Janet Evans watches Katie Ledecky and sees Olympic-sized what if

The first time Janet Evans watched her good friend Katie Ledecky swim away with the Olympic 1,500 meter race, she cried her eyes out like a broken-hearted teenager whose first love had run off with someone else.

This was back in 2021, the first time women got to swim “the mile,” as Evans and every American swimming nerd calls it, at the Olympics.

Evans, a gold medalist in the 400 and 800 in 1988 and the 800 in 1992, was Ledecky before Ledecky, so much better at distance races than everyone else it was a joke. On that night in 2021, she watched Ledecky race at the spectator-free Tokyo Games alone at her home in Laguna Beach, Calif.

Why the tears?

For decades, she and every other world-class female distance swimmer had gotten blown off when they pushed to swim the longest race in the pool, just like the men could. Always, there was another excuse. No room in the program. Not enough beds for additional athletes.

They heard something else — a barely veiled message that most women couldn’t race that far within a time worth watching, even though they did it in college, at other international meets and all the time in practice.

There is little doubt that Evans would have won two or three more gold medals had the 1,500 been a part of the Olympic program when she was at her peak, or even after it at the 1996 Games in Atlanta, where she handed the torch to Muhammad Ali before he lit the flame during the opening ceremony, a signature moment of the modern Olympics.

Janet Evans lights Muhammad Ali’s torch at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics opening ceremony. Ali then lit the cauldron. (Lynn Johnson / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)

“The mile was my best race,” Evans, 52, said Wednesday night at a bar outside La Defense Arena, where she had just watched Ledecky demolish the field to win her second consecutive 1,500 gold in 15:30.02, breaking her Olympic record and finishing 10 seconds and nearly half-a-pool faster than Anastasiia Kirpichnikova, the silver medalist.

“I had that world record for like 20 years,” Evans said.

Evans didn’t cry this time as she watched Ledecky from a few rows up from the deck of the Olympic pool. Her 17-year-old daughter, Sydney Willson — she’s a distance specialist, too, a rising high school senior already committed to Princeton for 2025 — sat beside her, capturing her mother’s ear-to-ear smile and arm-pumping as they watched Ledecky tear through the final lap.

Evans looked up at the scoreboard when it was done and did some quick swimming math. Her best time in the 1,500 was 15:50.

“I would have gotten fifth tonight,” she said at the bar, a little more than 36 years after that world record.

Once a swim racer, always a swim racer.

Janet Evans swims at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. She almost certainly would’ve added to her gold-medal haul if a 1,500-meter race had been offered for women in her time. (Dennis Paquin / AP)

Evans is in Paris for a couple reasons.

Reason No. 1: She’s a self-confessed swim freak and an Olympic addict.

This is her 18th Olympics, including the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, which she attended as a fan. She is a true believer. Her daughter chimed in that her mother teared up during the opening ceremony Friday night, as the boats headed up the Seine.

Reason No. 2. She’s working.

Evans, who served on the athletes commission for World Aquatics for 14 years, from 1992 to 2006, chairing the body at one point, is one of the leaders of LA28, the organizing committee for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

She is the chief athlete officer, essentially responsible for every inch of the athlete experience in Los Angeles, from the moment they land at the Games, to what they eat, where they sleep, and how they get to and from the competitions.

And making sure women get treated the same as men.

“I’m here to observe, to take it in, to see what we want to do similarly, what we want to do different, what we can do better,” she said.

Her early impressions of Paris? “The backdrops are spectacular, the arenas are great, and the stands are full,” she said.

That last past may be the most important one, because it has been 12 years since there were packed houses at the Games. Tickets cost too much for the vast majority of Brazilians and stadiums were mostly half full at best in 2016 at the Rio de Janeiro Games. Then came Tokyo. Covid. Enough said.

Evans said she wants to withhold judgment on what can be improved until after the Games are over and she can check in with athletes to figure out what could be done better. She noticed that the American track star, Noah Lyles, said he was having some trouble finding a safe and quiet space in the Olympic Village. She made a note of that.

The athletes will live on the campus of UCLA in 2028. Some peace and quiet seems doable there.

As a child of Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that encouraged federal funding for girls and women to play sports in the U.S., Evans is chuffed that at the Paris Games there are finally an equal number of male and female athletes competing.

She’d been a part of the supposed “Games of the Woman” in 1996, when the U.S. women’s soccer team and other female stars broke through. But there was still a long way to go, and there still is.

Recently, her 14-year-old son asked her why women play shorter tennis matches at the Grand Slam tournament than men do. She liked hearing that plenty of boys today think inequity in sports is just plain odd.

As she spoke, her eyes kept drifting up to the television in the bar. Léon Marchand, the French swimming sensation, was ripping through the water for his second individual gold medal of the night. Everyone in France is obsessed with him. Inside the arena, the roars of the crowd and choruses of the national anthem left ears ringing.

An ocean away in the United States, Marchand is still relatively unknown. He trains in Austin, Texas, she noted. The Los Angeles star-making machine will get churning on him soon. “What we’re trying to do is hard and we need athletes to help,” she said.

Katie Ledecky and Janet Evans have known each other since 2012, when they both competed at U.S. Olympic trials — Ledecky at 15, Evans at 40. (Ian MacNicol / Getty Images)

At the top of that list is her friend Ledecky, who at 27 has already said she wants to swim in Los Angeles, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to compete in a home Games.

And why not?

She went wire-to-wire in winning the 1,500 Wednesday, building her lead methodically, about a half body length for every lap of the pool, seemingly cruising through her 41-stroke lap with such ease. She barely kicks, takes in a breath every other stroke, like a weekend warrior out for a workout at the local YMCA. She turned it on during the final lap, blasting a little harder. She slapped the water after she touched the wall, ripped off one of her caps and let out a roar.

Later, she said the win was for all the women who never got to swim in this race.

Women like Evans, who helped land Ledecky a spot on the board of LA28. They have known each other since 2012, when Evans, then 40 and already a mother of two, decided to see if she could qualify for the Olympic trials. She did, and raced in the same events as a 15-year-old Ledecky.

Soon after, they became texting buddies. Ledecky is something of a mentor to her daughter, the three of them a little tribe of distance specialists who understand one another like no one else does.

Evans’ eyes drifted up again to the party unfolding inside La Defense, where more than 20,000 fans had packed into a rugby stadium to watch swimming, and spilling out onto the plaza. At the Los Angeles Games, swimming will take place at SoFi Stadium, the home of the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers in nearby Inglewood, Calif.

Plans are to have room for 38,000, the largest crowd ever to watch Olympic swimming, but there’s a chance that could grow given the expected demand for tickets in the heart of America’s swim culture.

“Should be pretty great,” Evans said, a little hint of FOMO sneaking into her voice.

Seems like there is a decent chance of that, especially if Ledecky dominates “the mile” once more.

Evans will be there, of course, a true circle of life moment, from fan to star to organizer.

And she’ll no doubt be doing some quick swimming math when the race is finished.