July 5, 2008
Olympic Trials | Road to Beijing
At Age 41, Torres Qualifies for Fifth Games
By KAREN CROUSE
OMAHA — Dara Torres’s
half-baked dream to make the 2008 Olympic team was rising like a
soufflé in the kitchen of her older brother, Michael. It was Thursday
night and he was trying to picture the image of Torres gliding across
his television screen, headed, it seemed, for Beijing.
Michael had not seen Torres swim in person since the Olympics in
1984, when she qualified for the United States swimming team as a
wide-eyed 17-year-old. After watching her post the second-fastest time
in the semifinals of the 100-meter freestyle, Michael packed his bags.
On Friday, he caught a flight to Nebraska from Florida, arriving
here four hours before the women’s 100 freestyle final at the Qwest
Center. His journey was nothing compared with that of his sister’s. She
resumed training while she was pregnant (her daughter, Tessa, is now
2).
With her brother and thousands of backers looking on, Dara Torres
locked up a fifth Olympic berth with a victory over the American-record
holder, Natalie Coughlin.
Torres was timed in 53.78 seconds, which was 0.02 off her best
time. Coughlin, who had already set a world record in the 100
backstroke and made the team in the 200 individual medley, clocked a
53.83. Coughlin’s American record, which she swam at a meet in
California in May, is 53.39. Libby Trickett of Australia set the world
record, 52.88, in March.
Michael Phelps,
who lowered his world record in the 200 individual medley Friday, has a
fan base supplemented by squealing girls. Torres is a big hit with
their mothers. The support she received from the crowd of around
14,000, which rose to applaud her after she finished, made her teary.
Torres, 41, climbed out of the pool, with the Lenny Kravitz version
of “American Woman” blaring through the loudspeakers, and fell into the
arms of Michael Lohberg, her coach in Coral Springs, Fla.
“I was very surprised that I won,” Torres said. She added: “I’m ecstatic. I can’t believe it.”
Torres’s time was 0.06 faster than her gold-medal effort in Sydney
in 2000. It was 4.58 seconds better than her fourth-place time at the
1984 Olympic trials in Indianapolis, which earned her a berth in the
400 freestyle relay in the Los Angeles Games.
Even before Torres swam, Friday night had been the setting for a comeback. In the 200 breaststroke, 26-year-old Amanda Beard
qualified for her fourth Olympic team by finishing second to the New
Jersey native Rebecca Soni, a 21-year-old senior at Southern California.
Beard stopped swimming competitively after the 2004 Olympics, but
last year she came out of retirement. In the mixed zone afterward, all
Beard wanted to talk about was Torres.
“I love her to death,” Beard said. “I love her sense of humor and her spirit.”
She added: “She’s going to make the team. That’s a no-brainer.”
Torres’s support came from near and far. There were the phone calls
that Michael fielded Thursday night from friends who were in awe of
what Torres was on the verge of doing. He knows how they feel.
Inspired by her, Michael said he began going to a gym for the first time in his life six months ago.
How can one family produce an exercise fiend like Torres and a
sedentary man? He laughed. “I’ve never really liked the regimen,”
Michael said. “She likes the regimen.”
A few hours before Friday’s evening session, Matt Biondi, Melvin Stewart and Jenny Thompson
appeared together at a news conference. United States Olympians
covering the timeline from 1984 to 2000, they all at one time had been
an Olympic teammate of Torres’s.
Thompson, who tied with Torres for the bronze medal in the 100
freestyle at the 2000 Olympics — they were both clocked in 54.43 — said
she was not surprised by Torres’s longevity. “She’s very compulsive
about everything — training, nutrition, sleep,” said Thompson, who was
on Stanford Aquatics with Torres during her last comeback.
It takes a person of a certain age to remember the days when female
swimmers rarely competed after high school because there were no
college scholarships for women to entice them to stay in the sport.
That was in the early 1970s. Torres, who competed at Florida, and
Thompson, who went to Stanford, were in the second wave of women to
benefit from the changes brought about by the passage of Title IX.
Biondi, who was on the 1984, 1988 and 1992 Olympic teams with
Torres, said, “When girls become women, when gentlemen graduated from
college, it wasn’t explicitly stated, it was just an understanding
there that you were to get on with your life.”
Torres, he added, “has blown the roof off that line of thinking.”
In the stands, where the fans were dressed in red, white and blue
T-shirts, making the arena look as if it were decked from floor to
ceiling in bunting, Michael Torres jumped up and down in his red
T-shirt during his sister’s final lap. “I was about ready to cry,” he
said. “It was amazing.”
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