Part Retton and part Rodman, 16-year-old Brooke Bennett has sports-hero alchemy down. She may not be the best swimmer on Team USA, but she's brassy, quotable, and pitch-perfect for the truer goal: marketing. So, you have to ask, could this be

The New Olympic Ideal?

Before slipping into an aquamarine pool for their afternoon swim--a mind-numbing lapathon of two hours, six miles--the older members of the Blue Wave swim team take a brisk run along the leafy avenues of Brandon, Florida, a bedroom community outside Tampa. Brooke Bennett, the team's 16-year-old, curly-haired ascendent star, doesn't do the run; her wobbly, hyperflexible knees and ankles aren't really made for it. So afterward, she engages in some routine exercises of her own, applying equal dollops of guile and guff as she lords it over the weight room, where the team is knocking out a few circuits. From a huffing perch atop a stationary bike, Bennett dragoons her teammates with a cheeky coerciveness that's annoying, yes, but not without a certain charm.

"Hey, guess what I got today?" she chirps to a tall boy grunting away on a nearby military press.

No answer.

"Heyyyy!" she screeches. "Guess what I got?"

The boy turns and looks at her. "I can imagine a lot of things," he deadpans. "None that I'd want to hear about."

"I got my driver's license!"

"So?"

"So-ooo, I'm borrowing your car after practice."

A minute later Bennett has sighted her next victim. "Hey Matt," she singsongs. "Can you take this off for me?" Pedaling away, she offers the helpless boy a slender wrist encircled by a thin gold bracelet. Slowly, the trapped Matt approaches and painstakingly undoes the clasp.

"Now, can you put it in my bag?" It's not really a question.

"Where's your bag?"

"It's in the other room."

Matt sighs and shuffles out. "Put it in
the outside pocket," she calls after him.

Just watching her, it's hard to discern the quality that elevates Bennett, a contender for a gold medal in the 800-meter freestyle in Atlanta, above her teammates, who will spend the summer vying for satin ribbons in lesser meets. Bennett is small--5-foot-5, 115 pounds--and not particularly muscled. Even her kinky, chlorine-bleached hair looks no more green than the rest of the teenaged Blue Wave team. Trot her out to the local mall, and Bennett would melt seamlessly into the central Florida teenster crowd: three rings and two studs in her left ear, two hoops and a stud in her right, and a chunky mouthful of braces that will be gone--she swears--by Christmas.

But attitudinally, as most of those in her circle, including her parents and her coach, will tell you, Bennett's league is all her own. Of course, she's still a scrawny, occasionally inchoate kid--16 years and holding--happily blind to a good deal of the financial yammering that goes on in the adult world around her. But Bennett does seem to understand one very adult concept: that she is a chosen one, a brightening light living in a land that pays outsize homage to athletes qua celebrities. And one day soon, perhaps as early as this fall if Atlanta breaks the way she hopes and if she decides to waive her college eligibility, Bennett's beux yeux could ride a Wheaties box and her loopy signature could officialize leafy-green endorsement contracts. In keeping with these facts, she, even at her age, has internalized Rule One about the athlete's role in this new age of infotainment: It's not enough to be the best. You also have to have the gravitational pull of a singular public image. Put less delicately: You have to have a shtick. "How else is the public supposed to understand what you represent?" she says glibly.

Thus far, the media are quite taken with Bennett's emerging character arc, whose central engine can be summarized as in-your-faceness, but of a geeky, almost cute variety. Indeed, Bennett's willingness to talk trash about her competition can become an asset when the marketing types descend from Madison Avenue. "For us, it's not just based on athletic abilities; it's also what these athletes are like as people," says Carrie Bates, a sports promotion manager at Nike. "Brooke is a lot of what Nike is: aggressive, competitive." Call her Mary-Lou-Retton-meets-Dennis-Rodman: innocently perky, but a little bit bad, too.

