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Most 41-year-old swimmers have been retired for more than a decade, but Dara Torres isn't exactly normal.

Torres came to the Olympic Trials just aiming to make her fifth Olympic team (her first Olympics was back in 1984 in Los Angeles, back when Carl Lewis and the hightop fade were in style). But even Torres didn't seem ready to imagine that she could win the 100 meter freestyle.

But here she is, supposedly 20 years past her prime, swimming the fastest times of her life and beating swimmers half her age.

"It's really hard to see the scoreboard, I think it's age," Torres joked on NBC when asked how she felt when she realized that she had won.

The New York Times did an outstanding feature on Torres' longevity in last Sunday's magazine. As they explained it, Torres' work on increasing her flexibility, including long pre-race stretching sessions, has allowed her to not only keep swimming competitively at age 41, but has also allowed her to increase her speed, even as her body would seemingly be slowing down.

Torres says she doesn't have that many races left in her 41-year-old body. But if she has a few more left for Beijing, she could make swimming history.