Universal Sports Talks to Dara Torres

By Jason Devaney, Universal Sports

BETHESDA, Maryland, April 8. AT 6 a.m. Beijing time, Dara Torres awoke in her room at the Olympic Village and started her day.

Drink a Living Fuel breakfast shake at 6:15.

Get on the 6:45 bus to the Water Cube and arrive 15 minutes later.

Go for a quick swim, then take a hot shower, stretch and "get mashed."

Wait in the team room.

Minutes before the start of the race — the 50m freestyle final — Torres was called into the ready room and shortly after that, she and the seven other swimmers walked onto the pool deck and prepared to swim the equivalent of track and field's 100-meter dash.

The splash and dash. In 24 or 25 seconds, the fastest female swimmer in the world would be crowned. Could Torres, whose four previous Olympic gold medals were in relays, finally get an individual title?

"I went to the pool at 7 a.m. that morning with my coach Mark Schubert and nobody was there except Bob Costas," Torres recalled Tuesday morning during a phone interview. "I yelled, ‘Good morning!' to him. I went for a wake-up swim, checked out the pool, noted where the underwater cameras and marks on the bottom of the pool were … got my plan. I was nervous but obviously excited."

After the starting tone went off, Torres cut through the water at breakneck speed — albeit gracefully — and touched the wall in 24.07 seconds. It was her fastest swim ever and it broke the American record, but she finished 0.01 seconds short of a gold medal. German Britta Steffen clocked in at 24.06 and won the race.

Torres was second. In her mind, even though she had just earned an Olympic medal at the age of 41, she had simply lost.

"Needless to say I was happy," said Torres, who became the oldest medalist in Olympic swimming history — after becoming the oldest swimmer to make the U.S. Olympic team. "I can't look at it as a failure, that's a pretty harsh word. To me, in my head on the competitive side, I lost."

Torres, eight months removed from her performance in Beijing during which she won three silver medals, released her memoirs on Tuesday. "Age Is Just A Number," which she co-wrote with New York Times Magazine contributing writer Elizabeth Weil, takes a walk through her entire swimming career — from when she was a teenager living in California and then as a student-athlete at the University of Florida, to her three comebacks as an adult.

She revisits past successes — setting world and American records, winning Olympic medals — and talks about the more difficult times in her life too. During her four years as a swimmer at Florida, she became bulimic. She's dealt with two divorces, the death of her father and fertility problems. Michael Lohberg, the coach who guided Torres during her comeback for the Beijing Games, was stricken with a serious illness and was unable to travel to China for the Olympics.

In the book, Torres talks about getting back into the water in 2005 when she was pregnant with her first child. Despite being retired, it had been in Torres' plans to resume swimming when she was expecting. Torres and David Hoffman, her boyfriend and the father of her daughter Tessa, joined a Masters swim club near their home in Parkland, Fla.

Torres had not been in the water for five years and, she says in her book, those first few laps on Day 1 were a challenge.

"For the first few laps I felt sluggish and winded, unconnected to the water I used to love," she writes. "Then my stroke started coming back. The water started feeling heavy in my hands, like it's supposed to. I didn't have the dreaded sensation of just spinning my arms and not getting anywhere, like a cyclist trying to bike in too low a gear."

After that, it was like she had never been out of the pool.

A few months after Tessa was born, Torres — who swam right up until almost the final day of her pregnancy — competed at the 2006 Masters World Championships at Stanford in August. On her last day at the meet, Torres was scheduled to swim the first leg of a coed 4×50-meter freestyle relay. She would be swimming her favorite distance, 50 meters. Torres broke the 50-meter freestyle world record three times in the 1980s.

Torres' split time that day was 25.9 seconds, qualifying her for the U.S. Olympic Trials before the Beijing Games.

She and her all-star crew began training for Beijing. Lohberg was the master coach and directed Torres during each swimming workout. Anne Tierney and Steve Sierra stretched and "mashed" her — mashing is a type of massage in which the masseuse uses his or her feet on the patient. This kept Torres' muscles loose during those long months of intense training.

"They were my team and there was just no way I could have gotten [to Beijing] without my team," Torres said of Tierney and Sierra. "I really couldn't have. Being flexible is extremely important. Training the way swimmers train and elite athletes train … you definitely become tight. When you're in a pool you want to feel on top of the water and you want to feel loose. They helped me recover quicker and get ready for the next day."

Aside from her silver medal in the 50-meter freestyle last August, Torres won two more silvers at the 2008 Olympics — in the 4×100-meter freestyle and 4×100-meter medley races. The trio of medals brought her career total to 12 in five Olympics, tying her with Jenny Thompson for the most medals by an American woman.

So, what's next?

Torres competed at the Austin Grand Prix in early March and won the only race she entered — the 50-meter freestyle. She is looking forward to the U.S. Championships in July, and then the World Championships in Rome a few weeks later.

Torres currently swims 4,500-5,000 meters per week as she prepares herself for another big summer. After that, the 2011 Worlds are the next bigtime swimming meet. And of course, the London 2012 Olympics are also on the horizon. She will be 45 that year — can her body hold up for one more Olympics?

"I think that right now I am just gearing towards Worlds," she said. "I've endured many injuries and I am not sure yet."

But then again, age is just a number.

For more coverage, visit Universal Sports.

To purchase Torres' new book, visit our Swim Shop.

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