Dara Grace Torres (born April 15, 1967 in Beverly Hills, California, USA) is an American swimmer and Olympic gold medalist. She is the first swimmer from the United States to compete in five Olympics: 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000, and 2008. She competed in the 2008 Olympic Games in the 50 meter freestyle, 4×100 medley relay, and 4×100 freestyle relay and won the silver medal in all three of these events. Dara Torres is the first woman in history to swim in the Olympics past the age of 40. Her Olympic career spans 24 years.
Torres has won twelve Olympic medals (four gold, four silver, four bronze), five of which she won in the Sydney Olympics in 2000, a feat made all the more impressive by the fact that, at age 33, she was the oldest member of the US 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 she won gold in the 100-meter freestyle at the U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis, her 14th national championship. On August 4, she broke her own American record in the 50-meter freestyle, 26 years after she first set the American record at just 15 years old.
At age 41, Torres returned to the pool to obtain a spot in her fifth Olympic games, unprecedented for an American female swimmer, especially given the fact that she sat out the 1996 and 2004 Olympic games.
Torres has worked in television as a reporter and announcer for American networks such as NBC, ESPN, TNT, OLN and Fox News Channel. She hosts the golf show The Clubhouse, on the Resort Sports Network.
Dara Torres is an occasional model, having appeared in the Sports Illustrated 1994 Swimsuit Issue. She was elected to the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame In 2005.
Torres is the author of the inspirational memoir, Age is Just a Number, published in April 2009, and Gold Medal Fitness, published in May 2010.
