On May 24th, 2023, 22 year old Ali Truitt was on a dream vacation with her best friend, Sophie Pilkington. The two girls had gone to the Turks and Caicos Islands to celebrate the fact that Ali had just graduated from Yale University two days prior. So they’re there to just celebrate this momentous achievement. Well, on that day, the 24th, the two girls decided to go snorkeling. Turks and Caicos is a beautiful place to do this. It’s crystal clear water. And the two girls decided it would be a great way to kick off their vacation. So they hooked up with a small dive company captain took them out on a small boat to a very popular dive site, where he dropped the two girls off in the water, and then he just kind of hung out on the boat. Well, the two girls spent the next half an hour snorkeling around, having a wonderful time, looking at all the beautiful fish and everything else. Until eventually, like I said, about a half an hour later, they decided it was time to swim back to the boat. Now, they had gotten about 70 meters, or 230 feet away from the boat during the course of them just swimming and snorkeling around. This was probably a little bit negligent of the captain to let them get that far away, because 70 meters in open ocean is actually a pretty, pretty decent distance when you’re dealing with waves and everything else. For Normal people, it would be a tough swim. For these two girls, however, it was not going to be a tough swim because both of them were collegiate swimmers, like, had been swimming competitively for the last 15 or so years. Medal winning collegiate swimmers. So the swim was not going to be a problem. What was a problem is that as soon as they turned back towards the boat, Ali got hit hard by something huge from underneath. Now, neither one of them saw it coming. It came out of nowhere. But it didn’t take the girls long to figure out what it was. It was a bull shark. And it was apparently a real ticked off bull shark, because it began to attack both of the girls. Now, initially, it wasn’t biting them, it was just ramming them hard. It would circle them and then ram them in the sides and then from underneath. Well, neither one of the two girls panicked. They stuck together and both of them began to vigorously fight the shark with one another. So they’re grabbing it, they’re pushing it away as hard as they can, and then they’re kicking out of it, trying to kick it in the eyes and everything else. But this really wasn’t deterring the shark. And then pretty quickly, at some point, whether she was kicking out of it or whether it just lurched in and grabbed her, we don’t really know. But at some point, the shark Grabbed Ali by the left leg in its mouth, and then it bit down and shook, at which point it removed Ali’s left foot and then a portion of her left leg. Ali’s looking down and thinking to herself, am I crazy, or do I not have a foot anymore? But, of course, she wasn’t crazy. She really didn’t have a foot. And so the water fills with blood all around them. She’s, of course, losing a lot of blood really fast. Again, the girls could have panicked, and Sophie could have left Ali at this point, and she can obviously swim a lot faster than Ali. But Sophie doesn’t leave her. Sophie sticks right there with her best friend. And the two girls, they’re screaming, they’re shouting. There’s all this blood in the water. But for whatever reason, the captain of the boat does not realize that something is wrong. Or at least he doesn’t bring the boat to them. So we can only assume he didn’t realize something was wrong. the two girls are forced to swim the full 70 meters back to the boat together. But the whole time, they stick together. And Ali is thinking to herself, if I don’t focus, if I don’t fight right now, I’m gonna lose consciousness due to blood loss, and that’ll be it. That’ll be the end of me. So she focuses. They make the full swim back together until they get to the boat. When they do the Captain, obviously, at that point, realizes something is wrong. He hoists the two girls up onto the boat. And then Sophie, who’s in school to be a doctor, knows immediately what to do. She grabs something, makes a tourniquet, and applies the tourniquet to Ali, saving her life. She stops or slows the bleeding. Well, they get her to shore and onto an ambulance within 15 or 20 minutes. She’s taken to the hospital there at Turks and Caicos, where she spends just a few hours before she’s life flighted to a hospital in Miami. And there she undergoes two life saving surgeries. A week later, on Ali’s 23rd birthday, she would undergo a trans tibial amputation. There was too much damage to her left leg, so they took the rest of her leg below the knee. Well, just several weeks after her leg has been amputated, Ali, who apparently is an incredibly tough person, was back in the pool. She’s training. And then just a few months after that, she’s back competing in a Para Olympics swim meet to qualify for the Para Olympics in 2024, the ones that are taking place right now. And this is just months after her leg has been torn away by a shark. Well, about six or seven months after her amputation or after the attack, she competed in the US Paranationals Swim Meet, where she won silver. So out of all the para athletes in the United States, she took second place. And She did qualify for the Olympics. And so right now, this week, I think, from the 31st to the seventh, she is competing in not one, not two, but three separate swimming events in the Olympics in Paris. So I hope some of you will watch that and give her some much deserved support. She seems like an absolutely incredible person.