Paralympian Ali Truwit Lost a Leg in a Shark Attack. She Was Retraumatized in Paris

U.S. Paralympian Ali Truwit speaks onstage at the USA House at the Paralympics in Paris on Sept. 7, 2024. Credit - Joe Scarnici—Getty Images for USOPC

Ali Truwit had already been through so much. She survived a shark attack, barely, while snorkeling off the coast of Turks and Caicos in May 2023, following her graduation from Yale; the shark bit off her left foot and part of her leg, and Truwit swam furiously to a boat 70 yards away so a friend could apply a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. The pain was excruciating. Truwit’s left leg needed to be amputated below the knee.

But amid all that trauma, the former NCAA swimmer found an unexpected opportunity to represent the United States, at this summer’s Paralympics in Paris. Truwit, 24, made the team, and was excited to cheer on her U.S. teammates competing at La Defense Arena before her own swimming races began. The pool looked beautiful. Fans filled the arena. The setting was electric.

Then as the races began, Truwit reveals publicly for the first time, she felt her chest tighten. “I realized I was staring at a really large, black underwater camera,” says Truwit, referring to the device used by Olympic broadcasters to capture the vantage point beneath the pool’s surface. “And the camera moves underneath the swimmers following them and chasing them as they compete in crystal-clear blue shallow water. For me, even sitting in the stands, it evoked the exact shark-attack conditions that I had fought to survive.”

She welled up immediately and tried to hide the tears from her teammates. She shot her mom, a cognitive behavioral therapist, a text about what she saw, to initiate the process of coping with it.

The next day, she had a practice session at the pool. Truwit saw the camera moving underneath her. “My body just shook,” she says. “My goggles filled with tears.” She cried with her mother for several hours that night. Four night terrors woke her up as she tried to sleep. They were flashbacks, related to the details of her shark attack or similar situations.

The incident brought on two very understandable sources of frustration. First was a feeling of, now this? Truwit worked so hard to get to Paris as part of her healing process, only to be traumatized again so unexpectedly. “I felt frustrated with life,” says Truwit.

Secondly, she was a bit ticked at herself, because her body didn’t seem to be listening to her mind. She knew the camera wouldn’t harm her. But her muscles still tightened. “With that involuntary response that my body had in that moment, I felt like I lost all energy,” she says. “It had been sucked out of me.”

The Paralympics come with enough pressure. For Truwit, this added layer of difficulty threatened to derail her whole experience, and overall recovery from the attack. With the help of her mother and coach, however, Truwit was able to rewire her thoughts and calm her body. She used some of the tools she learned while rehabbing: breath work, mindfulness.

She gave herself a mantra at the Paralympics. “As I got back in the pool. I kept repeating myself, ‘I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe,’” she says. Truwit also made a point of looking out to her support group, some 60 friends and family members, in the stands before her starts.

“I normally walk out to a race and look nervous and don't really smile or look at anyone,” Truwit says. “I remember taking the moment to look up and wave at the box and smile and really soak that in and understand that that support was behind me, no matter what happened in the pool.”

Another technique: cute-kid therapy. “Something that just takes me from tears straight to joy is that all of my cousins have little babies,” says Truwit.  “They send me photos and videos of their babies. And it's impossible not to smile when you see that. Those videos and photos came streaming in, and I focused my energy on that, and rewatched the videos and the photos just to kind of make myself smile and seek joy and hold it amidst a stressful and really hard time.”

It all worked. Truwit came home with two silver medals, in the women’s 400-m freestyle S10 and 100-m backstroke S10. (Para swimmers are slotted into classifications, based on how severely their physical impairment impacts their swimming, on a scale of 1-10; the greater the number, the less severe the limitation.) She set American records in both races.

Truwit won’t let herself wonder if the camera trauma cost her gold. “The fact that I'm at the Paralympics a year after shark attack and amputation, I'd already won gold in my mind, regardless of what place I came in in the race,” she says. Overall, Truwit enjoyed a positive experience in Paris. She cheated on her gluten-free diet after finishing her races, tasting the now-famous chocolate muffins in the village. “They were really great,” she says. “There's a fudgy center in the middle.” She snuck some 10 muffins out of the village to bring to friends and her coach, who finished one in two bites.

Tom Cruise called before her races to wish her luck. An unknown number popped up on her phone: “Please hold for Tom Cruise,” said the person on the other end of the line. “Those are my new favorite five words,” she says.

On her way back to her Connecticut home, Truwit, along with her parents and coach, made a stop in London to visit with Cruise on the set of his latest Mission: Impossible film. “We got to spend a lot of time talking about what he does as an athlete for recovery,” she says. “It was the best day. It was another surreal moment where I was like, ‘Where am I?’”

She packed her silver medals in socks for the trip home. “I didn’t want them to clink and get damaged,” Truwit says. They sat out on her kitchen counter, still in socks, during her interview with TIME. (The next day, she used the two small red berets she had ordered for her dogs to cover her medals instead. “We’ve wised up,” she says.) She plans to take it easy for a few weeks. “I am still in the process of healing,” Truwit says. She did get her first running blade, and plans to learn how to run on a prosthetic. She'll start a job at McKinsey & Company, the consulting giant, in New York City in November.

Truwit did not discuss the camera incident while in Paris, and she had planned to focus only on the happy stuff when she got home. But she’s sharing the details now because, she says, “I've realized for my story to be as helpful and accessible and attainable to people as I hope it is, it's important for me to continue being as open as I can about some of the hard things on the path to recovery. Because the road isn't always as shiny and bright as it appears.”

She wants to articulate the surprise lesson she learned in Paris. “I'm stronger than I thought, and I think we're all stronger than we think,” says Truwit. “In those moments where you're doubting yourself or your ability to rise back up, know that it's in you.”

Write to Sean Gregory at sean.gregory@time.com.