With Silver, Torres Sets Age Record for Medalist

With Silver, Torres Sets Age Record for Medalist


Twenty-four years after Dara Torres first dived into an Olympic pool for a freestyle relay, she took the plunge again.
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Dara Torres in the women's 4x100-meter freestyle relay swimming final on Sunday.
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There would be no gold medal Sunday morning to match the one she won with the American team as a teenager, but Torres, now 41, would have no problem keeping up with most of the younger set.

Her much-anticipated anchor leg kept the United States in second place behind the Netherlands, whose team set the world record in the 4x100-meter freestyle relay in March and who won the Olympic gold comfortably in a time of 3 minutes 33.76 seconds.

Torres and the Americans took silver in 3:34.33 and the Australians the bronze in 3:35.05. But for all but the delighted Dutch, Torres’s remarkable comeback was the keepsake from the event that concluded the morning session. The morning also featured the first South Korean gold medal in swimming, by Park Tae Hwan in the men’s 400-meter freestyle, and world records in each 400 individual medley, by Michael Phelps of the United States and Stephanie Rice of Australia.

Torres was already the oldest Olympic female swimming medalist in history, after taking gold in the medley relay in Sydney in 2000. But she is now the oldest swimming medalist of either gender, breaking the century-old standard of Britain’s William Robinson, who was 38 when he won the silver in the 200 breaststroke in the 1908 Games.

But training standards, swimsuit technology and women’s sports have evolved beyond the imagining of those from Robinson’s era.

“I think there are a lot of middle-aged women and men who I know and who have contacted me or e-mailed me or stopped me in the street and told me I was an inspiration to them,” Torres said. “As I’ve said from the beginning of this, age is just a number.

“When we’re in the water, I know the water doesn’t know what age we are.”

After deciding to return to elite competition last year, Torres has sculpted her middle-aged body into an instrument capable of swimming faster than in her younger years, raising some doubts along the way about her methods.

Torres, well aware of such concerns in an era where doping has tainted too many sports, has submitted to extra drug testing in an attempt to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she is beating the biological clock fairly.

She has now won 10 Olympic medals and is the first American swimmer to compete in five Olympics. She received her latest prize just before noon on Sunday with her teammates Natalie Coughlin, Lacey Nymeyer and Kara Lynn Joyce by her side.

It was a day when the gold was shared equally. Although Michael Phelps once again made the phenomenal look routine by winning the 400 individual medley in world-record time, the other three gold medals went to different countries: the Netherlands, Australia and South Korea.

Rice, a dark-haired extrovert whose duel with the American Katie Hoff in the individual medleys has been hotly anticipated, set a ferocious early pace in the 400 I.M. and then held off surges by Kirsty Coventry of Zimbabwe and Hoff to win in a world-record time of 4:29.45. That smashed Hoff’s mark of 4:31.12 set in June at the United States Olympic trials.

Coventry, a former star at Auburn University, took the silver in 4:29.89, which was also below the previous world record. Hoff, who is scheduled to compete in five individual events here, was third in 4:31.71.

For the 400 men’s freestyle, the gold went to South Korea’s Park, a talented 18-year-old who broke through to win the 400 at last year’s world championships. The silver, in a surprise, went to Zhang Lin of China, and the bronze went to Larsen Jensen of the United States.

The early pace was set by the Australian veteran Grant Hackett, long in the shadow of his now-retired teammate Ian Thorpe in the 400.

But Park took the lead on the third lap and had built it to half a body length by the 250-meter mark.

Hackett, the two-time Olympic champion in the 1,500, would later drop back, as Zhang and Jensen surged forward in the final 100. Park’s winning time of 3:41.86 s was a new Asian record, but still nearly two seconds short of Thorpe’s world record of 3:40.08.