Dara Torres
A lifetime of professional swimming has made 41-year-old Dara Torres freakish about fitness, and with an overall haul of nine medals from four Summer Games—spanning 1984 to 2000—she's been rightly rewarded for her diligence.
She hung up her goggles after winning silver and bronze Olympic medals at the 1988 Seoul Games, but then came back and won her second gold medal in Barcelona in 1992, and then came back again and won two gold and three bronze medals in 2000's Sydney Games.
But when she and partner David Hoffman were expecting their first child, Tessa Grace, in August of 2005, Torres said it never dawned on her to compete professionally after having a baby.
She continued working out during her pregnancy, but she wanted to be cautious of her baby's health. By the second trimester, her training sessions were mostly confined to the Stairmaster, which made her incredibly nauseous. Torres wanted to preserve as much of her six-foot, 148-pound frame as possible. "I didn't want to lose what I had worked my whole life to have," she said.
Swimming proved to be the least unsettling to Torres. With her obstetrician's permission, she got back in the pool. ("He said if I'm having a hard time breathing, then my baby is having a hard time breathing," Torres says.) The competitor in her had a hard time turning down challenges from her training partners, and her coach would often have to repeat her doctor's orders whenever she pushed herself too hard.
Once she gave birth and was back in the pool, her trainers were startled by her increased flexibility, and her coaches were stunned by her new speed in the water, the result of all the swimming she had done while freighted with Tessa and some 36 extra pounds.
"I'm leaner and slimmer than ever before," says Torres who dropped the pregnancy weight in just three weeks while sticking to a daily regimen of swimming and weights.
Fifteen months after giving birth, she won her 14th gold in the 100-meter freestyle at the U.S. Nationals. Then, three days later, she twice broke her own record—which she'd set at age 15—in the 50-meter freestyle.
Unfortunately, her performance has been so unbelievable to some that she has been suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs. To quell those suspicions, she asked the United States Anti-Doping Agency to give her any drug test it could devise. " I want to be an open book," she says. "Now if anyone says I'm cheating, I take it as a compliment."
After snagging a pair of golds at Nationals, she became the oldest American swimmer to qualify for the Games, where she is a favorite to medal in the 50 free. "Most people mellow out when they get older and have a family," she says. "But I'm probably more competitive now than I've ever been."
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