Whatever you call it, Bennett's lead-with-the-chin image was helped along last March by the New York Times. "Perhaps it was the time the family Doberman grabbed her face with his jaws, as if fetching the morning paper, and she didn't cry," began the story. "Or maybe it was the time she drove her father's Harley off the road, through a ditch and back onto the pavement like some pre-teen Evel Knievel." One can only speculate, but circling now, no doubt, are a camera-accompanied Bob Costas and the folks from Speedo.

Of course, to Bennett, the consummate here-and-now teenager, the rumblings on the media and marketing horizon seem less important than matters at hand, like algebra and catching up on sleep, which she says she rarely has enough time for. "I don't worry about that money stuff too much," says Bennett. She slides into the pool for another round of laps, adding one point before she disappears. "I'm only 16--not 24. And when you think about it, until I decide to go pro, it's not really my career yet."

Until Bennett renounces her college eligibility, grabs an agent, and dives into the professional world, hopeful companies are kept at a required arm's length by her coach and parents--no matter how eager they may be. "Swimmers tend to finish their collegiate careers and then go the endorsement route," says Matt Farrell, a spokesman for U.S. Swimming. "Sure, Brooke Bennett is one of the top swimmers, but she's young, she's got plenty of time. But if she wins the gold in Atlanta, she'll have some decisions to make."

Brooke bennett resides with her slender and decidedly nonathletic mom, Rachel, on a three-acre farm dotted into the country outside Plant City, some 35 miles east of Tampa. There are no siblings to blunt the agreeable mother-daughter byplay, and Bennett's father, Keith, who works for the local power company, moved out last year. But there are plenty of animal diversions: a horse, a miniature donkey, two cows, chickens, parakeets, cats, dogs, and a potbellied pig, Noelle, which shares Bennett's bed.

It was James Lane, who died this spring, who goaded his young granddaughter to become a swimmer. A maintenance worker in Bloomington, Indiana, he would kick off laps in the same pool where Mark Spitz trained--he of the nine gold medals and, perhaps more significant, the million-dollar pinup poster. When Lane retired to Tampa in 1980, his first task was the building of a proper pool for his young comer. Brooke, aged three months, toddled into it and began splashing around even before it was completely filled. "She didn't wrinkle and she didn't get cold," Rachel recalls. "You couldn't get her out!"

Bennett's first lessons came at age four, and a year later she had her precocious place on the team at the Boys and Girls Club in Tampa. Not quite understanding that the objective was to go faster than the rest of the field, she finished last in her first race. Then she saw the other children receiving ribbons. Stricken, she turned to her mother and said, "Why didn't I get one of those?"

Three years later she found a better goal: Off the TV came the image of Janet Evans, then a gangly 16-year-old, winning three gold medals at the Seoul Olympics. "That's what I wanted to do," she later told a newspaper reporter. "Everybody else wanted to be a movie star. I wanted to be a famous swimmer."

About the same time that Bennett's ambitions jelled, her physical makeup also began to take form. One of the curiosities of women's swimming is the way in which girls of 12 or 13 suddenly materialize onto the scene as premier athletes. Peter Banks, Bennett's coach, explains the phenomenon as a dramatic, biologically predetermined increase in the power-to-weight ratio. "At 12 or 13," he says, "there's a tremendous growth in muscle that allows girls to develop the strength to go with the technique and stamina they already have--assuming they've been swimming for a while. It seems to pop right out of the pool."

For Bennett this "pop" came over the winter of 1993-1994. That fall she was turning nine-minute 800-meter pieces, solid but by no means extraordinary junior national times. By spring she was down in the 8:30s. She went to the nationals and finished second to none other than Janet Evans; at age 13 she was on her way to the world championships in Rome. Recalling the finals, Rachel still gets choked up. "'That's my baby down there,'" she remembers blubbering as her daughter trotted out. "I was blowing my nose so hard I couldn't even see her."

Evans won the race, barely touching-out Hayley Lewis of Australia, but Bennett reached the wall a surprising third, less than a second and a half later. In Rome, Bennett field-tested her Sassy Media Princess role, preening for cameras while Evans, secure in her queenship, helped the younger girl do her homework. It wasn't until last year, with Bennett narrowing the gap with the older swimmer, that things grew tense. Evans skipped the 1995 Pan Am Games in Argentina, electing to stay home and beat up on a depleted field at the spring nationals. Bennett, meanwhile, cruised to victory in the 400-meter freestyle at the Pan Am Games and afterward suggested there was another reason for Evans' absence. "She knows there's somebody coming up behind her," she said. "I think she's a little scared."

