Month: April 2019

Attachment Disorder, part 2: Everything’s All Right

Early in her pro swimming career, Diana Nyad learned the benefits of hooking up. Her later mono-directional meandering provides strong evidence that she caught a ride from Cuba to Florida.

part 1 – part 2 – part 3

Carpe Funem (“Seize the Rope”)
Banana George showing how it’s done. (Julie Fletcher, Orlando Sentinel, via LATimes.)

In her first memoir, Other Shores, Diana Nyad lists the rules of a 1975 race in Argentina:

The swimmer must wear only regulation suit, cap, goggles and grease. The swimmer must swim to the side of his boat, not behind it. (Greta Andersen was once passed in a race in the Nile by an Egyptian with a wide grin on his face; he had a tight grip on a rope tied to the back of his boat, and was eating a banana.) The swimmer may not at any time touch the boat, the shore or another person. (p. 35)

The boom Nyad used for her directional streamer gave her an artificial stern. Swimming behind it allowed her to break the rule without breaking the rule, no banana required.

Andy Newman/AP via The Daily Dose

Continue reading “Attachment Disorder, part 2: Everything’s All Right”

International Fact-Checking Day Celebration

To celebrate International Fact-Checking Day, a quick look at an interview in the Annex’s overflow pile: Diana Nyad with Adriane Berg on “Generation Bold.”

Last November, Nyad spoke with Adriane Berg of “Generation Bold” (alternative link).

As you might expect, Nyad peddled many of her usual lies and exaggerations. But she added a few new ones.

First, a creel of oldies:
Continue reading “International Fact-Checking Day Celebration”

Attachment Disorder, part 1

Diana Nyad did not, in my not-so-humble opinion, swim from Cuba to Florida under her own power. In the next three posts, I’ll describe—and give evidence for—my theory of how she made it look like she did.

part 1 – part 2 – part 3

In Medias Res

Starting with the rules laid down in my house when I was a child,
I have never much respected society’s expected standards….
When some television executive tells me
the story I’m working on has to have a linear structure and start
at the beginning, I revolt and take my case to the highest command,
arguing that to embark on this particular story in the middle and
work the early part in later hits the sublime emotion of it.
Ask Shakespeare about in medias res.

—Diana Nyad, Find a Way, p. 222

><((̗(̂(°>    <°))̂)̖)><

Diana Nyad is well into the second night of her fifth and final attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida. She has made miraculous progress over the last two days, often moving at speeds more than double and sometimes triple her usual 1.5-2 miles per hour. At 9 p.m. on Sunday night, she’s chugging along at about three miles per hour—with the ostensible help of a strong current flowing northeast.
Continue reading “Attachment Disorder, part 1”