I also had the pleasure of catching the Olympic Trials in swimming and Track and Field. As a sports fan, I always considered the Olympics the pinnacle of the sports world. I believe it is the greatest achievement in an athlete’s life. But the Olympics Games all too often have become the Patriot Games, with too much politics causing distractions away from the actual games. The trials don’t have that international baggage. The trials pit athletes from national teams head to head for a spot on the Olympics team.
Watching these young men and women, who have spent much of their lives working to reach this point, was inspiring.
There is a great story coming out of the trials, the Dara Torres story. She is demonstrating what young men and women with the heart will do to win it all. By now, everybody knows that Dara is forty-one years old and the mother of a two-year-old, Tessa. Dara is getting the attention she deserves because her story resonates with women everywhere.
Dara Grace Torres was born April 15, 1967, in Los Angeles, California.
Torres is Hispanic and Jewish on her father’s side. Torres and her partner, David Hoffman, have a daughter named Tessa Grace, born in April 2006.
She will be the first swimmer from the United States to compete in five Olympics: 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000, and 2008. She will compete in the Beijing Olympic Games in the fifty-meter freestyle, 4 x 100 medley relay, 4 x 100 freestyle relay, and has the option to swim the one-hundred-meter freestyle.
Note—on July 7, 2008, Torres confirmed that she will be pulling out of the one-hundred meter freestyle swim for her time at the Beijing Olympics. She will be focusing her efforts on the fifty-meter freestyle
She has won nine Olympic medals, including four golds, and won five medals alone in Sydney in 2000. After the 2000 Olympics, Dara retired (for the second time) to start a family. But she went right back to swimming and broke a world record at the 2006 Masters Nationals, just three weeks after giving birth to Tessa.
On August 1st, 2007 at the age of forty (just fifteen months after giving birth to her first child), she won gold in the one-hundred-meter freestyle at the U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis, her fourteenth win at these events. She then followed that up on August 4th by twice breaking her own American record in the fifty-meter freestyle, twenty-six years after she first set the American record at just fifteen years old.
