Weeks away from competing at her first Paralympic Games, swimmer Alexandra “Ali” Truwit is poised to win gold. It’s especially remarkable considering that just over a year ago, while on vacation in Turks and Caicos, she lost part of her leg.
After racing in the Copenhagen Marathon, Truwit, 24, took the trip to the Caribbean to celebrate her recent graduation from Yale University, where she received a B.S. degree in cognitive science and behavioral economics and spent five years on the swimming-and-diving team. One of her best friends from the team, Sophie Pilkinton, joined her on the vacation. A consulting job at McKinsey awaited Truwit in New York City in the fall. Until then, it was time to relax.
“I went on that trip feeling like I was in a dream,” Truwit says. It quickly became a nightmare.
A day after their arrival, Truwit and Pilkinton were snorkeling off a shallow reef when, “seemingly out of nowhere,” Truwit recalls, “this huge shark came up underneath us and started attacking.”
“I just remember it being so aggressive,” she says. “We were shocked and terrified, but we fought back. We were pushing it and kicking it. The next thing I knew, it had my leg in its mouth. It bit off my foot and part of my leg.”
“Once I was bitten, I knew I was in danger of bleeding out, or passing out, or drowning.” Realizing there was no one coming to save them, Truwit and Pilkinton swam approximately 75 yards—or three laps in a typical American swimming pool—to safety, all while Truwit’s leg continued to bleed, and the shark continued to circle.
After making it to their boat, Pilkinton—who had graduated weeks earlier from medical school, at the University of Tennessee—tied multiple tourniquets around Truwit’s injured leg. From there, Truwit was rushed to a local island hospital, and several hours later was airlifted to Miami, where she underwent two surgeries to fight infection. She was then flown to the Hospital for Special Surgery, in New York. On May 31, her 23rd birthday, she had her third surgery of the week: a below-the-knee amputation.
The loss of her left foot and lower leg was particularly crushing, given Truwit’s natural affinity and talent for sports. She was raised in Darien, Connecticut, and her mother, who was the 1991 captain of Yale’s swim and dive team, had her racing at age seven. By her sophomore year of high school, she was a member of Connecticut’s Chelsea Piers Aquatics Club. Truwit and her coach, Jamie Barone, set their sights on a spot in an elite collegiate swim program. They were successful—Truwit began swimming for Yale in the fall of 2018.
Truwit recalls that, while recovering in a hospital bed in New York, “it was just unfathomable to me that I might not be able to regain my athleticism. I didn’t know how, and I didn’t know when, but I knew early on that I’d have to find a way back. I just had to.”
Despite her initial apprehension about re-entering the water, Truwit gradually began to swim again. Armed with the support of her friends and family, by September, less than four months after the attack, she was training at the Chelsea Piers pool with Barone.
Truwit wanted to swim largely to keep up her fitness levels while learning to live as an amputee. Prior to the attack, she had no Olympic ambitions, but the Paralympic Games in Paris, which were already less than a year away, would soon come onto her radar. “It felt like it was a long shot,” she recalls thinking. “But what if?”
To qualify for the Paralympics, American swimmers must compete in a variety of high-level meets throughout the year, and then officially secure a spot at the U.S. Paralympic Team Trials, which took place in Minneapolis at the end of June. For the past few months, Truwit has elevated her training with Barone—swimming six days per week, sometimes twice per day, in addition to upping her strength training and physical therapy to learn to use her prosthetic—and competed in meets, performing better and better at each one. What seemed like a pipe dream soon looked like a real possibility.
In June, Truwit broke an American Paralympic record in the 100-meter backstroke, winning two of her events and placing second in another at the trials. Just 13 months after the shark attack, Truwit had punched her ticket to Paris.
“I’m showing myself that I’m stronger than I think,” says Truwit, who is now set to start her job at McKinsey in October. “I’m sending the message that I’m not going to let what happened stop me from going after things that I want, or what I think I’m capable of.”
Before the attack, “I was on top of the world,” she says. “And then things went terribly, terribly south. I want to feel on top of the world again. And I believe I can. This journey has been about turning trauma into hope.”
The Paralympic Games will be available for streaming on Peacock beginning August 28
Jack Sullivan is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
