41 Year Old Olympian Swimmer

Making news just weeks before the Beijing Olympics is swimmer Dara Torres, a 41 year old woman who is heading to her fifth Olympics. I read about her on CNN this morning and wanted to cheer for her from here. Of course, there are a lot of people who seem bitter about her victory at such an age. Surprised? I'm not. I mean, she's beating out people half her age for a spot they think they deserve.

One of her fellow competitors on the U.S. swimteam this year was born in 1992, shortly after Torres competed in her third Olympics in Barcelona. I guess some young people just feel that she had her chance and its time for her to move on.

Move on is exactly what everyone thought she did when she took two years off to have a baby. She also had some surgeries on her knee and shoulder which held her back for a while. No one was expecting her to come back in 2008 and qualify for a spot on the team. The fact that she did it is making some people angry and, I imagine, quite jealous. Despite a clean record when it comes to drug tests and scrutiny about her strength at such an "advanced age" (41, ha!), Torres is getting slammed with accusations of illegal steroid use. Dara has offered to take a lie detector test to prove that she is not on steroids, but even that has failed to appease those who want to take her down. They claim that drug tests are not "foolproof" when it comes to certain drugs and they are convinced that she's cheating somehow.

Is it really that hard to believe that someone at 41 can swim that fast and that strong? She's been training as a swimmer her entire life. She works hard and she wants it bad. Joel Stager, an exercise physiologist at IU commented "It shows us what we can do. It's just that most of us don't." I love that comment. The human body (and mind for that matter) is capable of so much more than we realize. It's just that most of us don't reach high enough to achieve something great. Dara Torres is a champion for us all. She let her determination and her heart guide her and did not let what anyone else had to say about her keep her down. I'll be cheering for a gold for her in the 50-meter freestyle this year in Beijing.