A Year After A Shark Took Her Leg, Swimmer Ali Truwit Is Headed To The Paralympics
A year ago, Ali Truwit never would’ve imagined she’d be competing in the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games.
On May 24, 2023 — two days after the Connecticut native graduated from Yale University, where she’d had a successful swimming career — she experienced a tragedy that she described to Kelly Clarkson in February as “everyone’s worst nightmare.”
She was snorkeling off the coast of Turks and Caicos with her friend and former Yale teammate, Sophie Pilkinton, when a “huge shark came out of nowhere and started fighting us,” she told Clarkson.
Truwit said she and Pilkinton “fought back,” but before she knew it, the shark “bit off my foot and part of my leg.”
“My immediate thought was, ‘Am I crazy or do I not have a foot right now?’” Truwit added in an interview with CBS and The Associated Press. “It was a really hard image for me. But you move immediately into action.”
As the shark circled, Truwit and Pilkinton began to swim as fast as they could to the boat, 75 yards away. Once aboard, Pilkinton applied a tourniquet to Truwit’s leg, slowing the bleeding.
“Swimming is the first thing that saved my life, and the second was my teammate, Sophie,” Truwit told Clarkson. “I’m forever indebted to her.”
Truwit was airlifted to a hospital in Miami, where a team of trauma doctors “continued to save my life,” she told Clarkson.
“I underwent surgeries to fight infection, I had blood transfusions and it ended with an amputation on my 23rd birthday,” Truwit told Clarkson.
“I’m a lifelong athlete,” Truwit told Clarkson. “Ten days before the attack, I had run a marathon with my mom, and I was sitting there thinking, like, ‘Am I ever going to run again? Am I ever going to be able to be an athlete again?’”
Truwit told CBS and AP that when she first started rehab she found herself asking why this terrible thing happened to her. But after a while, she said, she thought, “Why not throw everything into something?”
She said her mentality completely changed once she decided to get back in the pool.
“I didn’t want to lose a limb and my love of the water, too,” she told CBS and AP.
“I was just really curious how I was going to feel being back on the pool deck and back in a competitive space,” Truwit told the news outlets. “The more I worked at it, the flashbacks reduced and the pain lessened.”
Soon after she made her decision, her prosthetist told her to speak with another patient of his, Paralympic swimmer Jessica Long. Long has had a highly decorated Paralympic career: 29 medals, including 16 golds.
Under Long’s mentorship, Truwit decided that she wanted to try to compete in the Paralympics. And although she had plenty of time to perfect her swimming skills to try out for the 2028 Paralympics in Los Angeles, she decided to give the 2024 Paris Paralympics a shot.
“I’m not someone who waits,” she told CBS and AP.
Her resilience paid off by the end of last year. She successfully competed in swimming nationals and the Paralympic swimming trials, qualifying with a time of 1:08.98, NBC Newsreported.
Now, 15 months after the attack, Truwit is heading to Paris, where she will compete in the 100-meter and 400-meter freestyle and the 100-meter backstroke in the Paralympics, which begin Wednesday.
“A year ago, I was just working to get back in the water,” Truwit told CBS and AP. “I now get back in the water, and that sense of joy comes back and the smile comes back. To have that again is something I’m so thankful for. Honestly, it’s one of the moments in my swim career that I’m the proudest of because I know how much work it took.”
She added to NBC News that although she now has a disability, she’s really no different than anyone in general.
“I’m unique in that I was attacked by a shark, but I’m not unique in that we all go through hardship and trauma and tough times in life,” Truwit said. “We all have the capacity to rise back up.”
