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.
NOMINEE
Name: Diana Nyad
Email: dnyad@icloud.com
NOMINATED BY
Name: Daniel Slosberg
Email: daniel@nyadfactcheck.com
Why does Diana Nyad deserve this honor?
Marathon swimmer Diana Nyad lies about everything: She turns a race of 10 miles into 30, and 30 competitors into 444. Three failed English Channel attempts become a 40-hour, 67-mile race down the Dutch coast. She inflates her BA into a PhD, and her mother’s unremarkable journey from France to the USA in 1941 becomes a trek across the Pyrenees one step ahead of the Nazis in 1943. Nyad’s fabrication-filled 2015 book Find a Way, which Netflix adapted for the 2023 biopic Nyad, testifies to Nyad’s imagination and Knopf’s policy of not fact-checking memoirs.
Above: Watch Nyad lie — and lie about lies — in “Diana Nyad’s Absolute Truth.”
Provide examples of long-form fabrications.
- The 1968 Olympic Trials (Olympic Swim Stadium, Los Angeles)
Nyad tells a detailed story about finishing 6th in the 100-meter backstroke final at the 1968 Olympic Trials. But that was Laura Novak, a 14-year-old from Michigan. Nyad wasn’t there. She tells the story on The Roseanne Show to two Olympic gold medalists. She also tells it in a commencement speech at Lake Forest College. Details at “Olympic Trials (1968).”
- First Pro Race (1970, Hamilton, Ontario)
Nyad wildly exaggerates everything about the event. The 10-mile, 30-person race in 65°F water took her 4 hours and 23 minutes. The way she tells it, 444 people swam 30 miles in 48° water, and it took her 37 hours and 38 minutes. But 48° water would have killed her long before she finished. Details at “First Pro Race (1970).”
- The Holocaust Survivor
According to the former director of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, Nyad’s horrific tale of a three-year-old sex slave at Dachau “is completely fictional.” Someone who would lie about that would lie about anything. Watch Nyad tell Oprah her Holocaust lie until she (Oprah) cries. Details at “The Survivor.”
Do Nyad’s lies meet the three Pushkin Prize criteria? Give examples.
1. No Remorse
A: Manhattan
“I was the first woman to swim around Manhattan” (Find a Way, 2015).
Nyad was the seventh. In her first memoir, Other Shores (1978), she names two of her predecessors — Ida Elionsky and Diane Struble. Nyad includes their swim dates and times. By 1981, she’d begun saying she was first. A 2011 CNN investigation debunked Nyad’s first-woman claim. In a blog post that she later deleted, Nyad feigned ignorance: “Imagine my mind-boggling surprise . . . to hear that there were in fact one or maybe two or maybe even as many as half a dozen women who did swim around Manhattan back in the early days!!!!!” Less than a year later, Nyad returned to saying she was first.
B. Walter Poenisch
“He’s not a legal marathon swimmer. . . . He does not swim by the rules. He’s a gimmick. . . . In the world of sports, he’s a cheat” (New York Times). “With all due respect to the aged, a man who’s 64 years old and very overweight is not going to swim for two days nonstop” (Miami Herald).
Walter Poenisch, a cookie baker from Ohio, began planning a Cuba–Florida swim by 1967. In July 1978, he completed his “Swim for Peace,” becoming the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida. Before, during, and after his crossing, Diana Nyad slandered Poenisch in the press. Her slander cost him his sponsors and destroyed his reputation. Poenisch sued, winning an out-of-court settlement and a perfunctory letter of retraction. Poenisch’s wife said Nyad “helped destroy my husband’s life.” Nyad finally made a show of apologizing — two months after she completed her crossing. Poenisch had been dead for 13 years. “Whatever he did,” she told The Wall Street Journal, “he was an incredible swimmer.”
2. Gratuitousness
A. Singing And Counting
Nyad says that she passes the time during long swims by singing and counting. For example, she has said that singing Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” 1000 times exactly the way Joplin sings it takes, “to the second, 9 hours and 45 minutes.” Nyad has also said that singing it 2000 times takes her 8 hours and 45 minutes. Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” lasts more than four-and-a-half minutes, so singing it 2000 times would take 150 hours. See also Nyad’s various takes on Neil Young’s “The Needle and the Damage Done” and her four-language counting routine that she says takes all night but would actually take over five days.
