ONE LAST SPLASH

By JOHN SKOW/LOS ANGELES

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.

In the 400 free at Seoul, perhaps her best race ever, and one that would haunt her, Evans hollowed out East Germany's big, powerful Heike Friedrich with an astonishing 4:03.85, an entirely unexpected clocking that knocked 1.6 sec. off her own world record. Her time in the 800-free victory that followed was a mere Olympic record of 8:20.20--3 sec. short of the world record that she had set some months earlier. It was worth little more than a nod. Janet had taken care of business, but gee, better luck next time. And indeed in 1989, in Tokyo, she did lower her 800-free world record to 8:16.22.

And that was it for supernatural performances. Since then no one, not Evans and not anyone else, has lowered any of her three great records. At the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, the winning time for the women's 400 free was 4:07.18, nearly 4 sec. slower than Janet's time at Seoul. And the winner was not Janet Evans. She came in second in 4:07.37, behind a relatively unknown German, Dagmar Hase.

This was not just surprising; it was troubling, as if the sun had reversed course one fine morning and gone back down in the east. At the postrace press conference, Evans was polite but stunned and teary. "I felt awful," she says now."I was supposed to win. I let everyone down." A few days later she won the 800-m free in unexciting time and so left Barcelona with what almost every other athlete there would have rejoiced to own: one silver medal and another gold to go with the three from Seoul. But she was depressed and ashamed, and she quit swimming.

That lasted three months. Then she moved her studies from Stanford to U.S.C. and hooked up with coach Schubert, who suggested that 1) being one of the two or three best distance swimmers in the world was not disgraceful; and 2) it might be possible to train seriously and still have, of all things, a life. It worked. Swimming became fun again, Evans says now. Schubert set her to training against his men swimmers. She loves this. Her freestyle pace is close to what Brad Bridgewater, the 200-m winner at the Olympic trials, does in the backstroke, and it's never certain who will win one of their training races.

By last year she had begun to win meets, in times appreciably better for the 400 and 800 free than she had clocked at Barcelona. Her world records no longer haunt her. "I'm not quite sure how I did what I did then," she muses, "but the records are mine; they're nice to have."

But if she is a touch slower than her 17-year-old self, it's clear that she has not lost her extraordinary competitive toughness. She endorses Cadillac cars (as well as Speedo swim gear, Ray Ban sunglasses, PowerBars and Xerox), and in one ridiculous TV commercial, a deep-voiced announcer growls--as kettle drums roll, engines rumble and the screen flashes footage of Janet surging through the water--"She believes in controlled aggression!" Not really. What she really believes in is greasy-spoon breakfasts. But in mid-December, not quite three months before the U.S. team-selection trials, she tore ligaments in her left foot in a jogging accident. For several weeks she couldn't kick and had to train with her arms alone. Pushing off from the end of the pool when starting and turning still hurt by the time of the trials in mid-March. "But it was O.K.," she says. "I could swim."

Controversy boiled up. Evans, who swam against a notoriously drug-aided East German team, is a straight-arrow in the matter of performance-enhancing substances. When the U.S. authorities refused to ban 15-year-old freestyler Jessica Foschi, who had tested positive for a steroid, Evans objected that the team was throwing away its moral right to object, for instance, to drug use by the Chinese. And then a pint-size, cheeky 15-year-old named Brooke Bennett, who reminded some people of a younger Janet Evans (and who beat Evans soundly in the 400 free in May 1995), began to make chirping noises that sounded a lot like bragging. "Yes, she hurt my feelings a little," Evans says now. "I used to help her with her homework at meets."

But at the U.S. trials in Indianapolis, Indiana, with only the first two places counting for a spot on the team, Evans came from behind to beat lanky Christina Teuscher in the 400 free. Bennett was fourth. Then, sure enough, Bennett steamed in first in the 800 free, with Evans second. (The Foschi controversy faded when Jessica failed to make the team.)

To be continued, at least through the Games in Atlanta. After which those unearthly world records of Janet Evans, set way back in 1988 and '89, may have been broken. Or, as seems more likely, they will be someone else's albatross.