One of the American athletes who is entered in the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games is resilient, inspirational, and positively upbeat beyond measure.
Her passion for swimming is easy to appreciate.
Ali Truwit (@atruwit), a competitive pool swimmer from Darien, Connecticut who represented Yale University, remembered on May 24th, “Today marks one year since the shark attack. In a flash, my life was almost taken from me. And, in a flash, I’m fighting to take it right back. I grieve, and I cry, and then I remember without my heroes, I’d have died.”
Their Backstory
She and her Yale swimming teammate Dr. Sophie Pilkinton were vacationing and swimming and snorkeling offshore in Turks & Caicos when an aggressive shark bit off her foot.
But nothing seemed odd or any different when they first took off from a diving boat to enjoy the warm, clear tropical waters, where Truwit had enjoyed many times previously.
She recalls the moment, “Am I crazy? Or do I not have a foot right now? We swam 50 – 75 yards back to the boat in the open ocean…me, footless and bleeding profusely – and Sophie swimming behind me, making sure that I was OK. Immediately upon getting on the boat, Sophie tied a tourniquet on my leg to stop the bleeding and save my life.”
Dr. Pilkinton explains the lead-up to those terrifying moments, “We were kind of leisurely floating on our way back to the boat. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a large shark came up, adjacent to our faces.”
Truwit said, “[The shark] was aggressive, like it wanted to fight us. I think both of us just responded the only way we could think and fight back. I remember the whole attack; I was conscious the whole time.“
Dr. Pilkinton continued with the memory, “Ultimately, in that moment, it bit Ali’s foot.”
The distance freestyler shark attack was airlifted from Turks & Caicos to Miami where Hannah Walsh, another Yale University teammate who is studying at the University of Miami Medical School, helped her through the surgery and the beginning of her recovery process.
During that healing period and the emotional ups and downs at being an amputee without a foot and part of her lower leg, she has leaned back on her passion and competitive spirit, but with a strong foundation of family and her swimming community. Truwit says, “Swimming and the water are places that I have loved forever.”
Paralympic Goals
After a year since the attack, surgeries, amputation, and her rehabilitation, she competed at the US Paralympic Swimming Trials and qualified for the 400m freestyle for the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games.
Explanation of the Shark Attack
The Mindset In The Moment
While the survival instinct is fundamental to humans, it is difficult to fathom just losing a foot in the ocean to an aggressive shark and bleeding profusely.
What do you do in that unexpected situation? Panic, for sure. Shock sets in immediately, most certainly. The pain must be off the charts. And the sight of your own blood pouring out of your leg with every heartbeat boggles the mind.
It is beyond comprehension, especially far from shore and more than a 50m pool length from the safety of their diving boat.
But Truwit and Pilkinton are swimmers – and swim they did.
I cannot imagine the shock of either losing a foot to a shark bite or swimming next to a friend whose foot was suddenly gone. Faced with such trauma, do you swim fast? Do you kick hard? Hyperventilation must have occurred. Both Truwit and Pilkinton took incredible courage and a laser focus to swim back to the boat.
That focus and natural intuition to swim had been honed over the years with early morning workouts and dedicated training. All those sets in the pool, paced to specific intervals, all their arm strokes, breathes, body rotations, and kick were natural motions they both suddenly relied on in an unfathomable situation.
Swimming brought them together initially as Yale University teammates and will forever bind them as friends and survivors.
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