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!

That Giant Ball Of Gas Ain’t The Boss Of Me

You don’t need to go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time. There’s been proof now that we have no circadian rhythm, that we’re not really sleeping around the sun like we thought we were. (B&B, 1:10:17)

Don’t tell that to Dr. Jeffrey C. Hall. In 2017, Nyad met him in a hotel bar in Stockholm after he’d won the Nobel Prize. He and his two research partners discovered the mechanisms by which circadian rhythms keep time in “almost every cell in our bodies.” In a 2024 interview, Nyad discussed meeting Dr. Hall. The image below shows she didn’t lie about that. Everything else she says about Dr. Hall and his research is wrong.

In an essay published last month (archived), Nyad gave another reason to question what she says about circadian rhythms — or anything else, for that matter: “I am admittedly functioning under a lifelong state of sleep deprivation.”

Making History

Revolution, Nyad Style

The Cuban Revolution happened. I was a 9-year-old swimmer . . . and we were fixated on that. Suddenly, within 24 hours, that forbidden island — when Che and Fidel rode their horses into Havana — all Cubans had 24 hours if they wanted to leave or live under socialism. (Blaine, 28:18, clip)

Neither Fidel Castro nor anyone else gave Cubans a 24-hour deadline. Nor did Che and Fidel ride into Havana on horseback. The dictatorship fell on January 1, 1959. Che rode into Havana in an old Jeep two days later. On January 8, Castro rumbled into Havana atop a tank. Nyad may be thinking of an undated image showing revolutionary Camilo Cienfuegos with a group of campesinos.

Nyad didn’t start swimming competitively until she was twelve. But she didn’t let that stop her from using the Cuban Revolution to goose her story. (She has also said she started swimming at 7, 8, 10, and 11.) Her new starting age becomes the foundation of her retroactive “mom on the beach” story:

I stood on the beach with my mother one day and said, “Mom, everybody says it’s so close, Cuba, but I can’t see it. Where is it?”

And she said, “It’s right there. It’s right across the horizon. A matter of fact, it’s so close, you little nine-year-old champion swimmer, you could actually swim there.”

Nyad’s first victory came in the 40-yard butterfly at a dual meet in 1961. She was 12. She won several other dual meet races when she was 13. Not until after she turned 14 did she win anything you could call a championship. (Here are all the results I’ve been able to find.)

Nyad didn’t start telling her “mom on the beach” story until a year after her Cuba crossing. Before that, her Cuba-swim origin story usually involved maps and charts.

Manhattan . . . Whaaaat?

And I, one day, literally, I’m running along the Hudson River, and I thought, “This is the most famous island in the world. Why are we not swimming around this island?”

Then I researched, and it turned out people did, way back decades before. But the swim was dead. (Blaine, 27:27, clip)

Only recently has Nyad begun claiming the Manhattan swim was her idea. Chuck Jones, her agent/publicist in 1975, says it was his. He suggested she do it to “raise Diana’s profile.” Another source told me that a swimmer-friend of Nyad’s suggested the swim.

But that’s nothing compared to her most cryptic Manhattan fabrication:

One, uh, minor detail: When I did it, I swam around going counterclockwise, breathing to the left, and I was the only one. I researched it; all the people who did it before me breathed toward New Jersey all day. Whaaaat? And, um, I saw Manhattan. I saw Manhattan all day long. (Blaine, 27:49, clip)

Nyad’s statement can mean one of two things:

1. She was the first person to swim around Manhattan counterclockwise. That would be the grandest lie of the two; everyone before Nyad had also swum counterclockwise. No one would swim clockwise until Kris Rutford in 1995.
2. She was the first person to breathe to the left. That’s a lesser but more absurd lie. No matter how long she researched Manhattan swimmers, she couldn’t know the side all her predecessors had breathed on.

(H/t to the Manhattan-swim authority who pointed out option #2.)

