Dara Torres

Dara Torres, 41 year old and with a 2-year-old daughter, completed her improbable Olympic comeback, making the U.S. team for the fifth time by winning the 100-meter freestyle at the U.S. Olympic trials.

Dara Torres got off to a blazing start and guarded her lead on the furious return lap to win in 53.78, beating out Natalie Coughlin’s 53.83.

Dara Torres, who made her Olympic debut at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, has twice retired from competitive swimming. She is the first U.S. swimmer to make five Olympic teams.

“I’m ecstatic. I can’t believe it,” Torres said. “It’s sort of bittersweet for me because I’ve made my fifth Olympic team, but I’m going to be away from my daughter for a month and that’s really hard emotionally. But I’m happy to be going to Beijing.”

Torres calls resistance stretching her “secret weapon.” Bob Cooley, who invented the discipline, describes it in less-modest terms. According to Cooley, over a two-week period in 1999, his flexibility system turned Torres “from being an alternate on the relay team to the fastest swimmer in America.” The secret to Torres’s speed, Cooley says, is that his technique not only makes her muscles more flexible but also increases their ability to shorten more completely, and when muscles shorten more completely, they produce greater power and speed. “What do race-car drivers do when they want to go faster?” Cooley asks. “They don’t spend more hours driving around the track. They increase the biomechanics of the car. And that’s what resistance flexibility is doing for Dara - increasing her biomechanics.”

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