Dara Torres

After watching Ryan Lochte, Michael Phelps and Ian Crocker compete in the Olympics tonight, I checked the news on CNN.com and saw an article on Dara Torres. And that's when I realized that she's freaking 41 years old, had a baby less than a year before making the Olympic trials, and actually won the 50 and the 100 meters for the Olympic Trials. Impressive, I thought. 41 and she's still got it. Until I saw this picture.
And that's when I got suspicious. She's 41 years old and she smoked everyone at the Trials. And usually the USA leads overall world times in these events, so when she was smoking everyone at the Trials, she was effectively smoking all the women swimmers from all over the world. That's a lot of smoke.
But guess what? None of the other USA women swimmers look like that. Natalie Coughlin, Katie Hoff, Margret Hoelzer. They don't look that way at all. The fact that even Gary Hall, Jr who was 34 at this year's Trials only placed 4th on the 50M free in the men's, makes Torres's feat even more suspicious.
And she had a kid. All of this vaguely reminds me of another athlete who had a kid previous to going to the Games. Her name was Marion Jones and she was pretty old to be competing, but compete she did. And then she was kind of sort of implicated in BALCO and kind of sort of admitted that she hadn't been mostly clean for the games. And then she kind of sort of had to give back all the medals she won and kind of sort of had to serve jail time for illegal doping, perjury, and fraud. And then people started looking at younger pictures of Barry Bonds, and then comparing them to his ginormous head that he has now along with a ripped body that would've been the envy of a young Barry playing for the Pirates.
And then people realized that it's just kind of odd how more and more older athletes of all sports seem to be able to keep up with the younger guys, and increase their performance compared to their younger years.
So for a straightforward question: Is Dara doping?
More than likely for crying out loud. She broke an American record in the 50m just this year. And to think that all the 18-25 year olds just couldn't keep up with her is odd. She hasn't tested positive for anything despite rigorous testing, but a national teammate for the same event did pop a positive.
So what do I think? I think that Dara is doping, or at least went through a couple of cycles and started feeding her baby on formula. Afterall, she did put up Olympic qualifying times at a Master's meet which probably wouldn't be able to afford stringent drug tests, so she could've slipped by. I'm thinking that she started taking testosterone in cycles after she qualified for the Trials, or that she's taking a new type of drug that she knows there's no test for, or that she's taking in steroids and/or testosterone topically since it's slowly absorbed and quickly broken down. But I do have one last idea. She could be part man. I mean, c'mon. I wish I had arms like that! But hey, if East Germany and China could run doping programs respectively in the 70's and 90's, why can't a person do the same for just one more Olympics?