“Before Diana Nyad, There Was Trudy Ederle”
—IndieWire headline
“‘Young Woman and the Sea’ claims its own lane alongside ‘Nyad’”
— Washington Post headline
When “Young Woman And The Sea” opened in theatres in May, reviewers and headline writers suggested that Nyad and Ederle share more than a gender, a sport, and a recent biopic. They were wrong.
“Young Woman and the Sea” begins streaming today, so it’s a good time to look at why Gertrude Ederle is one of the greatest swimmers of all time, and Diana Nyad is one of sports’ all-time greatest liars.
In the pool, Gertrude Ederle set world records in everything from sprints to distance. At the 1924 Paris Olympics, she won two bronze medals and a gold. Two years later, she became the first woman to swim the English Channel, crossing it two hours faster than the fastest man.
Yet she never boasted about her achievements. Nor did she exaggerate or lie about them. Her accomplishments spoke for themselves.
Diana Nyad began trumpeting her accomplishments — both factual and fictional — decades ago and never stopped.
Nyad has lied about
- winning the US Nationals and setting a world record when she was 16.
- being the first woman to swim around Manhattan.
- reaching the finals in the 1968 Olympic trials.
- winning a 67-mile race down the Dutch Coast.
- spending 37 hours in 48-degree water (she’d be dead).
- holding “all the major [ocean] records on planet Earth.”
- telling “the absolute truth” in every interview, speech, and on every page of her memoir, Find a Way.
- completing a legitimate swim from Cuba to Florida.
- watching giant squid “grabbing birds out of the air” (they don’t do that).
- etc. (see 51 Fabrications)
. . .
Ederle honored marathon swimming’s rules. Nyad claimed she did — but if she couldn’t complete a swim under the rules, she tossed them overboard.
In particular, Ederle followed the sport’s core rule: No touching. Nyad treated it as optional.
Under traditional marathon swimming rules, contact with the boat or another person ends a swim, as it did Ederle’s first English Channel attempt. Her trainer, thinking she was in trouble, ordered crew member Ishak Helmi to jump in and grab her. “Of course, as soon as Helmy [sic] touched me,” Ederle said, “I was disqualified.”
Diana Nyad’s crew members touched her throughout her Cuba-Florida crossing. However, for about a week afterward, she insisted that no one had:
I never of course touched a boat or another person. . . . I am an honest, straightforward person. Never been anything but. Every attempt I’ve made has been by the rulebooks. (deleted Facebook reply)
(I’m grateful to Evan Morrison, co-founder of the Marathon Swimmers Federation, for saving Nyad’s reply. He was the first to understand the fundamental rule of Nyad research: Save everything!)
. . .
Gertrude Ederle loved long ocean swims. “To me, the sea is like a person,” she told a friend,
like a child that I’ve known for a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I talk to it. I never feel alone when I’m out there.
Nyad hated long swims. To her, they were a prison that trapped her “in the solitary confinement of . . . protracted monotony” (Find a Way, p. 132).
She speaks of the ocean and its perils as though it were her personal enemy, her private torture chamber; she proudly exhibits her battle scars.
— Dr. Jeanne Safer, “Diana Nyad and Swimming Torture.”
The sea was her enemy, always searching for novel ways to inflict pain. But Nyad swam anyway because boasting about battling raging currents, swirling eddies, ravenous sharks, and deadly jellyfish won her adoration and cash.
“I can’t stand swimming,” she said in 1974. “It is the most boring thing I can think of. But after all the time I have put into swimming, I felt it should pay off in some way.”
Four years later, just before her first Cuba–Florida attempt, she told the New Jersey Record’s Michael Farber,
If I make it, I’ll be rich and famous — mostly rich.
(At some point, Nyad must have realized that her honesty made her sound rapacious. So, she replaced candor with sincere-sounding lies, like “It’s all about the journey” and “I’m just living out loud a true Greek story of a 35-year dream that’s authentic and has no ulterior motives to it whatsoever. It’s just pure.”)
When Nyad Used Ederle
Nyad’s 1975 record-setting swim around Manhattan showed her the potential of well-publicized solo endeavors. Suddenly, she was on the front page of the New York Times and on stage with Johnny Carson.
But setting a record wasn’t enough. By 1981, Nyad had begun saying she was the first woman to complete the swim. (She was seventh.) When CNN caught her in the lie 30 years later, she could have just said, “Sorry, my mistake.” Instead, she posted an 850-word masterclass on bullshit.
She deleted the article, but thanks to the Internet Archive, we can witness her genius. In the following excerpt, Nyad uses Ederle for rehabilitation-by-association before feigning shock that she “probably” wasn’t first:
. . . (no other than Gertrude Trudy Ederle entertained me in her home in Queens many times in the 1970’s, never recounting any of the stories of her women contemporaries of the 1920’s [sic] having swum around Manhattan), I am quite frankly stunned to hear now that this title is probably not mine to claim.
