A Call from Cruise Ali Truwit - So much Stronger than you think!

23 December 2024

A year after taking her first steps with a prosthetic leg, Yale graduate Ali Truwit was walking down the Champs-Elysees at the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Paralympic Games. She had achieved what many believed was a mission impossible.

Todd Harris spoke with the two time silver medallist about the Games, her activities post-Paris, and her ambitions for the future. First, though, he asked her about the event that changed her life. How does a young woman, an athlete, a person with so many hopes and dreams recover from an almost unimaginable horror?

“I had just gone through a shark attack, fighting to survive in the water, life-saving surgeries, blood transfusions, you know, an amputation on my 23rd birthday. They were really dark days and really hard and sad times.,” Ali said. “But I also really wanted to center myself on the gratitude that I was alive. And I was going to make the most of the second chance at life that I had been given. And so, for me, that kind of dictated my mindset as I returned home from the hospital.”

Ali explained that she had always loved being in the water, and had competed as an able-bodied swimmer, but after the shark attack, she was, understandably, terrified. Her first challenge was to overcome that fear. With that in mind, she made an incredible decision: to delay her post-graduate job and instead try to make the Paralympics. “I acknowledge [that] was a really ambitious goal with an absurd turnaround because trials were, you know, just a year after the attack and amputation. But [it’s] one that I'm so grateful that I made because I truly believe having the goal of trying to make the Paralympics was the most healing decision I could have made for my recovery, my self-acceptance.”

Ali didn’t only have to deal with her own emotional and physical recovery from trauma: she also had to reach an elite level of performance. She told Todd, “I always respected the strength, the mental fortitude, all of it, about Paralympians. I don't think I realized how fast they are. And so, to qualify for my classification, I had to swim times that were really close to the times that I needed to swim to be recruited to swim D1 at Yale with two feet. And now I'm having to do it with one!”

She made it, as we know, and her story inspired one of the world’s best-known movie stars to pick up the phone. Tom Cruise called Ali the night before her 400m freestyle race!

“That was such a treat. He's a big athlete himself,” Ali said. “He was so supportive, saying, you know, you've already won just by being there and by facing your loss the way that you have and so really take that into your races.” The Mission Impossible star then invited her to visit him on set! “ It was so cool, so generous and so kind of him. and like, you know, some I can't even call it a dream come true because everything here, I never even dreamed possible for myself.” Ali didn’t divulge whether she has a cameo role in Cruise’s latest movie… we’ll have to wait and see!

As for her own Mission Impossible, she triumphed - winning two silver medals. But that superb achievement is only one, albeit brilliant, aspect of Ali’s remarkable recovery. As well as working full-time, she now has a bakery business, Truwit’s Treats, and a non-profit foundation, strongerthanyouknow.org, to help amputees. “I realized,” Ali said, “just how expensive prosthetics are. And life as an amputee is hard enough that we shouldn't also have to focus on the finances behind that to even just have mobility and quality of life.”

The 24-year-old has been called upon as an inspirational speaker, and her words are truly powerful – backed as they are by her lived-experience. “My message to people is, you are so much stronger than you think,” she stated. “You have so much more in you than you think you do. And when I think back to my early dark days, I would have never guessed this is where I would be. But, like, unlocking our mind to the possibility of what a new life could look like or post-trauma and allowing yourself to believe that you have more in you to give, more in you to bounce back. We all have the capacity to do that. And, so, believe it, know it, and my actions support a belief in that.”

To hear the full interview and find out which sport she’s targeting for 2028;

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