Opinion> Connie Schultz> Torres Middle Age Mojo

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Torres' Middle-Age Mojo

For a brief, but delightful moment, Olympic superstar Dara Torres offered a welcome reminder that, in at least one small way, she's just like the rest of us pickled in middle age.

The 41-year-old swimmer wowed Americans last weekend in winning the women's 50- and 100-meter freestyle events at the Olympic trials. She broke records, too. As soon as she touched the pool's wall, the crowd erupted. By the look on her face, it was clear that she wasn't immediately sure what the fuss was about.

"I could not see the scoreboard," she told reporters later. "I'm looking and I'm like, 'What does that say?' … Then I heard the announcer, and then I could kind of see it, like, blurry. But they need to make those numbers a little bigger for people my age."

For people my age .

Don't you just want to hug her?

Normally, my love for Olympic events rivals my affection for gout. I like reading about the athletes and watching highlight clips, but I'm not one of those fans who carves out entire chunks of her daily life to sit in front of the TV and watch live coverage. I could tell you that this is because I am extremely busy and just can't stomach all those commercials insisting we buy this and consume that, but the force of my indifference is far darker: I am lime green with envy.

I watch those ever-so-young athletes with their superhuman feats, and I am consumed with the kind of envy that breeds self-loathing and the consumption of large bags of potato chips. If anyone had told me in my teens that so much of my body would sag so soon and so irrevocably, I swear I would have spent less time waiting for boys to call and way more hours learning the breast stroke or how to do something fancy on ice.

That whole "youth-wasted-on-the-young" thing flew right over me when I was 16. I thought I had all the time in the world to compete in an international event. And I have to tell you, fantasies about my adulthood never included images of me sleeping with a pug and shuffling like a mummy into the kitchen for my morning coffee.

But this Dara Torres has put a new spring in my step.

Granted, she's a decade younger than I and way fitter, but there's just something about a woman beating out competitors half her age that makes me want to flex my fingers at eager young writers and challenge them to a typing duel.

It's entertaining to watch commentators try to describe the wonders of Torres. They can't hide their glee or their amazement. How to explain the energy of this woman, this mother , who gave birth only two years ago? How to account for her ability to outswim the expectations of everyone who thought she was too old, too weary? How can we do rhetorical justice to her spectacular feats of talent, her utter will?

The New York Times declared her "eternally young." The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. said she is an "ageless wonder." One of her former teammates from the 1984 Olympics, Nancy Hogshead-Makar, said Torres is not a late bloomer, but a "continual bloomer." USA Today reported that Torres has so inspired middle-aged women that some Torres fans even will give their ages in interviews. Sacrebleu!

These days, there is the requisite caveat that "some people" wonder whether Torres is using performance-enhancing drugs. So she volunteered last year to participate in a pilot drug-testing program by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and regularly submits blood and urine samples. Cheeky chick that she is, she also says the speculation is such a compliment for a woman her age.

Torres already has won nine medals in four previous Olympics. And she wants more.

"I can't sit here and lie and say, 'Oh, I'm just glad I'm going,'" she told the San Jose Mercury News after she qualified for the Olympics. "I want a medal."

And so far, no one is telling this ambitious woman to get out of the race.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.