When Janet Evans Lost It

It was twenty-five years ago today when noted right-wing nut Eric Rudolph planted a bomb that went off in Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Atlanta Games, and no, I'm not going to tell the whole story all over again after having told it in July 2016.  Instead, I'm focusing on the moment a TV news crew from Germany's ARD network caught the explosion from a pavilion in the park while the ARD reporter was interviewing American swimmer Janet Evans.

I'm not going to recap the lousy week Evans had had during the swimming competition in the Atlanta Olympics' first week; you can go here for that.  I'm just showing the moment when she and the German reporter - whose name I never found out - saw and felt the bomb go off.  Up to this point, Evans had kept up her chipper, bubbly persona, which made her a favorite among Olympic fans in the first place.  At the pavilion of the timepiece company Swatch - which was throwing a retirement party for Evans - the reporter had talked to her about her retirement from competitive swimming and whether she was disappointed in how she swam in her last two races.  The topic then turned to Franziska van Almsick - who, at the time, was probably Germany's most famous female swimmer - whom Evans had just said hello to. She told the reporter that she wanted to speak to van Almsick at greater length but, with so many people crowding around van Almsick, she didn't want to be one more person bothering her.

"And no one's bothering you, right?" the ARD reporter said.

Evans had only gotten one word out in response when the bomb went off.  But what caught some people's attention was the one word she said after the bomb went off. 

Elizabeth Gleick, then writing for Time magazine, seemed to suggest at the time that Evans' cursing revealed her true nature, particularly with regard to the bad week she'd had, the bomb being the last straw . . . as if she was not the all-American girl next door she projected herself to be.   

Yeah, right - Evans should have been expected to be sweet and nice in a moment of domestic terrorism.  But in a situation like that, you couldn't expect her to just shrug it off and be so nonchalant about it.  As I wrote in August 2016, "Like, what was she supposed to do, say something like, 'It is terribly unfortunate that a bomb went off and could have killed me if it had been any closer?'"

No, when you're in a situation like that, you curse.  When someone explodes a backpack bomb near you, your first impulse is to drop a bomb of your own - an F-bomb.   

I had no problem with Janet Evans dropping the F-bomb at all.  Especially since I've been dropping it a lot since six months into the pandemic (before the pandemic, I never dropped it).  As far as I'm concerned, if there was any time appropriate for an all-American girl hailed as America's Olympic sweetheart to say , "F**k!", this was most certainly it.  She shouldn't have had to worry about her public image when she reacted the way she did. 

The video clip has troubled Evans for the past 25 years - not for her cursing, but for making her relive the moment.  "What happened," she later said, "was the German reporter literally took the tape, ran out of the building and ran to CNN. CNN had that video running in like ten minutes . . ..  I've seen it many times, and I hate watching it. It's not a happy memory."

I certainly hope Evans doesn't find this blog post by Googling herself.  But while it may be an unpleasant memory, it should not be an embarrassing memory for her just because she cursed.  It could have been any reporter interviewing any athlete in proximity to and in view of where the bomb went off, and anyone else would have been justified for cursing and being troubled by a clip of the moment being played over and over on TV news.

This only showed that Janet Evans is human.  There's no shame in being human.

And if she does find this blog post, I hope she appreciates what I just said.

*

Three days after the bombing, Evans joined then-current Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell, International Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch, Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games president Bill Payne, and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis onstage in a ceremony reopening Centennial Olympic Park.  Former Atlanta Mayor and Atlanta Olympics co-chair Andrew Young spoke to the crowd that assembled.

"We're here to proclaim a victory, we're here not to wallow in tragedy but to celebrate a triumph, a triumph of the human spirit," Young said. "We're here to remember the lives of Alice Hawthorne and Melih Uzunyol, two wonderful citizens, one from America and one from Turkey, who sought to come here to celebrate with 197 nations of the world, the possibilities of this planet, living together into the 21st century with a new measure of peace and prosperity. And we're sure that the 21st century will remember the joy, the wonder, the celebration, the vitality of the people of the earth gathered in this park and that we will define the future, not hatred, not bitterness, not alienation but joy and happiness."