*Diana Nyad Cuba-Florida Crossing, Special 13th Anniversary No-Asterisk Edition

Diana Nyad says she swam without a shark cage because she “didn’t want an asterisk next to my name on this record and a shark cage would have required that asterisk.” Her no-asterisk wish came true, but not because she left her shark cage at home. Her crossing will never appear on any list of ratified crossings, with or without an asterisk. And it’s no record unless she means the record for fraudulent claims about a marathon swim.

Three Reasons No Governing Organization Will Ever Ratify Nyad’s Crossing

We didn’t want an asterisk next to the swim. But if anybody wants to ratify it now and stamp it assisted, we can accept it. Because we did it fair and square, no help in any way.

— Los Angeles Times, Aug 30, 2023

In 2019, Diana Nyad began hunting for an organization that would ratify her crossing. She tried the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA) and the International Swimming Hall of Fame (ISHOF). No luck. By 2023, with her biopic nearing release, she was desperate for some official acknowledgment, even if it meant accepting an asterisk. Again, nobody bit.

Below are three reasons they never will.* The first reason may make sense only to experienced marathon swimmers. The second should make sense to everyone. The third — the farce at the finish — shouldn’t make sense to anyone. I’ve made these arguments before, but new photographic and video evidence reinforces and expands the arguments. I suspect there’s a lot more evidence out there, but Nyad has good reason to withhold it: new material always exposes new deception.

*For more on why Nyad’s crossing is unratifiable, see WOWSA’s “Report on the Diana Nyad Cuba-Florida Swim (2013) Issues Index” and its ratification denial. Both documents supplement the organization’s exhaustive and essential report on Nyad’s crossing.

For Diana’s Birthday, I Resurrected The Blog She Said She Didn’t Have

“One thing I wish I had done earlier, and regret not doing — I didn’t dive into the marathon swimming world, I didn’t write blogs or get on the websites of various organizations.”

— Diana Nyad, Time Magazine, “The Deeper Story Behind Netflix’s Nyad,” November 4, 2023

Diana often talks about living life without regrets. So it’s odd that she told Time Magazine she regrets not keeping a blog. She has plenty of things to regret, but that’s not one of them. Between 2010 and 2016, Nyad and her supporters uploaded over 500 posts to what she called “Diana’s Blog.” Many of her posts remained accessible via diananyad.com through most of 2023. Then, on September 1, 2023, the day Nyad premiered, her website redesign went live — absent a “blog” link for the first time in 13 years.

Unfortunately, some things do disappear from the internet forever. But thanks to the Internet Archive, I was able to salvage about 500 of the blog’s 526 entries. I posted them all here:

“Diana’s Blog” Archive

Notes about the archive:

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.

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:

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.
Blaine – “David Blaine and Diana Nyad on the Art of Endurance,” Outside podcast, 9 Jul 2025.
CTF – “Diana Nyad: The Courage To Fail,” The Terryberry Co., host Ashley Owen, 5 Sep 2024.
LIF – “A Lesson In Fortitude,” Aspire magazine, Spring 2021.
SEC – “The Secret Behind Diana Nyad’s Incredible 53-hour Swim,” Big Think, 22 Jan 2025.
UNS – “Unstoppable Spirit: A Conversation with Diana Nyad on Resilience, Dreams, and the Power of Perseverance,” Authority Magazine, 3 Jan 2025.

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!

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.

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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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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Time To Celebrate Another Anniversary Of Diana Nyad’s Unproven Crossing

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 →