No. 1 Again

At the crack of the starter's gun, the six swimmers plunged into the pool--Jimmy McLane just a splash ahead of the rest. For the first length of the 50-meter pool, the six were almost neck & neck. Then, almost imperceptibly, McLane began to draw away. Porpoising along at a steady 35 strokes to a length, he won last week's National A.A.U. 1,500-meter championship by a full length of Yale's Payne Whitney pool. Among the topflight swimmers Jimmy McLane left in his wake were Olympians John Marshall (of Australia and Yale), Peter Duncan (of South Africa and the University of Oklahoma), and Wayne Moore (of Nichols, Conn, and Yale). For McLane, it was a splashy comeback, at the age of 22, as the No. 1 U.S. distance man.

As McLane himself sees it, it was more of a catch-up than a comeback. Seven years ago, at 15, he was a national outdoor titleholder at distances ranging from 400 to 1,500 meters. At 17, as a crewcut, prep schoolboy (Andover), he became the Olympic 1,500-meter champion. But from then on, Jimmy McLane spent a good part of his swimming time gulping the backwash of such stars as Japan's Hironoshin ("The Flying Fish") Furuhashi, Australia's Marshall and Hawaii's Ford Konno. It was not because he slowed down; the others just got faster.

Furuhashi lopped almost a minute off Jimmy's Olympic time (19:18.5) for 1,500 meters--roughly as good as running a mile twelve seconds faster than anybody had ever done it before. Furuhashi's "incredible" performances, later matched by Marshall and Konno, set up for McLane what he now thinks was a psychological barrier. "My main difficulty was that I had already gone as far as I could go. I started at the top." But he started all over again, in four years managed to cut half a minute off his time for the 1,500 meters.

A Yale senior facing military service in June, Jimmy figured that this would be his last swimming season ("Swimming is only for college boys"). He made it a good one. In the Eastern Intercollegiates last month, he won both the 1,500-meter and 400-yd. races. In the N.C.A.A. meet a fortnight ago, he doubled at 1,500 and the 200-yd., finishing second (to Teammate Moore) at 440 yds.

Last week, after winning the 1,500, Jimmy came back to win the 220-yd. event in 2:07.2, just 1.7 seconds off the world record, then whipped the field at 440 yds. to join Marshall, Konno and Jack Medica as indoor triple-distance winners in a single A.A.U. meet. McLane figures that this is his farewell to swimming, and after ten years of competition he is not really unhappy about it: "In fact, it wouldn't break my heart if the Army stuck me in the Sahara Desert."

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