Looking back, it seems fitting that Janet Evans felt the earth move beneath her as she stood, Olympic torch in hand, in front of the world with Muhammad Ali atop Centennial Olympic Stadium on that electric night in July 1996.
“I remember I felt like the stadium was going to fall down,” Evans recalled Saturday. “And being a California kid it was like an earthquake in Atlanta.”
And in a way her world did shift in that moment.
“It was an epiphany for me,” said Evans, the three-time Olympic swimming champion, “the defining moment in my Olympic career.”
A moment, brief yet eternal, one that as much as Mary Lou nailing a perfect “10” or “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” defines the Olympic Games for so many us.
“It felt like it lasted forever yet it was so fast,” she said of moment she lit Ali’s torch and then stood next to him as he lit the Olympic cauldron.
As she replayed that moment between races at her daughter’s swim meet at Huntington Beach on Saturday, Evans remembered holding back tears.
“And I never cried after any of my Olympic medals,” she said “but I wanted to cry.”
She was not alone.
There are many reasons so many of us choked up that night in 1996 and why now, hours after Ali passed away at the age of 74 Friday night, that we tear up when we recall him there, his body shaking from Parkinson’s as if finally reeling from every blow that landed, but still standing nevertheless, still the King of the World.
We cried because he more than anyone represented a turbulent yet hopeful time. We cried in sorrow and we cried in belated recognition of his courage and his sacrifice we never fully appreciated all those years earlier.
Mainly we cried because we were overwhelmed by the power and symbolism of the moment: a man who, after being discriminated against in his hometown of Louisville shortly after his own Olympic triumph in Rome tossed his gold medal into a river that split north and south, another dividing line in a country scarred by too many of them. A man now towering once again above a nation that once prosecuted him for his religious beliefs and opposing an immoral war. A man standing over a city in the heart of an American South that once deemed him a lesser man the Olympic Games secured to redefine that city, the South, the country resting in his hands.
“To stand there and understand his history and the Olympic movement and being this man in Georgia bringing him back into the Olympic fold,” Evans said before pausing, “it is giving me chills right now.”
The emotions surging through Evans that night were driven by an overwhelming sense of understanding and direction.
“I was at crossroads in my career,” Evans said.
She had been the golden girl of the 1988 Olympic Games, continuing her dominance of the middle and long distances in Seoul, the 17-year-old out of El Dorado High sweeping the 400 and 800 meter freestyle.
Evans repeated as Olympic champion in the 800 in 1992 in Barcelona, winning by an even larger margin than she did in Seoul, but Germany’s Dagmar Hase edged her in the 400 final to snap Evans’ five-year unbeaten streak in the 400, 800 and 1,500 freestyles.
Four years later, Evans, then 24, arrived in Atlanta a long shot for a medal in the 800 and questioning what she would do with her life after swimming.
A year earlier at the U.S. Championships, Brooke Bennett, a 15-year-old from Florida who grew up with a poster of Evans on her bedroom wall, handed Evans her first 800 loss in eight years.
“I was really at a point in Atlanta where I thought the Olympics was about winning,” Evans said. “It was about gold medals and I couldn’t be successful if I didn’t always win.”
But it was in that moment with Ali, the stadium shaking beneath her feet as it rocked with the deafening chants of “Ali! Ali! Ali!” as she looked into his eyes, not dimmed by the disease but still searing as bright as the flame they shared, that Evans began to realize that a life is not defined by what you do within the confines of a boxing ring or floating lane markers but by the entirety of one’s time. That the gold medals were a reward for hours and years of labor but they also came with a responsibility.