Swimming saved Alexandra Truwit’s life twice. Literally, first. On May 24, 2023, the American student was snorkeling in the Turks and Caicos Islands, southeast of the Bahamas, to celebrate her science degree she had earned two days earlier. Suddenly, a shark attacked her and tore off her left foot, in front of one of her friends.
Despite the bleeding, Ali Truwit, a swimmer on the Yale University (Connecticut) team, managed to swim about a hundred meters to get back to the boat in the open sea. “Without the training, I’m not sure we would have been able to do it.”the young woman explained in May to the Usparaswimming website.
She was flown to a hospital in Miami, Florida, where she underwent two operations to neutralize infections before being flown back to a facility in New York. On her twenty-third birthday, she underwent a below-the-knee amputation. “There followed a lot of tears, pain and devastation. Very heavy questions crossed my mind in the hospital.”, Ali Truwit told NBC on a talk show in February. Ten days before the accident, the American had just completed a marathon: “Will I ever be able to run again? Will I ever be able to be an athlete again?”
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Very quickly, his optimistic nature took over. Swimming, once again, would be his lifeline. “There are things I have lost that I will never get back, that is now my reality. But the things I can get back, I will fight tooth and nail to achieve. I have always loved swimming and I was determined not to lose that love for swimming.”says the athlete.
First competition three months after the accident
The Paralympic Games are in fourteen months. They will serve as a compass for her, determined to try to qualify for them. From swimming, she begins her transition to para swimming. All the movements she used to do with two legs, standing on the starting block, pushing off the wall… she must now learn to do them with just one. To compensate for the imbalance in her lower body, she also has to change her breathing rate as well as the position of her head and hips.
Three months after the attack, Ali Truwit competed in her first competition. Then, in December 2023, she competed in the U.S. Para Swimming National Championships and won a silver medal. Her prosthetist connected her with another patient, swimmer Jessica Long.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Jessica Long is an iconic figure of the Paralympic Games. In Paris, the 32-year-old athlete is taking part in her… sixth Games. Her first, she was only 12 years old. An outsider, the teenager returned from Athens in 2004 with three gold medals. Twenty years later, her collection includes twenty-nine (including sixteen gold). “It’s one thing to be at the top, but I’ve worked extremely hard to stay there for so long.”, she insisted to the AP news agency at the end of June, during the American selections. Born in Eastern Siberia with a congenital malformation and then abandoned by her parents, she was adopted by an American couple from Maryland. After twenty-five operations, she would finally have both legs amputated at the age of 18 months.
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“Her confidence and the way she proudly displays her prosthetics outside the pool has given me the strength to accept myself better. She is so strong, so fast.”praises Ali Truwit. Like her elder sister, she has validated her ticket for Paris 2024. In the Paris La Défense Arena pool, the 24-year-old swimmer will line up, from 1is September, in the 100m freestyle, the 400m and the 100m backstroke. Jessica Long, for her part, plans to “retiring slowly” after the Los Angeles Games in 2028.
