Janet Evans, Olympic Champion Swimmer, Returns With a Different Focus Donald Miralle for The New York Times Janet Evans during training at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, California, this month. LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. - Shortly after Janet Evans disappeared into the bathroom, her 5-year-old daughter, Sydney, knocked on the door and said, "Can I come in, Mama?" Evans, a five-time Olympic medalist who has returned to competitive swimming at 40, was trying to provide a urine sample for a doping test while a woman sent by the United States Anti-Doping Agency watched. "Mommy," Sydney said, "What are you doing in there?" How to explain to a preschooler that Mommy is swimming so fast, she has to go to the bathroom to prove she is not cheating? Evoking her father, Paul, a veterinarian, Evans told her daughter that it was like when Grandpa took blood and other samples from dogs and cats and ran tests to make sure they are O.K. In 1988, Evans, then 17 and weighing barely 100 pounds, vanquished the East Germans - later found to be systematically doping - on her way to three Olympic gold medals in Seoul, South Korea, and instantly became a household name. She was so accomplished by her third and final Olympics, in 1996 in Atlanta, that she was chosen to pass the Olympic torch to Muhammad Ali during the opening ceremony. Sixteen years after those Games, and a year after returning to the pool, Evans has qualified to race in her signature events, the 400- and 800-meter freestyles, at the United States Olympic trials in June. The top two finishers in each event will earn berths to the London Games. Evans's return to high-level competition has captivated some while confusing others. For every person who applauds her comeback after giving birth to two children and taking a 14-year hiatus from training, many others wonder about her motives given that she is a long shot to qualify for her fourth Olympics. At the 2008 trials, it took a time of 4 minutes 3.92 seconds in the 400 and 8:25.38 in the 800 to make the team. Evans's best times this year in those events are 4:17.27 and 8:49.05. Evans is not the first 40-something mom to make a big splash; the sprinter Dara Torres, with her 2-year-old daughter in tow, won three silver medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics at 41 and will also be competing at this year's trials. But Evans has to log considerably more mileage in the pool to be competitive in distance races, which tend to be the province of the young and lithe. For Evans, whose passage from adolescence to adulthood played out in the public eye, this is a more personal journey. Anything less than a victory is no longer a stinging defeat. At the Olympic trials in June, Evans, like the majority of the roughly 1,500 competitors, will be racing for the pure thrill of it, with no expectations of an Olympic berth. If she makes it to the final eight, she said, she will be ecstatic. "I know there are people who feel like if I'm going to do this, then I have to make the Olympic team; otherwise, it's a failure," said Evans, who is focused more on the process. In pushing her body beyond what she imagined possible, Evans feels as if she has broken an age barrier. "I struggled with turning 40," Evans said. It was a hard birthday for me. Someone said to me, "How do you feel now that your life is half over?" I wasn't ready to accept that it was all downhill from here. As a mom you put so many things on the back burner. For me to find time to train, it was like this gift I could give myself. I think it can come out selfishly to say that, but it was something I could do for myself to feel good about being middle-aged, for lack of a better word. Evans, ever the competitor, was not willing to concede defeat to Father Time. "It's not about making the Olympics," she said. It's about my body being able to do things that my mind is telling it to do. Evans started swimming when she was 2 ½, the age her son, Jake, is now. Her mother, Barbara, used to tell a story of Evans's swimming laps, then emerging from the water for a bottle and a diaper change. Evans set the first of her seven world records at 15, two years before her star turn in Seoul. At the Barcelona Games four years later, she successfully defended her 800 freestyle crown and took the silver medal in the 400. She retired after the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, where she won no medals. So completely did Evans shed her athlete's skin for her new life as a motivational speaker, her husband, Billy Wilson, whom she married in 2004, said, "I never thought of her as an athlete." Evans's star power, like her smile, has never dimmed. She recently entered business partnerships with BMW, Arena sportswear and Metamucil, a fiber supplement that Evans admits was not on her radar when she was 17.