Forty-one-year-old mother Dara Torres won two silver medals last night, bringing her count to three for the Beijing Games. Her first was in the Women’s 50m Freestyle, where she missed gold by one one-hundredth of a second. The second was in the 4×100 Medley Relay, where she anchored the team and closed, but did not make up, a deficit against Australia.
Both races set new American records. The relay team broke the previous world record, although not by as much as the winning Australians.
Just to keep things in perspective, though: Teammate Kara Lynn Joyce told the New York Times of a locker-room conversation with Torres: “She said swimming was tough, but she thought childbirth was tougher.”
When asked by an NBC reporter what she would someday tell her two-year-old daughter about this day, Torres replied, “I’ll tell her you don’t have to put an age limit on your dreams.”
Congratulations to Torres and all of the older athletes at these Games. (See my post last week on a few of them.)