Janet Elway was a national-caliber swimmer before most people had ever heard the name Elway. Born Janet Buchan, she won six state championships in high school, led Stanford to its first national women’s swimming title as a freshman, and was ranked among the best in the world in her event before injury, and the 1980 Olympic boycott closed that chapter of her life.
She is best known today as the first wife of Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback John Elway, a marriage that lasted 18 years, produced four children, and ended in a 2003 divorce that neither side has ever spoken about publicly in detail.
In the more than two decades since, she has built a second identity almost entirely out of the public view, raising her children through some of the most watched years in Denver sports history and then founding a children’s charity that has operated continuously since 2005.
Janet Elway Biography
She was born on February 17, 1961, in Seattle, Washington, and grew up swimming competitively from around age five. Janet Elway attended Woodrow Wilson High School in Tacoma, now known as Silas High School, where she set a national short-course record in the 400-meter individual medley and won six state championships.
That record and her results at the 1979 World University Games in Mexico City, where she won gold in the 400 IM despite competing through stomach flu and a fever, earned her full swimming scholarship offers from multiple programs, including USC and the University of Texas. She chose Stanford.
As a Stanford freshman in 1980, she led the team to its first-ever national women’s swimming championship, medaling in all six events she swam at the meet.
She was ranked among the top swimmers in the world in her category that year, but a shoulder injury, combined with the United States’ boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, ended her chance to compete at that level.
She graduated from Stanford in 1983 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and was later inducted into the Hall of Fame for Tacoma-Pierce County Sports and Pacific Northwest Swimming in 2005.
John Elway’s Ex-Wife
Janet Buchan met John Elway at Stanford in February 1980. She had just left the pool after swim practice, while he had just come from baseball practice.
By her own telling, she thought he had bad hair, while he thought she looked like a wet rat.
They dated for about four years while both competed as Stanford athletes, John in football and baseball, and married on March 3, 1984, in a small evening ceremony at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California, in front of family and close friends.
That same month, John signed his second NFL contract with the Denver Broncos, and the newly married couple moved to Colorado together in 1985.
They had four children. Jessica Gwen was born on October 17, 1985, followed by Jordan, Jack, and Juliana.
Jessica went on to play basketball at Stanford, her parents’ alma mater, before working as a teacher and later becoming a director at Capital Family Medical Associates.
She married Jimmy Delgadillo in 2015. Jordan has a husband named Austin and a daughter, Addie, according to a 2019 social media post from John Elway.
Jack is the couple’s only son and followed his father into football during his own playing days. Juliana is the youngest of the four.
Janet has spoken about how demanding the marriage became during John’s playing career and has said she began seeing a therapist regularly, twice a week by her own account, as she worked through the pressure of raising four children in the public eye of one of the NFL’s most scrutinized franchises.
She has described leaning on a Christian faith she had held since childhood to get through that period. John and Janet separated in 2002 after 18 years of marriage, and their divorce was finalized in 2003.
Neither has ever given a public explanation for the split, and both have avoided placing blame on the other in any interview either has given since.
Janet made a brief appearance in Netflix’s 2025 documentary Elway, credited under her birth name, Janet Buchan, and identified in the film as John’s future wife, offering a short glimpse into their relationship during their Stanford years.
She has otherwise stayed almost entirely out of any media coverage tied to her former marriage.
Life After the Divorce
Janet Elway has lived in Cherry Hills Village in Arapahoe County, Colorado, for years, in a home she has said includes a pool she built specifically so she could continue swimming and working out.
She remarried in 2011 to Kevin Kretzmar, a financial services specialist, and has kept that marriage almost entirely private since.
Her most defined post-divorce achievement is Janet’s Camp, a charity fundraiser she founded in 2005 that provides scholarships, known as camperships, for underprivileged and inner-city children to attend YMCA of Metropolitan Denver summer camps.
The event has run annually for two decades and has helped send thousands of children to camp who otherwise could not have afforded it.
Beyond that signature project, she has served on the boards of several other Denver-area nonprofits over the years, continuing a pattern of low-profile, consistent charitable involvement rather than high-visibility public appearances.
John Elway, for his part, began dating former Oakland Raiders cheerleader Paige Green around 2005 or 2006, became engaged to her in Italy in 2008, and married her in 2009.
He and Janet have maintained a working relationship since the divorce, focused on their children and, more recently, grandchildren, without any public indication of ongoing personal conflict.
Career
Before the Elway name brought her widespread recognition, Janet Buchan was one of the most decorated age-group swimmers on the West Coast.
She won six Washington state high school championships, twice each in the 500-yard freestyle, the 200-yard individual medley, and relay events, and set a national short-course record in the 400-meter individual medley while competing in Paris as a teenager.
She earned high-point honors at an Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women meet and held a national collegiate record in the 400 IM.
Her signature achievement came in March 1980, during her first year at Stanford, when she led the team to its first-ever national women’s swimming championship, medaling in all six events in which she competed at the meet.
She was considered one of the top-ranked swimmers in the world in her discipline heading into the 1980 Olympic cycle.
Still, a shoulder injury and the United States’ boycott of the Moscow Games that year ended her competitive ambitions at the international level.
She continued swimming for Stanford afterward but did not pursue the sport professionally after graduating in 1983.
Janet Elway’s Net Worth
Janet Elway’s net worth is estimated to be $1 million. Reports that she received a substantial divorce settlement that she later used to support her charitable work have also never been independently confirmed with a specific figure.
Her ex-husband, John Elway’s net worth is estimated at $145 million, built from his 16-season Hall of Fame career with the Broncos, his equity stake and executive roles with the team afterward, and extensive business investments since retiring, including car dealerships and restaurant ventures.