Evert and Reeve: Chris Crossing

My Friend Chris Evert

I’ve become fanatical about tennis. I fell in love with tennis as a child in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Chris Evert was there. She’s five years younger than me, but we’ve been friends all this time. (B&B, 48:44)

Nyad was never friends with Chris Evert. Nyad once had to retract a claim that they had been. As a commentator for the USA Network, Nyad covered Evert’s last professional tournament, the 1989 US Open. Nyad used the opportunity to conjure a friendship:

Nyad, friends with Chris Evert when they grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., is keen on making her mark in TV beyond swimming and endurance sports she covered at ABC.

Evert or someone close to her may have read that story. Or they may have read another one a few weeks later in Sports Illustrated that referred to Evert as Nyad’s “longtime acquaintance.” A week after the SI article appeared, Nyad told the Miami Herald that she wanted to “set the record straight”: “We vaguely knew each other . . . She has always been a hero to me, but I never painted a picture of being childhood buddies.”

Yes, she did. And like her first-woman-around-Manhattan fabrication, her longtime friendship with Evert was too precious a lie to renounce forever.

My Friend Chris Reeve

The same goes for her friendship with actor Christopher Reeve:

I got a chance to meet — I can’t say we became close fast friends, but we became friends — Christopher Reeve. (B&B, 14:32)

Nyad likely stumbles during the Reeve introduction because she knows it’s untrue. They served together on the board of the non-profit organization World TEAM Sports from 2001 until Reeve’s death in 2004. Nyad may have met Reeve a few times, but they never became friends. As happened with Evert, someone in Reeve’s camp must have heard Nyad’s claims and asked her to stop:

Chris Reeve — I was not a close, close friend with Christopher Reeve. But we had come across each other a few times at a couple of events.

Still, she uses him as a prop in three of her grandest fabrications: her Olympic Trials lie, her First Pro lie, and her 30 Years a Non-Swimmer lie. That one’s a masterwork of temporal legerdemain. She starts in 2009:

So that brings us up to turning 60. For me, that was August 2009 (CTF, 47:32).

I was starting to feel the malaise of a spectator. And then my mom died — Dors bien, maman. Sixty, I was. She was 82. (CTF, 48:02)

Fifty-eight Diana was when her mother died in 2007. (And it’s more likely she’s feeling the lack of attention, not the malaise of the spectator. Many people spectate just fine without malaise.)

I started pushing myself on this spectator theme: Is that what I’m gonna be all my life, just a spectator who sits and watches? And then I met Christopher Reeve. (49:08)

To recap, Nyad and Reeve meet by 2001, Reeve dies in 2004, Lucy Nyad dies in 2007, and her fabulist daughter turns 60 in 2009. But Nyad can’t let time and truth ruin an epic friendship:

Coincidentally, around that time [Nyad turned 60], she met Christopher Reeve – Superman himself – and the two became friends. (LIF)

Keeping Current

The following two lies suggest Nyad is either in the early stages of dementia or, having gotten away with lying for over half a century, has decided she can say anything she wants and get away with it.

1. The current made her crossing more difficult

Nyad has argued for over a decade that the current made her swim easier. Nyad’s “genius” navigator, John Bartlett, used the Gulf Stream to increase Nyad’s speed to three or four times normal. See, for instance,

Bonnie said, “I’m gonna’ tell you three things. One, John Bartlett says the stream is going right where you’re going. We are traveling north, and it is, it’s a vector that is helping you invaluably.” (press conference, 14:54)

Did I finally, after five times, get some luck with the current rather than bad luck? Yes, we got a great Gulf Stream. (ABC News)

Bartlett supposedly kept Nyad riding the Gulf Stream straight toward Key West for 52 hours. But she upended the story in the Books & Beyond interview:

That swim would be not easy. But it would be much, much, far, far easier if you didn’t have that current, that easterly current that you’re fighting. Easily, you could lie back and look up at the stars in the Gulf Stream, or you could tread water and get a little bit of rest for your shoulders. But not on this swim. You take that quick feeding, and you’re on your way again. (44:43)

That goes against everything she and her crew have said for twelve years. Early on, though, they needed time to sync their stories. Bartlett said at first that Nyad “was swimming 1 mile per hour and the current was going 4 miles per hour, sideways . . . It was pretty darn tricky.”

