After '01 shoulder surgery, Brooke Bennett is working on mounting a challenge to Janet Evans' world marks.
By BRUCE LOWITT
Published July 29, 2003
[Times photo: Bob Croslin]
Tampa native Brooke Bennett has won three Olympic gold medals but has fallen short of the world-record times, her goal for the 2004 Games in Athens: "That's what makes it a little easier for me to get up every morning and practice."
Brooke Bennett still is chasing times. The triple-gold Olympic swimmer figures she has plenty of time remaining in her career-long pursuit of Janet Evans' times.
But how much is enough? And how much will her 2001 shoulder surgery help?
Evans is the women's world-record holder in three freestyles, 400, 800 and non-Olympic 1,500 meters. She won Olympic gold in the 400 and 800 at Seoul (1988) and the 800 in Barcelona (1992); Bennett won 800 golds at Atlanta (1996) and Sydney (2000).
And Athens beckons 54 weeks from now. The Tampa-born Bennett, who moved from Plant City to Davie in 2002 to follow her coach, would love nothing more than to crown her aquatic career by surpassing Evans' world records.
"The only thing I don't have is a world record," she said after a recent practice in Fort Lauderdale. "That's what makes it a little easier for me to get up every morning and practice."
With a victory in the 800 at Athens, Bennett would be the first American swimmer and third in the world - woman or man - to win golds in the same event in three successive Olympics, joining Australian Dawn Fraser (100 free, 1958, '60, '64) and Hungary's Kristina Egerszegi (200 backstroke, 1988, '92, '96).
If she does, she will get a pot of gold as well as the medal. To promote distance events, USA Swimming is offering a $1-million bonus to the American who breaks Evans' 800 world record.
There is, of course, the matter of making the U.S. team at the Olympic trials next July. Bennett says she has plenty of time to get up to speed. "If it was six months I'd be sweating bullets," she said between practices. "But right now I'm not too worried."
Bennett is focused strictly on the U.S. National Championships starting Aug. 5 at College Park, Md. That's where she hopes to begin in earnest the quest to regain her world rankings, buried in the aftermath of operations on both shoulders in November 2001.
She's not concerned about whether, or how long, she will swim competitively after Athens, but she said she hasn't entirely ruled out the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
"In 1996 it was easy to say I'd swim another four years. In 2000 it was easy to say I'd swim another four," Bennett said. "Right now I have to prove to myself that after two surgeries I can come back and make the Olympic team. If I get to Athens next summer, I could see myself swimming another year or two, maybe more, but that's as far in the future I can see."
For now her goal is a personal best each time she races. "This is the start of my new and improved career," said Bennett, sixth in the 400 and 800 free and fourth in the 1,500 at the Spring Nationals in April. Bennett acknowledges that Evans and her records gnaw at her. "For 10 years I've been hearing I could be the next Janet Evans," she said. They've been mentioned in the same breath since 1993 when, swimming against collegians at age 13, Bennett was third in the 800 at the U.S. Open championships. In 1995 Bennett swept Evans in the 400, 800 and 1,500 at the U.S. nationals and established herself as the queen of distance freestyle swimming.
When Peter Banks, her coach with the Brandon Blue Wave swim team, left to join Broward Aquatic in Fort Lauderdale, she had to decide whether to follow him and whether to have surgery. Each essentially was a foregone conclusion.
"I had too much elasticity in my shoulders," Bennett said. "They'd stretched out so much that I had no stability inside; every time I took a stroke everything in my shoulders was rubbing up against everything else.
"It was something I'd dealt with for three years. ... If I was going to make it to the 2004 Olympics I was either going to continue swimming in pain and try to get through it that way or try to fix it."
Banks moved the day of Bennett's first operation. "I had six months of rehab to go through," she said, "but I knew (following him) was what I had to do."
She was champing at the bit for 41/2 months before she dipped a shoulder into the pool. Before that, 90 minutes of physical therapy each morning was followed by afternoons on a stationary bike, a step machine and so on.
Back in the water, Bennett at first was limited to 600 meters. "That was the hardest part; I had to take every day really slow. I wanted to do more but my shoulders weren't ready to take that much stress."
She's back to the thousands in each two-hour practice, two on most days, one on the others. "Now I can push it to the limit, but I still have to listen to what my body says - I'm not 12, 13 anymore - and give my shoulders time to recover from the soreness or the surgeries are going to have been pointless."
In 2000 Bennett was ranked No. 1 in the 400 free and 800 free and second in the 1,500 free. Going into the recent world championships, which she bypassed, she was ranked 345th in the 400, 189th in the 800 and unranked in the 1,500. But if she comes close to her personal bests in the nationals, Bennett could rise to top-eight rankings at the three distances.
Evans set her world records at ages 16 and 17; Bennett was 16 when she won the 800 gold at Atlanta. Evans was 25 then. She finished sixth. Then she retired. Bennett is 23.
"I feel old when I get on the pool deck now. I'm in Janet's shoes now and all these younger kids are in mine," Bennett said. "I know there's going to be a day when some 15-, 16-, 17-year-old girl is going to come up and smoke me out of the water. It might be hard for me to swallow but it'll mean we're doing something right and that's a good thing."
For now, though, she has a mental edge, Banks said. "In the nationals she's going to be swimming against kids trying to make a name for themselves, the way she once did. A decade in swimming is a long time. Brooke knows they're not close to swimming what she swam in 2000 and she knows what it took for her to get there. They don't."
She is acutely aware of German Hannah Stockbauer's winning times in the 400, 800 and 1,500 free at the world championships in Barcelona. How Bennett's numbers at the nationals match up "will be a real good indicator of where I am for next year and where my biggest competitors are for next year," she said.
Neither Bennett nor her coach is concerned with winning anything at the nationals. "All that matters is that she swims better than her last time out," Banks said. "If she feels she can win (a race) she's going to go for it; that's just her nature. She'll probably be disappointed if she doesn't win, but disappointment is what feeds her competitiveness."
