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

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.

I’m Nothing Special — That’s The Cachet You’re Smelling

Early in the interview, Nyad says, “Marty, I’m nothing special.” She spends the rest of the interview doing what she’s done throughout her career: Trying to convince us that she’s special. Nowadays, she doesn’t say it outright like she used to. Instead, she enlists others to say or imply it for her. She especially likes to use celebrities:

NYAD: When Lily Tomlin’s first play came out on Broadway. What was it — “Intelligent Life In The Universe”?

MOSS-COANE: Yes, exactly.

NYAD: I had just swum around Manhattan, so I had a little bit of fame cachet in Manhattan, and we got front row tickets. My best friend and I [Candace Hogan] were sitting in the front row. And before the show started, her stage manager came over and said, “Miss Tomlin would love it if you would come visit her in the dressing room right after the show.” (7:30)

“The Search For Intelligent Life In the Universe,” starring Tomlin and written by Jane Wagner, opened in 1985. Tomlin’s first Broadway play, “Appearing Nitely,” opened in March 1977. Nyad swam around Manhattan in 1975.

One could argue that she got confused. If so, she gets confused a lot, like when she claims to have been friends with Chris Evert and Christopher Reeve. (She later retracted both claims, but she recently un-retracted the friendship with Evert.) Or her work with Reese Witherspoon on the non-existent “National Archive of Sexual Abuse.” Or when she claims Paul Gauguin visited her great uncle’s Paris apartment. (Gauguin died before great-uncle Atherton Curtis moved to Paris.) Nyad also claims that Gertrude Stein visited the Paris apartment, too, and encouraged Diana’s mom, Lucy, to enter a Europe-wide essay contest. Lucy won, of course, and “was sent to England to meet the Queen and accept her award.”

As if.

The story about 9-year-old Diana on the beach with her mom can’t be true.

And we would stand on that beach and say, “It’s right out there.” My mother said to me — I was nine — “Cuba, you’re, you…,” and I was already a little competitive swimmer, pool swimmer. She said, “It’s so close, as a matter of fact, it’s so close that you, you little champion swimmer, you could actually swim there.”

Nyad didn’t start swimming competitively until she was 12. She has to make herself 9, though, to align her age with the end of the Revolution in January 1959.

Nyad doesn’t start telling her mom-on-the-beach story until 2014. Before that, she said that the idea for the Cuba swim came from looking at maps and charts. See “Discovering Cuba” for details.

Terrific Swimmers

All the terrific swimmers who have tried Cuba have never gone back a second time if they didn’t make it.

Again, Nyad emphasizes her specialness by claiming to have done what so many others couldn’t. Including Nyad, six people have attempted to swim from Cuba to Florida. Three succeeded.

106 Strokes Per Minute

Speaking of special, that’s a faster stroke rate than Katie Ledecky.

Nyad has spent years claiming that she breathes 53 times per minute. She finally realized that, since she breathes every two strokes, it made no sense to also claim a stroke rate of 53 strokes per minute. She could solve the problem by telling the truth, i.e., that she breathes about 26 times per minute. But the truth doesn’t sound epic enough. Instead, she doubles her stroke rate:

I’m turning my head [i.e., breathing — DS] 53 times a minute. (17:54)

So I take 53 strokes a minute. That’s with the left hand. So you could say, I hear 106 slaps per minute. So it’s like Sploosh, swoosh, swoosh. (~21:11)

Ledecky maxes out at around 90 slaps per minute.

Abuse Allegations

In the interview, Nyad spends a lot of time on her abuse allegations. I want to focus on one claim:

There were others besides me who spoke up, too.

Not a single person besides Diana Nyad has ever accused Jack Nelson of abuse. Really — no one. Nyad has been telling this Big Lie for years: She tells it often enough and with enough confidence that people don’t dare question it. She gets bonus points for telling it in The New York Times and in a memoir from Knopf.

To make matters worse, her supporters want to help by piling on. Annette Bening told the Los Angeles Times:

[Nyad’s] early swimming was imbued with a lot of pain because her swim coach was abusing her sexually — as well as all the other girls on the team.

Let me reiterate: No one else has ever come forward.

la mère française

Regarding Diana’s mother, Lucy:

MOSS-COANE: She was French — yeah, French-born.

. . .

NYAD: I lived in New York City for almost 30 years, and I was born in New York, and she first came to the States in New York City.

Nyad’s mother was not French-born. Nyad could have corrected Moss-Coane, but she’d have to admit to lying all along. Lucy Winslow Curtis, later known as Lucy Nyad, spent about 11 years in France, but she was born in Southampton, Long Island, and remained a U.S. citizen throughout her life.

Not Afraid To Say Gay?

A fundamental precept of Nyad mythology has always been her fearlessness:

MOSS-COANE (slightly edited for brevity): You clearly have always been outspoken, but is there something about being in your 70s — 60s and 70s — that somehow it just feels like the moment is right to say what is on your mind, because you’ve earned it.

NYAD: No, honestly, Marty, I don’t think that’s me. I don’t think I’ve ever been soft spoken. I’ve never been afraid to say I’m gay. (42:06)

When Nyad introduces a statement with “honestly,” you’re about to be snowed. Nyad hid her sexual orientation at least into her late 40s. The following comes from the transcript of a 1997 presentation. More examples here.

I do a lot of public speaking and I often say to my boyfriend, ‘Come on. Come with me. We’ll have a couple days of fun.’ No matter where I am going, he listens to who the group is and then says, ‘You go ahead. You go on your own. I’ll see you when you get home.’

But then I was on the speaker phone the other day and I said to the woman who was organizing this event, ‘What is the group like? What do they do?’ Then another question I came around to was, ‘What is the ratio of men to women?’ She said, ‘Oh, that’s probably about 99 to 1 men to women.’ My boyfriend said, ‘I’m coming.’ (Laughter)”

Superiority Complex

MOSS-COANE: The Jodie Foster character who plays your manager says that you have a quote, unquote, superiority complex. Was that something made up for the movie, or was that something that was said to you by Bonnie?

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “Superiority Complex” as “a psychological defense mechanism in which feelings of superiority counter or conceal feelings of inferiority.” Like Nyad’s ostensible “fearlessness” helps her cope with her abject fear of exposure.

Here’s Bonnie Stoll telling an interviewer that her pal has a superiority complex. I suspect that Bonnie has also told Diana.

Nyad never answers Moss-Coane’s question. Instead, she becomes indignant. She brings up Sally Ride and Martin Scorsese, implicitly equating herself with two people who would be justified in feeling superior but probably don’t (or, in Ride’s case, didn’t). Once again, Nyad indirectly tells us how special she is.

Portuguese Man O’ War Fatalities

No one in the history of mankind has ever died from a Portuguese man-of-war sting.

Deaths from Portuguese man o’ war stings are rare, but they happen. Just ask Diana Nyad: “I’ve been stung by Portuguese men-of-war many times, but those stings are not usually fatal.”

Examples of documented deaths:

• 1941: “Portuguese Man-o’-War Causes Child’s Death,” Daily Mercury; Mackay, Queensland, Australia.
• 1987: “Fatal Portuguese man-o’-war (Physalia physalis) envenomation,” Annals of Emergency Medicine.
• 2010: “Woman’s jellyfish-sting death Europe’s 1st,” upi.com.

Diana’s Authentic Self

CROSS-COANE: You say the 70s . . . has been the best decade of your life because, what, you feel like you can be your authentic self?

NYAD: Well, you know, no, I think I’ve been my authentic self for quite a while, for several decades.

Diana Nyad has been her authentic self, in all her inauthentic glory, for over half a century, proudly perpetuating a family tradition.