Mai 2023. Alexandra Truwit, or “Ali” to her friends, has just graduated. With her best friend, they go to the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. And swim together. Until a shark rips off her left foot.
“We fought back with kicks and shoves, but he bit my foot,” she said on the U.S. Para-swimming team’s website. “We had to swim 50 to 75 meters to get back to the boat.” Once on board, her friend tried to stop the bleeding, before Ali was flown by helicopter to a hospital in Miami and then to New York.
After several infections and surgeries, doctors amputated her leg below the knee so she could wear a prosthesis, giving her better mobility. On the day of the surgery, she was celebrating her 23rd birthday.e birthday.
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“I remember the whole attack”
Swimming – Ali Truwit readily admits – is her life. A few days after the accident, one thought kept coming back to her. “Will I be able to run again? Be an athlete?” she admits in an interview with NBC.
How do you bounce back after a lifetime of dreaming about competitions? At Yale, the young woman was part of the “Bulldogs swimming and diving” program, like her mother, which produced champions such as Emily de Riel, a silver medalist in the pentathle […] Read more
