begins.

At 24, she has made the U.S. swim team one more time, and is headed to her third Olympics. "And last!" she says, laughing. "That's it, finished!" Next year she's going to law school. She's going to get serious about running and try the Los Angeles Marathon just for fun. (A basket of ripe sweat socks to the reader who guesses how close to the women's marathon record of 2:21.06 she will clock on her first try; the guess here is 2:32.) Maybe, she says, she'll try some journalism; communications was her major at the University of Southern California.

Her visitor hasn't seen her since the Seoul Olympics, in 1988. She was a high school junior then, slightly built, 5 ft. 5 1/2 in., just turned 17. She did not own a driver's license, though she held world freestyle records in the 400-m, 800-m and 1,500-m distances. She swam with a strange, windmilling, stiff-armed stroke. "It's not one you would teach," says Mark Schubert of U.S.C., her coach these days, "but only an idiot would have tried to change it."

So, no, her stroke hasn't changed. Earlier, in the cool of the morning at the U.S.C. pool, visual memory kicked in, and it was easy to tell which of the swimmers churning 50-m lengths at three-quarter speed was Evans. But she's taller now by a couple of inches--that was clear as she eased out of the pool--and heavier by nearly 20 lbs. of hydrodynamic muscle. This is a change in body mass from waiflike to slim, but it explains why Evans has competed unsuccessfully for so many years against an elusive sprite named Janet.

Coach Schubert first saw this astonishing child swim in 1984 in San Jose, California, in the 1,500-m race at the junior nationals. She was 12, two years younger than the next youngest girl, and a couple of inches short of 5 ft. tall. She destroyed the field, recalls Schubert with the misty look of a trainer who knows he isn't likely to see anything like that again. By the time the Seoul Olympics were on the horizon, competition in women's distance swimming tended to be for second place. In the last 30 or 35 m of a cruelly arduous race, against the best the world could send her, she would surge ahead unbelievably, often swimming the remaining distance without breathing. She was an aerobic marvel whose skinny rib cage could expand a full 6 in.--two or three more than that of other women team members.

At Seoul she entered three races--the 400 free, the 800 free and the 400 individual medley (backstroke, butterfly, breaststroke and free) and won three golds. No one who knew swimming doubted that if her best race, the 1,500 free, had been offered, she would have won that as well, churning the final lap, as she customarily did, utterly alone.