Sports Star Player: Dara Torres American international swimmer

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Dara Torres American international swimmer

Dara Grace Torres (born April 15, 1967) is an American international swimmer and Olympic gold medalist. Torres is the first swimmer from the United States to compete in five Olympic Games (1984, 1988, 1992, 2000 and 2008), and, at age 41, the oldest swimmer ever to earn a place on the U.S. Olympic team. At the 2008 Summer Olympics, she competed in the 50-meter freestyle, 4×100-meter medley relay, and 4×100-meter freestyle relay and won the silver medal in all three events.

Torres has won twelve Olympic medals (four gold, four silver, four bronze), five of which she won in the 2000 Summer Olympics, a feat made all the more impressive by the fact that, at age 33, she was the oldest member of the 2000 U.S. Olympic Swim Team. She has also won at least one medal in each of the five Olympics in which she has competed, making her one of only a handful of Olympians to earn medals in five different Games.

On August 1, 2007, at age 40 (just 15 months after giving birth to her first child), she won gold in the 100-meter freestyle at the U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis, her fourteenth national championship. On August 4, she broke her own American record in the 50-meter freestyle, twenty-six years after she first set the American record at just 15 years old.