A Year After A Shark Took Her Leg, Swimmer Ali Truwit Is Headed To The Paralympics

"A year ago, I was just working to get back in the water," the former Yale swimmer said. "I now get back in the water and that sense of joy comes back.”

A year ago, Ali Truwit never would’ve imagined she’d be competing in the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games.

On May 24, 2023 — two days after the Connecticut native graduated from Yale University, where she’d had a successful swimming career — she experienced a tragedy that she described to Kelly Clarkson in February as “everyone’s worst nightmare.”

She was snorkeling off the coast of Turks and Caicos with her friend and former Yale teammate, Sophie Pilkinton, when a “huge shark came out of nowhere and started fighting us,” she told Clarkson.

Truwit said she and Pilkinton “fought back,” but before she knew it, the shark “bit off my foot and part of my leg.”

“My immediate thought was, ‘Am I crazy or do I not have a foot right now?’” Truwit added in an interview with CBS and The Associated Press. “It was a really hard image for me. But you move immediately into action.”