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.
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:
B&B – “Finding a Way with Diana Nyad,” Books & Beyond podcast, Episode 9, Winter Park Library in Winter Park, Florida, host Michael Werner, 2 Jul 2024.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.)Continue reading →
Eleven years ago today, Diana Nyad walked ashore in Key West to complete the farce that launched a thousand speaking engagements, not to mention a memoir, a biopic, and boundless adulation for marathon swimming’s most successful liar.
Diana Nyad celebrating the day after her 2013 crossing. Image by J. Pat Carter, Associated Press, via Miami Herald.
Not only is today the eleventh anniversary of Diana Nyad’s Cuba-Florida crossing, it’s also the first anniversary (plus two days) of Evan Morrison’s announcement that he had changed his mind about Nyad’s “swim,” and it was “time to move on.” Continue reading →
In a lawsuit filed on Friday, Quinn Fitzgerald, director of the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA), alleges that Steven Munatones breached the WOWSA Dissolution Agreement that he and Antonio Arguelles signed last May.
The complaint, which also names Arguelles and Gerry Rodrigues as defendants, alleges that Munatones never intended to follow the terms of the agreement. It further asserts that Munatones only signed so Fitzgerald would consent to the agreement’s stipulations, including a date-specific non-disclosure section that could be the entire reason Munatones wanted Fitzgerald’s signature.
(The complaint is publicly available for free on the San Francisco County Superior Court’s website., but I posted it here for easier access. The document includes The Dissolution Agreement as Exhibit A.)
In particular, the complaint alleges that, once the Dissolution Agreement took effect, Munatones and Rodrigues “orchestrated a scheme” to remove Fitzgerald as the Open Water Swimming Facebook group’s administrator — despite the agreement making Fitzgerald the group’s sole owner.
Munatones and Rodrigues succeeded in removing Fitzgerald and now administer the group.
Twenty years after journalist Rebecca Morris met Diana Nyad in Gertrude Ederle’s den, an anthology of writing about swimming put Morris and Nyad together once more, giving us a chance to celebrate Morris and expose more of Nyad’s lies.
Author/speechwriter/swimmer Rebecca G. Morris — not to be confused with journalist/editor/true crime writer Rebecca T. Morris or artist Rebecca no-middle-initial Morris — wrote a series of quirky features for the New York Sunday News in the 1970s.
For example, she surprised foodie friends with a meal of camping cuisine in “I freeze-dried my dinner party.” In “The Scuba Cops,” she documented a day she spent with the NYPD’s Underwater Recovery Team as they searched for cars, guns, and bodies.
And in “The Challengers of the Channel,” Morris chronicled a meeting between Diana Nyad and Gertrude Ederle. (I’ve written previously about Nyad lying to Ederle in “Challengers.”) The Sunday News published the article on August 1, 1976, five days before the 50th anniversary of Ederle becoming the first woman to swim the English Channel.