You’d expect a miracle current to generate some joy among Nyad’s crew. But neither of Nyad’s observers logged a word about it. Nyad and her supporters only began touting it after the crossing. And Nyad’s “quick” stops averaged 14 minutes, longer if you factor in the 80–90-minute storm. How did she do that while continuously drifting eastward? I suspect that Nyad and a handful of crew members know the answer.

2. She had “the same dedicated team” for all five attempts

[In] 1978, we come down and it’s looking good. Eight hours later, only eight hours into our dream swim, we were in an 8-to-10-foot sea. So you know, wherever you are, that’s a wave that’s breaking at the top of your ceiling. I can’t see my boat anymore. I can’t see Bonnie, John Bartlett — they’re covered with waves. (CTF, 41:59)

She didn’t see her boat because she didn’t have one; she swam inside a motorized shark cage. She couldn’t see Stoll and Bartlett because they weren’t there. Nyad didn’t meet Stoll until 1980, Bartlett until 2010. Only one person crewed all five attempts: Candace Hogan. That’s according to both Hogan and Nyad. But in these recent interviews, Diana’s desperate to prove how much she means to her team. To make room for the same crew on all five attempts, she throws the truth overboard:

I knew I had this in me. And my team, they were the same team. They were the same dedicated team. (CTF, 57:18)

Update: In an even more recent interview, Nyad says it was Candace and only Candace. Sort of:

I had people on the swim who had been with me, Candace, from way back in 1978, and were still with me. (clip)

The words “people” and “were” suggest that Nyad really, really, really wants to make it more than just Candace.

Diana Goes Deep

An Unwavering Commitment To Self-Adulation

So I don’t know if there’s anybody who quite feels the depth of emotion of what I do when I look out at that horizon. (SEC, 6:50)

Would anyone with a nanometer of emotional depth say that? The same goes for being “quite poetic”:

That’s the way I want to go through every day, just an unwavering, awake, alert commitment to feelings and to thoughts and, to be quite poetic about it, I want that last day to come, that last breath, and for me to say, “I did it all. I did it all so I couldn’t do it a fingernail better.” (SEC, )

To be quite prosaic about it, Diana Nyad has an unwavering commitment to self-adulation and deception. But she has a big heart. We know this because she can fit so much into it. She starts with Cuba, where she began the farce that launched a thousand speaking engagements, a book deal, a star-studded biopic, the genuflection of countless talk-show hosts, and a picture of her backside at the National Portrait Gallery:

I wanna welcome you to my home, first of all. I’m in Los Angeles, but you might have the idea that we’re in Havana. I’ve had a room here painted with murals of my heart place, which is Cuba. (CTF, 06:31)

And then there’s Key West, where the fairytale ended:

Bonnie and I are in our heart place, Key West. (Facebook, 3 Apr 2018)

But on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Nyad decided there was room for more, so she parasitized a national trauma:

I feel the deep pain of a New Yorker, born there, my first seven years in Manhattan, and later twenty-five more formative years there. It will always be my heart place and now I am not there. I can’t help. I am helpless.

Nyad’s family left New York by the time she was three. Even her most ardent followers might not accept a three-year-old feeling strongly about her hometown. But they’d go for a seven-year-old, especially one who “had a little New Yorky tough kinda thing about me.”

In “What Does It Mean to ‘Never Forget,’” the New York Times’ Dan Barry suggests two reasons why people might remain silent about their experiences on September 11. One is “simple reverence.” The other is “fear of being perceived as another 9/11 narcissist, the hero of our own narrative.” Diana Nyad has likely never lost sleep over the fear of being thought too narcissistic. Convinced of her greatness and blind to her self-absorption, she has devoted her career to making herself the hero of her own tall tales.