B. Box Jellyfish Fatalities
Nyad exaggerates and lies about everything related to box jellyfish. Example: In her talks and interviews, she cites sting mortality rates from 90% to 100%. “If that tentacle touches,” she told one interviewer, “you’re dead instantaneously.” In her memoir, Find a Way, she writes that “[The experts] did report the box usually delivers a fatal sting” (16). They did not and do not. Though box jelly venom is highly toxic and blindingly painful, most people survive box jelly stings.
C. Name-Dropping And -Shattering
Stein, Matisse, Gauguin, and Friends
Nyad says her great aunt and uncle, the art collectors Atherton and Ingeborg Curtis, lived in Paris “next door to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas . . . and had soirees where the likes of Gauguin, Matisse, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Zelda dropped by for cultured conversation.” But Gauguin died in 1903, the year before Atherton began living in Paris and at least seven years before he married Ingeborg. According to a letter from Atherton to artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, whose paintings he and his wife loved but whom Nyad never mentions, Atherton despised Matisse’s work. (For more about Nyad’s fascinating family, see “Family is Everything.” For more about Henry Ossawa Tanner, Atherton and Ingeborg’s close friend and the first Black American artist to achieve international recognition, see his page at the Smithsonian’s website and his papers there.)
Julia Child
When Nyad went to interview Child “at her town house in Boston, she answered the door, looming above us at the top of the steep steps, . . . tears standing in her eyes. This was the first day her husband, in the throes of Alzheimer’s, hadn’t recognized her.” Child and her husband never lived in a townhouse in Boston. I’ve found no evidence that Diana interviewed her.
3. Recklessness
A. Best Of The ’70s
“I became, in the 1970s, the best ocean swimmer in the world. I held all the major records on planet Earth, out in the open sea” (Wilshire Ebell – audio clip).
Nyad often says she was either the best or one of the best ocean swimmers of the ’70s. At the Wilshire Ebell, she made her claim quantifiable. I did the calculations and found that Diana Nyad hadn’t completed a single major solo ocean swim and never came close to being the best ocean swimmer of any decade. For details, see “Best of the ’70s.”
B: The Glowing Review
Of her solo show The Swimmer, Nyad said, “The New York Times gave us a glowing review” (Wilshire Ebell – audio clip).
The New York Times didn’t review The Swimmer. The only published reviews for Nyad’s show came from four audience members who posted feedback to Ticketmaster’s website. “Dramatic and heartfelt and humorous,” wrote one fan. “Diana is a natural story teller.”
C: No Touching!
“I never of course touched a boat or another person” (Facebook).
Members of Nyad’s crew touched her throughout the crossing. However, Nyad knew that the cardinal rule of marathon swimming is Thou Shalt Not Touch. That’s why she made such a show of repeling potential touchers as she walked ashore in Key West. And that’s why, four days after her crossing, she wrote, “I never of course touched a boat or another person” (Facebook, 6 Sep 2013, archived). And that’s why she told Ellen DeGeneres a week after her crossing, “You can never touch the boat or get out on the boat or touch any other person” (clip). Hundreds of images surfaced later showing her crew touching her during the crossing.
Does Diana Nyad Have a Code of Conduct that She Ignores?
Nyad doesn’t have a formal code like Columbia University’s, but we can extract one from interviews. Her most detailed code-like statement comes from 2018 when an interviewer asked her about her sense of truth. “You’re such an inveterate storyteller,” asked Mason Funk of the OUTWORDS Archive, “what is the relationship you’ve come to with stories and truth, truth with a capital ‘T’ and truth with a little flair?”
Below are some excerpts from Nyad’s responses. (The “Diana Nyad’s Absolute Truth” video shows each response, followed by examples of Nyad contradicting herself.)
The Absolute Truth in Interviews, Presentations, and Books
I think we’re in an era with Trump, especially, when we’re examining the truth all the time. So, I have definitely come to a position as a journalist or someone, if I’m giving an interview, of telling the absolute truth.
. . .
When I’m on stage, though, and when I wrote the memoir, I can vouch that every word is true.
. . .
When I’m talking about records or, you know, facts as they happened — if people need to know them — and now I’m a minor public figure, but something [of] a public figure. Like that memoir, it’s some 400-some pages, I swear by every single word, every paragraph in that book. It all happened exactly the way it happened.
