Home > Dara Torres: Olympic Champion Ready for Round Five
Dara Torres: Olympic Champion Ready for Round Five
At 41 years old, swimmer and new mom Dara Torres is attempting to qualify for her fifth Olympic Games at the USA Swimming Team Trials on June 29 – July 6 in Omaha, Neb.
By Wendy Lewellen
Published: June 19, 2008
Athletes finally get to the point when they just have to throw in the towel. They take up golf, speak at banquets, do weight-loss commercials.
Dara Torres had a different idea. Go back to the Olympic Games. With nine Olympic medals to her name, apparently she is not one to rest on her laurels. The stopwatches gave her no choice.
How appropriate that in the same month NBC brought back a new version of “The Bionic Woman,” Dara Torres blew everyone out of the water with her 50- and 100-meter freestyle times at the USA Swimming National Championships in Indianapolis. On August 1, 2007, she won gold in the 100-meter freestyle and three days later broke her own American record in the 50-meter freestyle.
If Dara Torres qualifies for Beijing she will become the first swimmer to make five Olympic teams and will be the oldest female Olympic swimmer. How exciting for us mere-mortal spectators that she has the audacity to take on such an unheard-of challenge.
Think back to what you were doing in 1984. That was the year Torres won her first Olympic gold medal in the 4 x 100-meter freestyle relay. Diana Nyad, swimming legend and radio commentator, recalled interviewing her as a “skinny-hipped 14-year-old…an exuberant, giggly, talented kid.”
She is attempting her second Olympic comeback. The last time she competed in the Olympic Games was in 2000, after a seven-year lay-off. In 2006, while pregnant with her daughter, Tessa Grace, Torres’ doctors suggested that she do some leisurely swimming. As the story goes, she couldn’t keep herself from racing others in her lane at master’s swim sessions. If her body would cooperate, she was going to give it one more try.
Torres’ physical form is remarkable for an elite athlete of any age. Her results have been so extraordinary that she proactively demands and receives regular and frequent drug tests to douse any doubts about her amazing battle with the ageing process. The road to that form isn’t easy. Training a 40-year-old, post-partum body is not the same thing as training a 17-year-old body. It’s the recovery from workouts that reminds Torres of her true chronological age. But after her two physical therapists and her two masseurs get done with her, “I feel like Gumby,” She said. Completing her team of experts are a head coach, a strength coach, a sprinting coach and, last, but definitely not least, a nanny.
What she’s doing seems to be working. She takes Thursdays and Sundays off from her typical 7-2:30 work-outs, and she plays close attention to her diet. At 5’11”, she’s 10 pounds lighter than she was in 2000. I expected to encounter in Torres a living nutritional chemistry experiment. But aside from relying heavily on her Living Fuel shakes and bars in the early part of the day, her diet sounds simply sensible.
In the course of her life, she has endured five knee surgeries, one shoulder surgery, and two or three hand surgeries during her University of Florida years, where she went on a full volleyball scholarship. During those college years she also overcame an eating disorder, and after the ’92 Games she was diagnosed as asthmatic. Throw in her recent pregnancy and childbirth following an emotionally harrowing battle with infertility, and her toughness is no surprise.
Like a true champion, Torres has used her influence to raise awareness around health issues that have touched her life. Toyota sponsors her effort to spotlight eating disorders. During her struggle with infertility, she spoke openly about this culturally hush-hush subject. As her father battled and lost his fight with colon cancer, she became an official spokesperson for an educational initiative of the Colon Cancer Alliance.
It’s not like she needs something to do. Beyond training, beyond charitable work, Torres has pursued a broadcasting career with the likes of ESPN, TNT, OLN, USA Network and E! Television. And of course, there is motherhood – her number-one priority. While she used to swim for herself, she now admits to swimming for her daughter. Whether she qualifies for the Olympic Games or not, her place in sports history is now secure, and someday when her daughter is old enough to Google, she will say, “Mom, I can’t believe you did that.”
The swimming Olympic Team Trials will take place June 29-July 6 in Omaha, Neb. For more information on the event, go to USASwimming.org.