Aug 21, 2008 5:43 pm US/Eastern
Torres' Coach Fights Blood Disease At Md. Hospital
BALTIMORE (WJZ) ―
Dara Torres is back in the states after winning three silver medals in Beijing. In a sense, she accomplished it alone.
As Weijia Jiang explains, her coach has been in Bethesda at the National Institutes of Health for several weeks battling a life-threatening disease.
The odds were against her. Dara Torres headed to Beijing at age 41 on her fifth Olympic tour.
For any athlete, at any age, to fight for a top-notch spot at the Games without a coach can't be the best feeling.
"I basically just lost it. I became very emotional and just cried a lot," she said.
Two weeks before coach Michael Lohberg was set to take off for China with Torres, doctors told him he has a rare blood disease that is potentially fatal.
"They said what would have happened in the next week was you would have been floored over and you would have been dead," said Lohberg.
He stayed back to be treated at NIH in Bethesda, 7,000 miles away from Beijing.
"It's really rough not having Michael here. It's all we've talked about the past almost two years," said Torres.
But Lohberg was there with her. Thanks to technology, the two talked everyday, going through workout plans on the phone.
Torres then beat all the odds, bringing home three silver medals.
"I don't even think I can describe it in words because it was an emotional thing and it's hard to do that. I've never experienced a thing like this or a swim like this," said Lohberg.
"We wrote the story together and the one thing he said to me when he was in the hospital and realized he couldn't be in Beijing was that I needed to finish the story that we wrote, so I knew he was with me spiritually," Torres said.
Torres did more than finish the story. She wrote history, becoming the oldest swimmer to ever win an Olympic medal.
Torres hints she may not be done with swimming just yet. It's possible that she could be vying for the gold medal at the 2009 World Championships in Rome.
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