“That memoir” is full of lies — all 308 pages of it. Lies fill every one of Nyad’s books, articles, interviews, and presentations.
Please fact-check me!
The Bulldog Defense: Nyad’s Not-Self-Aggrandizing Loophole.
And I certainly am very careful as to the stories I tell. And I still, Bonnie [Stoll, Nyad’s BFF], if we’re at a dinner, in a dinner party, and I’ve told the story, she’ll go, “Well, it didn’t happen exactly like that.” And I say, “Who cares?” That story isn’t for history. And there’s nobody here recording it. And, you know, and it’s not a self-aggrandizing story like, “I achieved this.” It’s just a funny story that happened at the dog park today. And it’s funnier if it was a bulldog, French Bulldog, instead of a collie.
“The Highest Ideals”: I Mean, Come On — Who Says This Stuff?
Relevant Nyad statements from other sources:
“I’m an absolutely aboveboard person who never cheated on anything in my whole life. . . . I hope they’re not questioning I’m an honest person.”
— New York Times, 8 Sep 2013
“I certainly hope that all of you out there know of my pedigree for many years in this sport. I have always upheld the highest ideals. It is the champions who achieve under the purest circumstances whom I respect . . . and I have always, proudly, fallen into that category.”
— archived post, 20 Jul 2012
“I am an honest, straightforward person. Never been anything but. Every attempt I’ve made has been by the rule books.”
— Facebook [screen capture], 6 Sep 2013
“Anyone who calls me a mercenary, gimmicky, show-business type is on the wrong track . . . I don’t know any other athletes who have any more integrity than I do.”— Fort Lauderdale News, 14 Aug 1978
“It’s true I used to lie. . . . Only to impress myself. I would tell a cab driver a lie — anybody. I don’t have to do that anymore.”
— The Village Voice, 1976
Too Good To Be True
“This whole series we’re doing is about what happens when we fail to see the truth of what is right before our eyes.”
— Ben Naddaff-Hafrey, “Hitler’s Olympics, Part 6: The Jiggle & the Giddy Up” | transcript
After five attempts spanning 35 years, a 64-year-old athlete achieves her lifelong dream of swimming 110 miles from Cuba to Florida. It’s a great story. Too bad not a word of it is true. Experienced marathon swimmers know Nyad is a fraud. Almost everyone else wants to believe Nyad’s con.
Fraud, A Family Tradition
I can’t finish without mentioning Diana Nyad’s family. Her stepfather, the Greek con artist, smuggler, and career criminal Aristotle Z. Nyad, a.k.a. Aris Notaras, arrived in the U.S. in 1940. He made a living posing as a Greek Air Force veteran who needed money to return home to fight for his homeland. In the late 1940s, he was at the center of the largest smuggling operation in Greek history, married someone we’d now call a supermodel, and eventually landed in a Zurich prison. On Diana’s maternal side, her great-great-grandfather Jeremiah Curtis invented Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, a sometimes too-effective morphine-based patent medicine — see the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s video about it. Mrs. Winslow’s made the Curtis family unimaginably wealthy. In 1952, that wealth’s gravity pulled in the then-impoverished but still beguiling Aris Nyad. Diana was four when Aris married her mother, Lucy Winslow Curtis. He left about ten years later — his last known whereabouts somewhere in Mexico or Central America. (For more on Aris, see this “Aris Nyad Timeline.”)
Above, right: An 1863 ad touting Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. Most sources say that Mrs. Charlotte Winslow, Diana’s 3X great-grandmother, concocted the syrup; it’s much more likely that her druggist son-in-law Jeremiah Curtis was responsible.
Note
For some amusing and refreshingly vulgar information about Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, the Pushkin Prize’s namesake, listen to the “Revisionist History” podcast episode “Feeling A Bit Attacked with Maria Konnikova.” It’s worth listening to just to hear Konnikova recite Pushkin in the original. Konnikova is a “Revisionist History” regular who I’ve frequently cited in Diana Nyad Fact Check Annex posts. Notably, I use her book, The Confidence Game, to show how Nyad’s con works. I use Konnikova’s article, “Less Than Artful Choices: Narcissistic Personality Disorder According to Donald Trump,” as a template to show how Diana Nyad meets the criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder.