Diana Nyad Is Living Her Best Life At 106 Strokes Per Minute

In her latest interview, Diana Nyad declares, “I’m nothing special,” then spends an hour trying to prove she’s something special.

Last week, Diana Nyad spoke with Marty Moss-Coane of Philadelphia public radio station WHYY. Their chat, “Long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad gets real about living her best life,” which aired on October 31, will likely be her last published interview before she unveils her Florida State Historic Marker on November 6. She seized the opportunity to lie her burning pants off in a way only Diana Nyad can. She told some new lies and cranked some of her old ones well beyond 11.

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Evan Morrison’s Decade Of Doubt

Marathon Swimmers Federation co-founder Evan Morrison questioned Diana Nyad’s crossing for ten years after she walked ashore in Key West. Then the gaslighting began.

In his August 2023 “On NYAD: An Open letter to the marathon swimming community,” Evan Morrison said that his “general view” of Nyad’s Cuba-Florida crossing hadn’t changed in a decade:

Incidentally, here’s what I wrote after the conference call of September 10, 2013, in which Diana and her team answered questions from a panel of marathon swimmers and administrators (including myself):

While many questions about Diana’s swim remain to be addressed, I have not yet seen any evidence to suggest that Diana did not do as she is claiming — swim from Cuba to Florida. However, because of the repeated physical contact with her crew in putting on her stinger suit, I consider it an ‘assisted’ swim – the third after Walter Poenisch and Susie Maroney.

Some may find this surprising, but my general view has not changed from 10 years ago — except now, with far more documentation, far fewer questions “remain to be addressed.”

He was right; he spent the 10 years after Nyad’s 2013 crossing questioning her claims and supporting other skeptics. That he would argue the opposite transcends hypocrisy — “surprising” doesn’t come close. It’s as if Greta Thunberg began saying that climate change was a hoax, Jane Goodall turned out to hate chimps, or Kermit the Frog joined the Proud Boys.

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Evan Agonistes: The Anatomy Of A Betrayal

Evan Morrison didn’t begin defending Diana Nyad’s Cuba–Florida crossing until the summer of 2023. The timing suggests he betrayed his sport for reasons other than high-mindedness.

November 4, 2023, Facebook message from Evan Morrison to Stuart McDougal. Morrison writes, "I started defending Diana's swim, once she and her team provided convincing documentation of the feat - which they did in late 2022. "I base my beliefs on evidence, Stuart. What do you do?"
From a Facebook discussion about the Diana Nyad biopic (archived reply and discussion).

The World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA) posted its “Diana Nyad Cuba–Florida 2013 Swim Report” on August 21, 2022. Not until the Nyad biopic’s publicity push began a year later did Marathon Swimmers Federation co-founder Evan Morrison begin publicly defending Diana. I’ve gathered data from multiple online sources to pinpoint when Morrison flipped. What follows uses Morrison’s 2013 post, “Nyad Agonistes: The anatomy of a social media campaign” (archived), as a model.

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Che And Fidel On Horseback, “The Same Dedicated Team” For All Five Attempts, And Other Proof That Diana Nyad Deserves A Nobel Prize For Lying

Six recent acquisitions show Nyad up to her lyin’ eyeballs in new fabrications. Time, space, and scientific proof can’t overcome her determination to deceive.

Sources:

Diana’s Biological Threat Assessments

My Jelly’s Meaner And Faster Than Yours

Nyad says that the box jellyfish can kill with just the touch of a tentacle. Not so the Portuguese man o’ war:

Nobody has ever died from the Portuguese man o’ war sting. (B&B, 57:50)

Nobody in the history of mankind has ever died directly from a Portuguese man o’ war sting . . . And it swims faster than a human, the only jellyfish that swims and propels itself on its own. (CTF, 32:50)

In other words, she battled the Diana Nyad of jellyfish, the most stupendous jelly on the planet. In a later interview, Nyad says, “They call [the box jelly] the perfect killing machine.” “They” is Diana Nyad, the same singular “they” who calls the Florida Straits the Mount Everest of the earth’s oceans. The plural “they” can’t decide on a perfect killing machine. I found votes for sharks, mosquitoes, saltwater crocodiles, and cats.

Deaths from Portuguese man o’ war stings are rare, but they happen. Bonnie may have googled it for her BFF; in the “perfect killing machine” interview, Nyad says that Portuguese man o’war stings are “not usually fatal.”

Most jellyfish species propel themselves. But not the Portuguese man o’ war. That boneless lazybones has a sail and goes wherever the wind takes him. And he’s not even a real jellyfish!

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On “What’s The Rusch?” Podcast, Marathon Swimming’s Master Magician Makes Truth Disappear

In an interview during this year’s Outside Festival, Diana Nyad debuted new fabrications, touted her Florida State Historical Marker, and denigrated all athletes not named Diana Nyad.

Above: Diana Nyad prepares to swim around Manhattan, Oct. 6, 1975. Nyad’s right arm blocks the face of her publicist, Chuck Jones. Reporters and photographers line the seawall. In the 1990s, Jones gained notoriety for handling the publicity and shoes of Marla Maples, Donald Trump’s second wife. Image via The New York Times.

At the end of May, two expert illusionists — David Blaine and Diana Nyad — met onstage at the Outside Festival in Denver, Colorado. During the festival, Nyad also sat for an interview with off-road cycling champion and founding director of the “Be Good Foundation,” Rebecca Rusch. Nyad proved that, after half a century of lies, she can still come up with breathtaking new ones.

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Finally, An Honor Worthy Of Diana Nyad: The Pushkin Prize

I proudly nominate Diana Nyad for the George Santos Memorial Pushkin Prize For Egregiously Deceptive Self Promotion.

Author, speaker, podcaster, and omnipresent raconteur Malcolm Gladwell created the Pushkin Prize two years ago “to honor the giants of the American education system.” Columbia University won the inaugural Pushkin for manipulating data to help the school go from #18 to #2 in the US News College rankings.

It’s time for the Pushkin Prize to recognize a scholar-athlete. The following nomination uses the criteria Gladwell extracted from George Santos’s claims. (For details, listen to the Pushkin Prize episode of Gladwell’s podcast, “Revisionist History.”) Diana Nyad has been egregiously promoting herself for over 50 years. Let us no longer deny her the recognition she deserves.

Above, left: Marathon swimmer and serial liar Diana Nyad flexes at Barnard College. Above, right: Convicted felon and serial liar George Santos’s official Congressional portrait.

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Diana Nyad’s Historical Marker: How Fort Lauderdale Struggled To Find The Right Words To Honor A Fraud

Fort Lauderdale City officials approved five versions of the Diana Nyad Florida State Historical Marker text. Nyad’s admirers worked to include her exaggerations and lies while others sought to remove them.

 

Above: Diana Nyad models false equivalence. She posed for this photo in 2017 at her marker’s proposed location, across the Las Olas Beach entrance from the Wade-Ins marker. That marker commemorates the 1961 protests against Fort Lauderdale’s segregated beaches. Image via Dr. Lynette Long’s “Proposed Marker Location Request,” 21 Jun 2017.

In 2018, Fort Lauderdale’s Parks, Recreation and Beaches Board voted on a resolution to place a Diana Nyad Historical Marker at Las Olas Beach. Chairperson Debby Eisinger and all but one other board member voted against the resolution. The marker died, or so I thought.

When the Nyad biopic opened five years later, Nyad’s supporters began a crusade to resurrect the marker. Eisinger led the battle. Though she no longer sat on the Parks, Recreation and Beaches Board, the former mayor of Cooper City, Florida, she retained (and retains) clout at Fort Lauderdale City Hall. She wanted the City Commission to vote on the marker last April 2, so they voted on and approved it last April 2. She demanded that they place the marker at the entrance to Las Olas Beach, so they agreed to place it at the entrance to Las Olas Beach.

Eisinger gave three reasons for that placement. Two of them are lies from Nyad’s core repertoire. According to Eisinger, Las Olas
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Who Is UraFibber and Why Did He Attack The Nyad Biopic Wikipedia Page?

At last year’s Oscars, the Nyad biopic was up for two awards, and Diana got to sit in Jennifer Aniston’s lap. “She was crying,” Diana said in a recent interview, “and telling me I was a hero and that the movie meant so much to her.”

It also meant a lot to UraFibber, a Wikipedia editor with one goal: Sabotage the Nyad biopic’s entry.

Detail from “Nyad (film)” revision history. It shows some of the edits UraFibber made on March 9 and 10, 2024.

On Friday, January 19, 2024, Los Angeles Times movie and TV columnist Glenn Whipp wrote, “Oscar nominations arrive bright and early Tuesday morning.” At 1:15 a.m. the next day, a Wikipedia user created a sockpuppet account called “UraFibber.”

According to Wikipedia, a sockpuppet is “a false online identity used for deceptive purposes.” The account holder made 40 total edits, all to “Nyad (film)” and all focused on the 2024 Academy Awards. He made six on January 20, then five on the 24th, the day after the Academy announced the nominations. He made the remaining 29 on March 9 and 10, the day before and the day of the Oscars.

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In SHIELD Webinar, Scientists Prove Defenseless Against Charismatic Grifter

Nyad says she has five stepchildren, lies about a Nobel Prize winner, and insults every French-speaking person in Québec. Just another day in the Dianasphere.

In August, Diana spoke with Dr. Merav Opher, professor of Astronomy at Boston University and director of the SHIELD NASA DRIVE Center.

Above: A screenshot from SHIELD’s home page. “SHIELD” is an acronym for “Solar wind with Hydrogen Ion charge Exchange and Large-Scale Dynamics.”

The SHIELD Center is an international collaboration of researchers studying the heliosphere, a solar-wind-generated bubble surrounding the solar system. Nyad appeared as part of the SHIELD Center’s webinar series. They called her presentation:

“The Human Spirit Can Make the ‘Impossible’ Possible:
What Space Exploration Can Learn About Passion, Perseverance, and Resilience from a Groundbreaking Athlete.”

I would have called it something else. Nyad lied throughout. Let’s start with some new ones.

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New And Uplifting Footage, Fresh Fabrications, And A Handout From Harvard

Though Diana Nyad didn’t follow traditional marathon swimming rules on her Cuba-to-Florida attempts, she has always insisted that she never touched the boat, pushed off the boat, or received help moving forward or staying afloat.

Recently unearthed footage from 2011 shows her going three for four.

Three days after Diana Nyad’s “successful” 2013 Cuba-to-Florida attempt, lead kayaker Don McCumber (as @Woodkayaker) wrote on the Marathon Swimmers Forum that he had video of “water breaks, feeding breaks, medical breaks, the application of anti-jellyfish creams, and the donning of the ZERO FLOTATION suit and mask” (archived).

Little of that footage materialized. These creenshots from McCumber’s 2011 video suggest why he might have withheld it:

Two details from screenshots of footage from Diana Nyad's September 2011 Cuba-Florida attempt. The images show Nyad touching her guide boat and being held up by a crew member.
Screenshots of footage from Diana Nyad’s September 2011 Cuba-Florida attempt. The images show Nyad touching her guide boat and being held up by a crew member, an episode that lasts at least 60 seconds. (Clips here [184MB]. The first clip shows Nyad possibly kicking off the boat.)
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