Torres has worked on television as a reporter and announcer for American networks such as NBC, ESPN, TNT, OLN and Fox News Channel. She now hosts the golf show the Clubhouse on the Resort Sports Network. She is also a sometime model, having appeared in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue in 1994.
Of course, this explosion back onto the swimming scene and her “ripped” body have raised a few eyebrows. How, they say, at forty-one years of age could she have done this?
She bore a child, was diagnosed with asthma, had recent knee and shoulder surgery, and arrived at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials posting faster times than she posted in her mid-twenties. Humm, something smells strangely steroid-like, the nay-sayers say.
I’m not ready to accuse her of anything other than magnificent talent and guts.
Torres qualified for the Olympic team by edging out twenty-five-year-old Natalie Coughlin by five one-hundredths of a second—53.78 to 53.83—in an event in which Coughlin holds the American record. The critics and skeptics are going to use the “steroid” card, we know that.
“I’m so used to it now that it’s not even an issue,” Torres said of the doping suspicions that have dogged her in this latest Olympic comeback. “I just got drug tested and I can’t see them not coming out and at least blood testing me with that pilot program I’m involved with. That’s fine. Like I said (before), anyone who makes any accusations I take as a compliment.”
The fact that Torres is taking part in a voluntary U.S. Anti-Doping Agency program called Project Believe won’t quell the rumbling. Framed as USADA’s most vigorous testing regimen, Torres says her involvement has led to her blood and urine having been tested “twelve to fifteen times” since March.
“You can DNA test me, blood test me, urine test me, whatever you want to do,” Torres said in her first statements after arriving in Omaha. “Just test me because I want people to know that I am doing this right, that I’m forty, forty-one years old and I’m doing this and I’m clean and I want a clean sport. I swam against swimmers who were dirty my entire life and it’s just something I wouldn’t do.”
The doubters will doubt and Dara will swim. This is a reality Torres can’t escape. So she moves on to Beijing on the fresh wings of a story that is almost too good to be true and certainly the stuff that Olympic Dreams are made of. And that might be the only thing on which her supporters and skeptics agree.
Go Dara!
By Ivette Ricco
Photo courtesy of Femme Fan