In her 1978 memoir, Other Shores, Nyad writes about two of her predecessors — Ida Elionsky and Diane Struble — and says she knows of others. If Nyad was “stunned,” it was because she got caught. Within a year, she went back to claiming her Manhattan first.
As for the likelihood that she met with Ederle “many times,” we have only the word of a serial liar.
When Nyad Lied To Ederle
Nyad visited Ederle’s home once. We know because author Rebecca Morris was there. She wrote a series of New York Sunday News feature articles in the 1970s. In one, “The Challengers of the Channel,” she documents Nyad’s 1976 visit to Ederle’s home.*
“Challengers” contains some of Nyad’s usual BS: She’s in her third year of doctoral studies at NYU (she left in 1974 after one year), she holds “the Great Barrier Reef-to-Australia title” (there was no such thing), she’s “the world’s first-ranked woman marathon swimmer” (she held a disputed pro title in 1974 but never before or after that), etc.
However, Nyad added a one-off gem just for Ederle. She (Ederle) had mentioned her anger after Helmi touched her during her first English Channel attempt. She felt she wasn’t in danger and could have kept swimming.
Nyad sensed an opportunity to bond, and all she had to do was lie:
The same thing happened to me once,” Diana says. “I’d just swum 32 miles across Lake Ontario and I was going for a double crossing and was signaling for my cup. Another swimmer who’d got in the water to pace me thought I was calling for help; she started to grab me. I tried to push her away and they disqualified me. After 20 hours. I’d been swimming 20 hours!”
All contemporary sources, including Nyad herself, said that crew members pulled her out of the lake after she lost consciousness. “I would have been mad at myself,” said Nyad two days later, “if I’d been a crybaby and asked to be taken out of the water. But I passed out.”
But it wasn’t enough for Nyad to concoct shared distress. Two years later, she declared her superiority to Ederle. In 1978, she told NewTimes Magazine:
If I get to the Florida coast, it will be one of the most historic moments in sport. I am not going to compare it to Lindbergh, but it is certainly going to be bigger than Gertrude Ederle finishing the English Channel.
Five tries and 35 years later, Nyad finally made it to Florida — though we’ll likely never know if she swam the whole way. We do know that Nyad’s “success” was a spectacle that grabbed lots of attention. Meanwhile, Ederle’s crossing was an athletic triumph that changed the world.
. . .
In 2004, Nyad debuted a sports commentary program for public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica. “The Score” aired for seven years. (Nyad says 22.) In a 2007 episode, she celebrated her Manhattan “first,” again using Ederle’s name to cloak herself in Trudy’s credibility:
In 1975, I found that not only had Gertrude Ederle never swum around Manhattan. No other woman had done it, either. . . . I was determined to be the first. (The Score, “Manhattan Island”)
Nyad also said that if Ederle had become the first woman to swim around Manhattan, “it would have been touted as a stellar accomplishment.”
But Nyad knew that an Ederle first would have been as fraudulent as her own. When the first woman, Ida Elionsky, circled the island in 1916, Gertrude Ederle would have been 10 or 11. She wouldn’t begin formal swimming instruction for at least another year.
. . .
A decade after Elionsky’s feat, Ederle would achieve what many thought impossible. The day after her crossing, London’s Daily News published an opinion piece likely typeset while Ederle powered toward Dover. It reads in part:
Even the most uncompromising champion of the rights and capacities of women must admit that in contests of physical skill, speed, and endurance they must remain for ever the inferior sex. (London Daily News, Aug 7, 1926, via Young Woman and the Sea)
Gertrude Ederle called bullshit and changed the world.
Diana Nyad’s bullshit will leave a different legacy.
Above: Clips from Nyad’s OUTWORDS Archive interview, her meta-lying masterpiece, in which she tells multiple lies about lying. (In 2021, the Hollywood Reporter’s Tatiana Siegel asked Nyad’s publicist, Kelly Bush Novak, “What’s the worst PR move you’ve seen in your career?” Novak answered, “Lying. . . . It always catches up to you. You can’t get away with lying.” Then again, if a lie about a lie makes a truth, maybe Nyad has found a way to get away with it.)
NOTEs
- A whale of a DNFCA thank you to Glenn Stout, whose marvelous Ederle biography, Young Woman & The Sea, inspired and informed parts of this post. The Ederle biopic is an adaptation — sometimes rough — of Stout’s book. We can’t blame him for the Ederle film’s inaccuracies, as we can the author of the Nyad biopic’s source material for most of Nyad’s many factual errors.
- I borrowed parts of this post from other Diana Nyad Fact Check blog posts:
