From a shark attack to Paralympic silver: Truwit’s remarkable journey

Even in the story-laden world of the Paralympics, where things are never monochrome, it is hard to trump getting your leg bitten off by a shark one year and swimming for medals in Paris the next.

Yet that is the true tale behind the success of Ali Truwit, the 24-year-old former Yale competitive swimmer and now silver medallist at La Défense Arena in the S10 400m freestyle on Thursday night, who in 2023 fought off a shark in the waters of Turks and Caicos in the Atlantic Ocean, and saved her own life by racing 70 metres to a boat, having lost part of her left leg.

Truwit was always sporty, running, swimming, jumping, and had just done a marathon before heading out for a celebratory snorkelling trip with her friend Sophie one flawless May morning, days after graduating from Yale University. In the aftermath of the attack, after Sophie had stemmed the flow of blood by tying a makeshift tourniquet as the boat raced back to land, she was airlifted to hospital where the doctors fought first to save her life, and then ­operated on her leg, eventually amputating just below the knee.

What followed was rough – the mental battle to cope with the loss of a limb and a life imagined, and both real and phantom physical pain which seared through her body, especially at night. Water became a phobia. But, incredibly, just four months after the attack, she contacted her old swimming coach James Barone and asked him if he would help her again. By late October, she had swum in her first para competition, where meeting other athletes was a turning point. Less than a year after that, after four minutes and 31 seconds in the water, second behind Canada’s Aurélie Rivard, she now holds a silver medal.

Just where does that extraordinary ability to bounce back come from? “My parents have done an incredible job in raising me and my three brothers to be adaptable and to try to look for the positives in life and appreciate all we’ve been given,” she says, grinning in her swimming costume and cap, “and so when I was faced with a life-changing trauma, I worked to see the positives and to focus on gratitude and let that carry me and adapt to the situation I was in.

“But I would also say that when you’re truly faced with death and you understand what a second chance at life means, you want to make the most of it. I’ve worked to do that and it has not been without an incredible, incredible support system.”

The water, once a friend and then an enemy, is still a battle. “Every day there is something new for me that evokes a new memory from the attack, because I was conscious the whole time, and truthfully, at the start, I thought that it was going to be that I overcame the fear and that was it. I’ve learned through this journey that that isn’t what this looks like, that there will be days when it’s great and there are going to be days where I have to fight to get that love back, but I say I’m at a 90-10 right now at really feeling comfortable and happy in the water.”

And next? Spending time with the 60 or so loved ones, including her parents, and Sophie, who are in Paris, and perhaps a bit of shopping.

Alice Tai collected her second gold and her fourth medal of the Games, charging through the field to win the S8 50m freestyle on a happy night for ParalympicsGB in the razzle dazzle of the pool. Tai, who chose to amputate her right leg below the knee to alleviate years of pain just two years ago, was visibly surprised. “It’s usually such a close race, I’m more shocked that I went sub-30, I’m getting so close to my old times,” she said. “The 50 is the hardest [race], my dive has been pretty affected by my amputation, I didn’t think I could get back under sub-30 for another year.”

Just 20 minutes earlier, Becky Redfern had won the SB13 100m breaststroke by 1.68sec, her first gold after silvers in Tokyo and Rio. “It feels really surreal,” she said. “I was half-expecting someone to come out of lane one and beat me. A gold medal is just crazy.”

The youngest member of the ParalympicsGB team, the 13-year-old Iona Winnifrith, took silver in the SB7 100m breaststroke behind neutral athlete Mariia Pavlova.