Jezebel: Dara Torres

International Relations

Anna Holmes — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:10:00 EDT

[Rome, August 2. Image via Getty]

Newsweek's Women Leaders Are Diverse And Sometimes Dumb

Jessica G. — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

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Newsweek has several essays worth of advice in its current Women & Leadership issue. The issue boasts a varied and impressive group of women including master of the universe Tyra Banks, designer Anna Sui, director Kimberly Peirce, Duke medical school dean Nancy Andrews, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. These women are supposedly telling America "what matters most" but they offer mostly useless platitudes about having strong mothers and working really hard. Not everyone was completely fluffy — Cynthia Nixon and a few others were substantive and intriguing — but the majority of it was not riveting stuff. My favorite was when Olympian Dara Torres explained her swimming dominance by saying "I'm probably genetically gifted." Since most of these essays are filler anyway, I've read each one and taken out the most pertinent sentence or two for your comprehensive ease. More »

Do you care that Dara Torres didn't win...

Margaret Hartmann — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:20:00 EDT

Do you care that Dara Torres didn't win a gold medal? Neither does anyone else. Torres, 41, has become a national inspiration despite the fact that she returned home with three silver medals and has never won the gold. At the Olympics last month, her agent, Evan Morgenstein, tried to explain to her that losing the gold actually made her more relatable, since “wanting something so badly and you don’t get it, but you keep on trying, is something everyone can identify with.” Though Torres was disappointed about missing the gold by a hundredth of a second, she says the intense adulation she's received since she's come home, from throwing out the first pitch at a Yankees game, to inspiring Lance Armstrong to come out of retirement, to being congratulated by fawning fans wherever she goes, is helping her stop seeing herself as a loser. [NY Times] More »

Dara Torres, the 41-year-old American swimmer...

Maria — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 09:45:00 EDT

Dara Torres, the 41-year-old American swimmer who won three silver medals at the Beijing Olympics this year, is set to undergo anthroscopic surgery to repair her right shoulder. Torres developed a degenerative arthritis problem in her acromioclavicular (or AC) joint in 2007, but she put off surgery in order to compete in the Beijing Olympics. [CNN] More »

At 41, Dara Torres Is the Oldest Swimmer To Win A Silver Medal

Margaret Hartmann — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:20:00 EDT

If you're suffering from a case of Phelps phatigue, we nominate Dara Torres for your next aquatic object of affection. At 41, Torres became the oldest swimmer to win an Olympic silver medal in Sunday's 50-meter freestyle. In the clip above, Torres comes in just a hundredth of a second behind German Britta Steffen, 24, (the same margin Phelps won by). With a 24.07 second finish, she still set a new American record and a personal best. The young women swimming with Torres say they are inspired not just by her age, but by the fact that she has a two-year-old daughter. “Most of us girls, we have to stop our sport so we can start a family, but for her to have a family and still get back in and win the silver medal is just absolutely incredible,” said American Cate Campbell, 16, who finished after Torres for the bronze. More »

"Ab-Session" With Olympic Bodies Is Not Just About Ogling Others

Jessica G. — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Not to focus too much on bods today after Badonkgate, and Dodai's piece about Olympic ogling, but there are several articles about Olympians, exercise, and physique in the New York Times and Slate that we feel compelled to turn our attention to, and they're about women comparing their bodies to those of other women. Let's start with Slate, where human guinea pig Emily Yoffe tries to go from flab to fit in four months. After a lot of time with a fairly bad ass sounding personal trainer (the lady can lift 200 pounds), the end result is that Yoffe is pleased with her arm muscles, but not that into her tummy. Not revolutionary stuff, but what stuck out to me was the part where she talks about another woman she sees at the gym whom Yoffe thinks is truly fit, named Fanny. "Following her around one night, I realized why I will never really be in shape," Yoffe writes. "For me, a complete workout was a hard 45 minutes. Fanny works out 5 days a week for about 2 hours at a time." More »

41-Year Old Dara Torres Aims To Be Oldest Female Swimmer In Olympic History

Jessica G. — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:30:00 EDT

Dara Torres broke her first world record in swimming at age 14, back in 1982. In subsequent years, she's been in four Olympics, and she's looking to compete in her fifth this year in Beijing. The 41-year-old will be the oldest female swimmer to compete in the games, according to a profile of Torres in yesterday's New York Times magazine. Despite some surgeries and giving birth only two years ago to baby Tessa, Torres broke the American record last November for the 50-meter freestyle short course, swimming it in under 24 seconds. She's dealt with a college bout of bulimia ("The coaches routinely weighed all the swimmers, and if a swimmer didn’t make weight, he or she had to swim extra morning workouts," the Times reports) and "13 small surgical incisions on her knees, elbows, shoulders, hands and fingers," and yet she's still a fierce contender. A clip of Dara talking about her competitive spirit on this morning's Good Morning America, above. More »