Six weeks after Tessa was born in 2006, Lohberg asked Torres whether she might be interested in swimming at an event Coral Springs was hosting. He wanted to use her name for a little public relations to help promote it, but only if she was on board. Torres said she would try her best.
"She was apprehensive because she had given birth just a bit ago," Lohberg says. "She was relatively slow. She was just a young mother. She was nothing special, nothing to write home about."
Torres continued to swim, and her times slowly started dropping. She tweaked her stroke a bit, and in the Florida Gold Coast meet that year, she swam the 50-meter freestyle in 25.70 seconds, a remarkable time for someone who had been away from the sport that long.
"I sort of got bombarded by older masters swimmers that kept saying, `You should swim; we want to see a 40-year-old in the Olympics,' " Torres says. "That sort of turned the light bulb on."
"She came back and said maybe," Lohberg says. "I said if that's what you feel, you've got to give it a shot. If you have that urge in you, you need to do it. It's almost irrelevant if you make it or not. You need to get it out of your system. The worst thing you could do would be to not follow through."
Before Lohberg agreed to get serious about training Torres, however, he wanted to sit down with her and have a serious conversation about steroids. Because even in 2000, on the pool deck in Sydney, there had been whispers about her. Lohberg has seen the devastating effects of steroids up close, coaching against the East Germans in the 1980s. He would not coach someone who used performance enhancers.
"I'm a pretty straightforward guy," Lohberg says. "We met for lunch, and she laid our her plan for training, and I said: `Dara, I need to know one thing first. There were rumors in Sydney. I usually don't care for that stuff. But if you're going to be my protege, I need to know.' And she said, `Michael, not now, not ever.' Knowing her better now, I know that's the last thing she would do."
Murmurs continue
Torres' willingness to get tested frequently hasn't quelled the murmurs, especially after she broke her own American record last year at the U.S. Championships in Indianapolis in the 50-meter freestyle (24.53), a record she set in 2000.