Viewed in the context of Bennett's developing media persona, it was a perfect moment: the brash newcomer elbowing the idol out of the way. But Bennett, despite all the bravado, was just a young girl. Rachel says her daughter cried when she saw her quotes in the paper. They can be read as nothing more than the postrace comments of a teenager basking in a newly shone limelight. And yet her comments accomplished their work, intended or not. Brooke was irreverent. Sassy. Hardly anyone held the words against her; in fact, reporters clamored for her even more.

An image was launched, as was a very public feud between Bennett and Evans. "I haven't talked to her and I don't plan to," Evans snarled when told of the remarks. "She's 15. I'm 24. It's not like I have anything in common with her. People say, 'You were like Brooke once.' No. When I was 15 I had two world records." The newsprint brinkmanship continued until the two finally met later that spring at the Alamo Challenge in San Antonio. There, for the first time, Bennett beat Evans in the 400 meters. "It was a good race," said Bennett, patronizing but imminently quotable. "Janet was really good in the race."

"I'm just telling you right now, I'm out of here at 5:15 at the latest," Bennett is saying to Banks. "I have an appointment to get my nails done at 5:30, and there's no way I'm missing it."

It's a hot Saturday in May at the Brandon Swim and Tennis Club, and a couple hundred be-Speedoed kids from ten central Florida swim teams loiter on the pool deck. Off to one side, Bennett scribbles autographs on photo cards and swim caps for a swarm of future Brookes. She's a little perfunctory about it, but she signs for everybody, tossing in an occasional smile. Only three years ago, at the senior nationals, she was getting Janet Evans and Summer Sanders to sign her swim cap.

Her dad, Keith, stops by for a few minutes to drop off a gift: a little teddy bear dressed in the Stars and Stripes. Keith is a sight in this crowd: bearded and ponytailed, with a Harley T-shirt that reads, if I had to explain why, you wouldn't understand. He oozes pride over his girl, though, and she's obviously touched.

The name of today's meet is Breathe Easy Swim '96, but the subtext is clear: This is an off-Broadway run-through of the Bennett Show. It's a benefit for the Allergy and Asthma Foundation of Florida and sponsored by a number of pharmaceutical companies that have done similar informal events with Spitz and three-time gold medalist Nicole Haislett. Before the racing starts there are a few speeches lauding the blushing star on her work ethic and urging her to bring home the gold.

Waiting around, Bennett lets her persona run free, sighing theatrically and sprawling in the laps of her male teammates, affecting boredom. But when her heat is called, she snaps to. She blitzes the 400-by-40 meters in 4:31 and climbs out of the water hardly breathing. "She won!" one little boy screams to his mother in amazement. "She won!"

Bennett is the only girl in her heat of the 800--competing against seven boys--but she soon leaves everybody in the field behind, save one. "This kid is good," Banks says gloomily. "He went to the junior nationals. He'll beat her. She's tired. I'll be happy if she's under nine minutes." Bennett splits in 4:23, down by a body length, but slowly works her way back up onto her opponent's shoulder. At 750 meters, she turns first. Banks starts to get excited. As the two pass his spot, Bennett's lead is maybe a foot. "Hup! Hup!" yells Banks. "She's never lost a race from this position," he says, sardonically adding, "Watch her make a liar out of me." The finish looks to be a dead heat at 8:45, but Bennett gets outtouched by 0.05 second. "Longer arms," says Banks.

He's not unhappy.

Bennett pulls herself from the pool, red-faced and smiling, and hustles toward the locker room and the ever-important nail appointment. No time to chat. "I'm out of here," she says, shooting her coach a glance.

"Good job," Banks says.

Bennett nods, just a little dip of the head, a framing moment. Very cool.

Rob Buchanan is a frequent contributor to Outside. Katie Arnold contributed additional reporting for this story.